Married Families Affect Effectiveness of Schools in General

One study found that the proportion of single-parent families in a school was a greater predictor of school failure than race, income, or the student’s own family structure. Large proportions of students from single-parent homes reduce the academic achievement of both children in intact and children in single-parent families, even after controlling for race, income, and characteristics of the school, such as per-pupil spending.

Maggie Gallagher, “Why Supporting Marriage Makes Business Sense.”  Corporate Research Council paper.

Marriage Helps Children's Education

Stable marriage has a powerful impact on children’s education. Research has consistently shown that children raised by their own two married parents do better in school than children in other family forms. For example, about one out of four children in both single-mother and blended families repeat a grade in school, compared to only one in seven children in intact married families. About a quarter of children in mother-only families and 18 percent of children in blended families have been suspended or expelled, compared to less than 10 percent of children from intact marriages. A 15-year study of 2,000 married people and their children by Paul Amato and Alan Booth found that even after controlling for marital quality, income, race and family background, parental divorce reduced adult children’s educational attainment, occupational status, and increased the risk of economic hardship in their adult lives. Children in single-mother homes are significantly less likely to complete high school, attend or graduate from college than either children in intact married families or children in widowed families (even after controlling for race, gender, and maternal education). Children raise outside of intact marriages are also only half as likely to attend a selective college, even after controlling for income and parental education.

How can the marriage of parents contribute to their children's education and future productivity? Parents contribute to their children's development of social skills that are valuable to schools and employers--punctuality, self-discipline, honesty, tolerance for frustration, diligence, reliability, respect for others. On average two married parents have twice the time, energy, financial security, and personal skills as well, reading to young children, helping with homework, reinforcing patterns (like regular breakfast and early bedtime) that help children learn. The tastes, values and skills of parents influence their children's success in school and in the world of work.

Maggie Gallagher, “Why Supporting Marriage Makes Business Sense.”  Corporate Research Council paper.

Why Does Marriage Matter?

Why does marriage matter? First, married guys work longer hours, they have lower “quit rates” and therefore longer job tenure than men without wives. Married men tend to choose higher-paying professions, even if that means less pleasant work, or less control over working hours. Married men take advantage of the on-the-job training more often, and when unemployed they use more methods of job search than singe guys. In surveys, they rate pay as a more important job attribute than bachelors do. Marriage makes men, on average, more focused and motivated workers.

Second, married people adopt healthier lifestyles. Married people reduce consumption of alcohol and other substances. Married people also sleep more, eat more regular and healthier meals, visit the doctor, and take fewer stupid risks, like driving fast without seat belts. So married workers, on average, are less likely to show up for work from time-to-time hung-over, sick and/or sleep-deprived.

Maggie Gallagher, “Why Supporting Marriage Makes Business Sense.”  Corporate Research Council paper.

Character

A man's character may be learned from the adjectives which he habitually uses in conversation.

Mark Twain

The Future and the Past

You cannot successfully navigate the future unless you keep always framed beside it a small clear image of the past.

Jan Struther, Mrs. Miniver, pg.120

Economic Benefits of REAL Marriage

Scientific evidence makes it clear that marriage I a wealth-producing institution, not merely a cultural value or a consumer good. Marriage boosts wealth in part because it points men and women toward productive, sober, steady behavior that pays off for families, for businesses, and for society. But marriage also boosts wealth and productivity for the same reason that other partnerships do: By sharing the burden of domestic and market work, married persons actually produce more working together than either would alone.

Married workers are, on average, more productive workers. The marriage premium (higher wages) earned by married men is one of the most well-documented phenomena is social science. “Typically,” write labor economists Sanders Korenman and David Neumark, wage “differentials are in the 10% to 40% range—roughly as large as race, firm-size, and union wage differentials, as well as differentials across industries.” The longer a man stays married, the higher his marriage premium, even after controlling for other factors.

Maggie Gallagher, “Why Supporting Marriage Makes Business Sense.”  Corporate Research Council paper.

