New study: 9 out of 10 children born to co-habiting couples this year will see parents split by the time they are 16

Dina sent me this article from the UK Daily Mail.

Excerpt:

Nearly nine out of ten babies born to co-habiting parents this year will have seen their family break up by the time they reach the age of 16, says a study.

Half of all children born this year will not be living with both natural parents when they reach their mid-teens, and almost all those who suffer family breakdown will be the children of unmarried parents, added the report.

The study, based on figures from the national census and large-scale academic surveys, extrapolates from current trends and calculates that just 9 per cent of babies born to cohabiting couples today will still have their parents living together by the time they are 16.

The report adds that the declining popularity of marriage and the rise of co-habitation will damage the lives of increasing numbers of children.

The figures were produced by researcher Harry Benson, of the Marriage Foundation think tank, who said: ‘The report provides solid evidence that married parents are more stable than unmarried parents.

‘The contrast between married and unmarried parents who remain intact by the time their children reach their teenage years demonstrates that marital status plays a crucial role in family breakdown.

‘With family breakdown costing an estimated £46 billion a year – more than the entire defence budget – in addition to the immeasurable social damage, it is clearly in the interest of the Government and the taxpayer to work to counter this devastating trend.’

Here in the United States, the cost of family breakdown $112 billion per year, and rising as the illegitimacy rate rises.

Filed under: News, Breakdown, Child, Children, Cohabitation, Divorce, Family, Father, Feminism, Happiness, Marriage, Mother, Selfishness

What caused Melanie Phillips to turn away from the left and embrace conservatism?

Dina tweeted this article from the UK Daily Mail, by famous moderate conservative Melanie Phillips.

She sets up her article this way:

[Leftists] reserve a special loathing for me. This is not just because I refuse to be cowed. 

It’s because I was once one of them, one of the elect, a believer. 

I come from the kind of family in which it was simply unthinkable to vote Conservative. For my parents, the Tory Party represented the boss class, while Labour supported the little man — people like us.

My father was haunted all his life by the poverty he endured growing up in the old East End of London in the Twenties and Thirties. 

His family of six lived in two rooms; he never had enough to eat. He left school at the age of 13. 

As a university-educated young woman with hippie-style hair and an attitude, I, too, generally toed the standard Leftist line in the late Seventies and early Eighties. 

Poverty was bad, cuts in public spending were bad, prison was bad, the Tory government was bad. 

The state was good, poor people were good, minorities were good, sexual freedom was good.

And pretty soon I had the perfect platform for those views when I went to work as a journalist on The Guardian, the self-styled paper of choice for intellectuals and the supposed voice of progressive conscience.

The UK Guardian is the most liberal newspaper in Britain. 

Here’s what turned her around:

The defining issue for me — the one that launched me on a personal trajectory of confrontation with the Left and with my colleagues and friends — was the persistent undermining of the family as an institution.

By the late Eighties, it was glaringly obvious that families were suffering a chronic crisis of identity and self-confidence. 

There were more and more divorces and single parents — along with mounting evidence that family disintegration and the subsequent creation of step-families or households with no father figure at all did incalculable damage to children.

‘Too many children lack a consistent mother or father figure,’ researchers told me. 

Poverty, the Left’s habitual excuse, could not be the culprit since middle-class children were also not receiving the parental attention they required.

For me, the traditional family is sacred because it embodies the idea that there is something beyond the selfish individual. 

But it was being turned into a mere contract that either side could break more or less at will. 

I listened to the evidence of those with no particular ideological fixation or agenda, but who simply spoke of what they saw was happening.

[...]From Zelda West-Meads of the marriage guidance counsellors Relate, I learned that, though many single mothers did a heroic job, it was the absence of the father that did such terrible damage to their children. So I described how fathers were vital to the emotional health of children. 

Fatherless families were also at least partly responsible for a national breakdown in authority and rising levels of crime.

My view was backed in 1992 when three influential social scientists with impeccable Left-wing pedigrees produced a damning report.

From their research, they concluded that children in fractured families tend to suffer more ill-health, do less well at school, are more likely to be unemployed, more prone to criminal behaviour and to repeat as adults the same cycle of unstable parenting. 

But instead of welcoming this analysis as identifying a real problem, the Left turned on the authors, branding them as evil Right-wingers for being ‘against single mothers’. 

Their sanity was called into  question. ‘What do these people want?’ one distinguished academic said to me.

‘Do they want unhappy parents to stay together?’ 

Eventually, he admitted that the authors’ research was correct. But he said it was impossible to turn back the clock and wondered why there was so much concern about the rights of the child rather than of the parents. 

He turned out to be divorced — revealing a devastating pattern I was to encounter over and over again. Truth was being sacrificed to personal expediency. Evidence would be denied if the consequences were inconvenient. 

Self-centred individualism and  self-justification ruled, regardless of the damage done to others.

