Consequences of the Breakdown of Marriage and Family (UK)

[سيف الله]

Salaam

Found a very good passage from the book The Home We Build Together by Johnathan Sacks

Its long but well worth a read. This helps explain why marriage and family are so important to Muslims.

Fewer people are getting married. A report issued by the office of National Statistics in February 2007 showed that the number of Britons choosing to marry has fallen to the lowest levels in 111 years. The number of marriages fell by 10% in one year alone, between 2004 and 2005. Those who are marrying are doing so later: the average for men is now 36.2 years and for women 33.6, up by three years since 1995. Since the 1970s the number of couples getting married has fallen by a third, and the marriage rate has fallen by two-thirds, from 71 to 26 per thousand unmarried adults per year. Those who marry are not staying married. In Britain more than 40% of marriages end in divorce. In 2005 there were 155,052 divorces, as against just over 244,000 marriages.

Virtually every society every studied by anthropologists has some form of normative family structure, some agreed convention by which others – usually, though not always, a husband – support a mother and child. The West, Britain especially, has embarked on an unprecedented experiment of sexual and reproductive anomie: cohabitation, a succession of step parents, same-sex partnerships, limited commitment marriages, children shuttling between households, and above all single parent households. Nearly one in two children in Britain are born to unmarried parents, up from one in eight in 1980; 26% of British children currently live in lone parent households. Britain has the highest rate of teenage pregnancies in Europe as well as the highest percentage of children living in single parent families. The results are devastating.

A UNICEF survey published in February 2007 reported that Britain’s children are the unhappiest in the western world. They drink and smoke more, take more drugs, have more underage sex, rate their health as poorer and dislike school more than their peers in other countries. They are more prone to failure at school, more likely to experience violence and bullying, and suffer more unhappy relationships within and outside the home. They are the least satisfied with life.

Already in 1997 Oliver James in his Britain on the Couch was documenting the spectacular rise, especially among children, of depression, drug and alcohol abuse, eating disorder, stress-related syndromes, violence suffered and committed, suicide and suicide attempts. Britain has become, he said, a low serotonin society, serotonin being the chemical associated with feelings and well being.

One of the results of family breakdown is poverty, despite rising levels of affluence in society as a whole, and massive government expenditure on low income families. In 1999 a research report concluded that a third of Britain’s children, more than four million were living in poverty, three times as many as in the 1970s. In 2005, a UNICEF report noted the significant progress that had been made, but said Britain still had one of the highest rates of child poverty in the developed world, with more than 15% of families with children living on less than half the UK average income. In 2006 the Charity Shelter reported that 1.6 million youngsters in Britain were living in housing judged to be temporary, overcrowded or unfit. Lone parents are 2.5 times more likely to live in poverty than are couples, and their children suffer as a result.

The breakdown of marriage has a significant impact on adults well being. Research in seventeen countries has shown that married people are happier than unmarried ones; they have higher incomes, enjoy greater emotional support, are healthier and live longer. The mortality risk for unmarried women is 50% higher than for married women; 250% higher for unmarried than married men. Cohabitation is no substitute. In America the average cohabitation lasts for no more than 1.3 years. In Sweden, women who have cohabited before marriage have a divorce rate 80% higher than those who have not.

The main victims, though are the children. Massive research in recent years has exposed the systemic disadvantages suffered by those who do not grow up in stable, secure association with their biological parents. Children in single parent homes are more likely to drop out of or be expelled from school, to become juvenile delinquents, to take drugs and to commit adult crimes, to have poor jobs ot no jobs. Stepfathers are more likely than natural parents to harm children. In England, children living with cohabiting parents are twenty times more likely to suffer child abuse than those with married parents.