Only REAL Marriage Benefits Society

Studies show that marriage plays a powerful role in adult well-being; married people live longer and healthier lives, and exhibit fewer signs of mental illness. Marriage is also a productive economic relationship, a powerful generator of human and social capital. Married people earn more money than otherwise similar single individuals, and build more wealth than singles with similar incomes. Married workers (especially married men) are more productive and motivated, on average, than otherwise similar single employees. Married people experience less economic hardship than singles with similar incomes.

The failure to marry taxes society as a whole. Children whose parents do not get married or do not stay married, for example, are more likely to drop out of high school, commit crimes and display other conduct disorders, experience more infant mortality, childhood illnesses and disease, and suffer from mental illness. As adults, they achieve less academically and occupy lower-status jobs, on average, than children whose parents were able to forge a good-enough marriage bond, even after accounting for race and family background.

There is no scientific evidence to support the recent idea that domestic partnerships are the functional equivalent of marriage. Adults who merely live together more closely resemble singles than married people. Children who live with cohabiting parents do no better than children of solo moms.

Giving cohabiters the same benefits in law and policy as married couples does not therefore represent justice or fairness. By offering the social rewards of marriage but without its public responsibilities, domestic partnership benefits discourage marriage. Why marry the mother of your new baby if the society says living together is just as good--and may even increase the government subsidies available to your family?

Likewise, a same-sex domestic partner [or “marriage”] benefits send a confusing signal, giving the appearance of providing an appropriate context for having and raising children, when the social science evidence supports the idea that children benefit from having both a mother and a father.

Confining benefits to spouses is one way that the law, pubic policy and society point out to the next generation the unique importance of marriage. Extending marital benefits to other intimate couplings sends a message that is dangerously untrue. Living together and being married are just not the same, for children or their parents.

Maggie Gallagher, “Why Supporting Marriage Makes Business Sense.”  Corporate Research Council paper.

Socialism

Socialism depends on coercion and takings from the productive members of a society. That means those who can create wealth will usually either leave, or if they stay and refuse to cooperate, be killed.

Bill Walton, “Why Socialism Fails Wherever It’s Tried”

Art or Entertainment?

For centuries the upper crust had an appreciation for the arts. But to enjoy the arts required person to think, to meditate, and to engage the mind and the soul. This new brand of entertainment, increasingly being enjoyed by the masses, was mindless. It was “about gratification rather than edification, indulgence rather than transcendence, reaction rather than contemplation, escape from moral instruction rather than submission to it.” 

In other words, they new forms of entertainment gaining popularity with the ordinary man were nothing more than senseless fun—and loved for just that reason. The elite hated entertainment for the same reasons that the working class delighted in it. The elite loved art, Shakespeare, excellent, thought-provoking literature and classical music while the masses were swooped off their feet by dime novels, ear-splitting music, and trash of all kinds.

Gary Gilley, This Little Church Went to Market, pg.25

God’s Design for Sex

Our sexuality and our spirit are inexplicably and profoundly intertwined. We are--at our core--spirit beings, created in God’s image. So our sexuality is likewise at that same core--it must be, because we are more than animals in our nature. That is why sexuality cannot be perceived as some mere tangent for us humans, as if it were something removed from our spirit.

In order for the act of sexual expression between a man and a woman to be fully representative of the spectrum of the characteristics of God, a male and a female must be one in totality--and that includes oneness not merely physically, but oneness emotionally, spiritually, and psychologically. That oneness is not something experienced for a moment--it is lifelong. There is a phrase for this unique unity of being--it is called the covenant of marriage.

God is so thoroughly pro-sex that he has established boundaries by which to protect it, to maximize its joy. He has also designed ways by which to express this spectacular gift in order to bring fulfillment. His Bible consistently and clearly establishes heterosexual monogamy--“one flesh” marriage--as core to providing the security of enduring, growing, developing, nurtured, authentic sexual love.

This love stands in stark contrast to the throw-away, who-looks-the-best-for-the-moment type of lust that results in multiple partners and deep emotional pain and rejection.

James L. Garlow and Peter Jones, Cracking Da Vinci’s Code, pg.23