This article is a long read, but a good one. If you like to read things that are maybe a little longer than most articles I post, then I really recommend this one. You won’t be disappointed.

Fiscal and foreign policy conservatives will be surprised by how important social issues are when pulling someone away from the left. All conservative ideas are testable with reason – not just fiscal and foreign policy, as some might have you believe. I often hear Christians and conservatives trying to win people over with just one issue, instead of knowing a little bit about everything. Well, let me be clear. If I can get Obama out of office by winning someone over on record low labor force participation, then that means no more taxpayer-funded abortion drugs. If I can get Obama out of office by winning someone over on security and stability in the Middle East, then that means no more spiraling national debt. And if I can get Obama out of office on the defense of traditional marriage, then that means we might get a fence build on our southern border so that Hezbollah cannot just walk right in and try to assassinate the Saudi Ambassador in New York.

It’s all related, and we need to be persuasive on every issue, not just one issue.

Filed under: Commentary, Conservative, Family, Family Breakdown, Leftist, Liberal, Marriage, Melanie Phillips, UK

Ryan T. Anderson’s commencement speech at Regent University

The full text is up at National Review. I wanted to highlight a couple of points.

First, the importance of marriage and family for raising children:

As a graduate of Regent University you know that the obligations we have to our neighbors are not dependent on race, or sex, or social class. Neither are those duties dependent on age, or size, or stage of development. Or whether someone is wanted or unwanted, planned or unplanned, healthy or sick, “perfect” or disabled.

This starts with you and me. We need to love our children. Graduating class, if you have a daughter with Down syndrome, love her. If your son is conceived “by accident,” love him. As my late mentor Fr. Richard John Neuhaus explained, we have the responsibility to see to it that every human being is protected in law and cared for in life.

The best care comes from the family. Some of you may have already started your families. Most of you will start one in the next decade. And as you welcome children into this world you will experience firsthand that the best way to ensure that children are cared for in life by the man and the woman who gave them life is to unite that man and woman as husband and wife in marriage.

We are created male and female. And marriage unites a man and a woman permanently and exclusively as husband and wife to take responsibility for their children as father and mother. That’s what marriage is all about. And our marriage policy should respect these truths. So, too, should our churches and our own lives. Graduating class: Live lives of fidelity and service to your spouse and your children.

Your children will be educated in this society. And as mothers and fathers you have the responsibility to care for and educate your children. Government should empower you to fulfill those duties. It shouldn’t interfere or indoctrinate. Nor should it use healthcare laws or anti-bullying programs to promote a sexual ideology at odds with the values that responsible parents try to instill in their children.

Second, the free market and the need for job creation:

Our responsibilities extend beyond our families. One of the best ways to care for our neighbors is by serving them in our professional callings, performing quality work at a fair price. Creating wealth and value for our neighbors. Who among the Class of 2013 will be the next David Green, the founder of Hobby Lobby? Who will be the next Truett Cathy, the founder of Chick-fil-a? Who will improve our lives with new technology or medical devices? Who will create new jobs that pay decent wages? This is your responsibility as future business leaders and entrepreneurs.

We know that the market economy—along with families headed by married couples—has done more to lift people out of poverty and into a flourishing life than any other institution. But it only works if people of good character and upright morals are at the helm. Markets are inert apart from the values that actors bring to them—and you have responsibility for your market action.

Look at leaders like David Green and Truett Cathy. They run their businesses in accordance with their Christian beliefs. There’s a simple reason why: They know that they have duties to serve God—and not just on Sundays, but also on the other six days of the week, when they enter the workforce and marketplace. Remember, you can’t check your faith or morals at the door.

It’s worth a look. The actual speech can be seen here, starting at 41 minutes in.  It goes on for about 19 minutes.

Filed under: News, Capitalism, Children, Civil Society, Commencement, Education, Entrepreneurship, Family, Free Market, Jobs, Love, Marriage, Parenting, Regent University, Ryan Anderson, Ryan T. Anderson

ESPN newscaster punished for not affirming the goodness of homosexuality

Here’s a popular post at the American Spectator.

Excerpt:

As homosexuals come out of the closet, Christians go into it. “Authenticity” is highly prized in society today, provided that what one feels falls safely within the dictates of political correctness. Sports analyst Chris Broussard stepped briefly outside of the Christian closet on Monday and paid the price for it.

“Personally I don’t believe that you can live an openly homosexual lifestyle or an openly premarital sex [lifestyle] between heterosexuals. If you’re openly living that type of lifestyle, the Bible says you know them by their fruits, it says that’s a sin,” Broussard said on ESPN. “If you’re openly living in unrepentant sin, whatever it may be, not just homosexuality, adultery, fornication, premarital sex between heterosexuals, whatever it may be. I think that’s walking in open rebellion to God and to Jesus Christ.”

ESPN, not long thereafter, apologized for permitting these remarks to disrupt Monday’s canonization: “We regret that a respectful discussion of personal viewpoints became a distraction from today’s news. ESPN is fully committed to diversity and welcomes Jason Collins’ announcement.”

Naturally, a Soviet-style clarification was in order from the guilty party, and Broussard supplied it via Twitter by Monday night: “Today on [ESPN], as part of a larger, wide-ranging discussion on today’s news, I offered my personal opinion as it relates to Christianity, a point of view that I have expressed publicly before. I realize that some people disagree with my opinion and I accept and respect that. As has been the case in the past, my beliefs have not and will not impact my ability to report on the NBA. I believe Jason Collins displayed bravery with his announcement today and I have no objection to him or anyone else playing in the NBA.”

Broussard did a good job of expressing his opposition to marriage, but any kind of restrictions on sex are no longer welcome in a society that thinks that there are no moral rules when it comes to sex. Obviously, he could have  a better job of expressing his opposition with some evidence, but I don’t see why he should be censored and forced to apologize.

One other funny thing about the gay NBA player story. He had a girlfriend for 8 years and was going to marry her in 2009. He called it off. She found out that he was gay just a few days before the big announcement was made to the public. I wonder how this sort of thing squares with the popular myth that gay people are born gay?

Filed under: News, Carolyn Moos, Chris Broussard, Christianity, ESPN, Family, Free Speech, Gay Agenda, Homosexuality, Marriage, Religious Liberty

How the UK government penalizes stay-at-home moms and pushes kids into daycare

Dina sent me this must-read article from the UK Daily Mail.

Excerpt:

For years, parents like me who believe that the best place for a young child is at home with a loving parent have been ignored or mocked as smothering, over-protective mothers. Go back to work and put your child in nursery where he can socialise, we were told by ‘experts’ and feminists. Don’t feel guilty.

Unfortunately, the politicians listened — and state-subsidised childcare grew as a result. Between 1995 and 2010, mostly under the Labour governments of Tony Blair and Gordon Brown, for children under five years old it grew by 36.4 per cent. It’s been an unmonitored social experiment on a huge scale.

[...][T]he tragic irony is that the plethora of unruly children ill-fitted to school coming out of our nurseries is a direct result of successive governments’ tunnel vision childcare policy.

It’s a policy which, through tax advantages and financial incentives, encourages mothers to go out to work, leaving young children in nurseries.

Under Labour, working mothers were championed and childcare was considered best left to state-subsidised nurseries. It was taboo even to suggest that stay-at-home mothers were performing an equally valid role.

The tragedy is that the Coalition seems to be continuing in the same vein.

[...]The most comprehensive research studies have shown that daycare nurseries breed bad behaviour.

A study in the U.S., which followed 1,000 children from birth to 15, found that those children who spent long hours in early daycare were more aggressive than those who had been cared for at home.

This is because young children are not designed to socialise in large groups of their peers. It may promote a quasi independence — but of the wrong kind.

It leads to children bullying or being bullied for social survival. ‘We let them fight it out,’ is how one helper describe her nursery’s approach.

[...]As a result of writing about childcare and bringing up children, I hear frequently from mothers who are distraught that they have had to return to work, leaving their children in daycare, because the Government has made it financially impossible for them to remain at home.

Not only has it withdrawn child benefit from households where a single breadwinner earns £60,000, while families in which both parents work and pull in a combined income of up to £98,000 will keep every penny, more recently it announced that families with two working parents will get tax breaks worth £2,000 a year.

The message is loud and clear: neither Cameron nor Clegg genuinely value the role of stay-at-home parents.

Their policies are cruel to mothers and to children, and they don’t bode well for the mental health or resilience of future generations.

Cameron and Clegg should create, at the very least, a neutral tax system that does not penalise mothers for staying at home.

And they should stop ignoring what all studies, mothers’ instincts and millennia of evolution have told us: that the best place for a very young child is with their mother or  father.

I have some pretty strong feelings against daycare, unless it’s a last resort. I think this article is helpful because a lot of people who vote for Democrats are women who one day hope to marry and be stay-at-home moms. They believe that socialism is somehow compatible with a strong marriage, a man who provides for the family, and a mother who focuses on the needs of her toddlers as they grow up. But socialism isn’t compatible with that, because socialism is wed to feminism. Feminism is the idea that women need to act like men in order to be equal to men. And the way that social engineers on the left achieve that goal is by creating taxes and incentives to push women out of the home. A stay-at-home mom has no value to the government because she isn’t paying taxes for the government to spend, too. They want her to work, both for ideological reasons and for financial reasons. People on the left think that society is more “equal” when parents are separated from their children and the children are raised communally by strangers. That’s “equal”. Some of the women in the UK who are complaining now undoubtedly voted for these policies. Maybe they had no choice since the Conservatives are the least bad option. But we have choices here, and we need to think carefully when we have the opportunity to vote.

Filed under: News, Child, Child Care, Children, David Cameron, Day Care, Daycare, Family, Father, Mother, Nick Clegg, Parenting, Socialism, Toddler, UK