Divorce too has long lasting effects. Children whose parents divorce tend to have lower educational achievement, poorer socioeconomic chances, and emotional problems. The effects can last decades, even a lifetime. Children of divorcees tend to be fearful of betrayal and abandonment. They are more likely to throw themselves into unsatisfactory relationships, to become teenage mothers or fathers, or to become divorced themselves. Barbara Dafoe Whitehead said about the‘divorce culture’: ‘Divorce abrogates children’s rights to be reasonably free from adults cares and woes, to enjoy the association of both parents on a daily basis to remain innocent of social services and therapy and to spend family time in ways that are not dictated by the courts’. She concludes ‘Divorce involves a radical redistribution of hardship from adults to children and therefore cannot be viewed as a morally neutral act’.

Behind the statistics lie human tragedies. One of the most powerful feature od the Social Justice Policy Groups ‘Fractured Families’ (2006) is the testimony of the children themselves. This is Kate, aged 10: ‘I don’t like living with my mum and her boyfriend. They don’t love me. Since the divorce I never see my dad and I have to lie and say everything is ok to the social worker or my mum will get angry’. This is Paul aged 12: ‘My Dad cheated on mum and now they are splitting up. Mum is always drinking alcohol and talking sleeping pills and I don’t know what to do. I hate all the shouting and sometimes I feel like killing myself’. And this is Abby aged 13 ‘My parents are going through a divorce at the moment and mum is taking it out on me, always shouting and hitting me for everything that foes wrong. I feel scared and do not know what to do now that dad has gone’.

Children who have not experienced normal nurturing and support survive. But they do so at a cost, often an extreme reluctance to commit themselves, to invest emotionally in long term relationship. Through their own experience, they have learned not to trust people. SO the live within their own narrow emotional register, making friends but not deep ones, not fully able to invest their emotions in long term projects.

I discovered some of the emotional injuries of broken families when I spent a day filming young criminals at Sherbourne House, a centre for young offenders that gives them a six-week vocational training course in the hope that they will be able to get a job and stay out of prison. The young men I spoke to – they were all about eighteen years old – had spent about the last ten years in petty crime. This was their last chance of a non-custodial sentence. I wanted to now about their own childhoods. On that subject they were defensive – for the best reason. They were loyal to their families. They didn’t want to criticise mothers, fathers or stepfathers. SO I tried putting the question in a different way. I said; ‘Soon you are likely to become parents yourselves. What kind of father would you like to be?’
This opened the floodgates of feeling. They started crying. They said things like: ‘Id be strict. But I’d be there for my children. I’d discipline them but I’d be there’. That is what they had missed: a stable father figure in their childhood who was firm, consistent, capable of saying no, but at the same time available, dependable. That was when I saw the cost of the almost casual abandonment of family in the past forty years. Fractured families create fractured lives.

None of this is meant to be judgemental. People in fractured families need our support not our condemnation, which can only make things worse for them. There are outstanding single parents. There are times when divorce is better for all concerned than the alternatives. Besides this, there are other interpretations of the research findings. Some blame poverty rather than the breakup of the family. Some accept the facts but regard them as a fair price to pay for the end of an institution they find objectionable. There are psychotherapists who see the family as emotionally repressive, feminists who regard it as an instrument of male dominance, and libertarians who see it as an unnecessary constraints on the open ended possibilities of self-expression.

Let us accept these alternative voices. In any case, when dealing with so widespread a phenomenon, no individual, no group, no institutions is to blame. Yet only by denial on a massive scale can we ignore the pathos of the situation. If children have the right to anything, it is the right to be responsible, caring presence of those who brought them into being. John Stuart Mill thought so and said so: ‘the fact itself, of causing the existence of a human being, is one of the most responsible actions in the range of human life. To undertake this responsibility – to bestow a life which may be either a curse or a blessing – unless the being on whom it is to be bestowed will have at least the ordinary chances of a desirable existence, is a crime against that being.’

In 1994, as part of a television documentary I was making about the family, I interviewed the sociologists and sage A H Halsey. One remark he made has stayed with me across the years. The twentieth century, he said, has been called the century of the child. It should more accurately be called the century of child neglect.

[سيف الله]

Salaam

Another update on the state of marriage in western societies

The decline of marriage

MARRIAGE, and its many ups and downs, still exercises a powerful hold over newspapers, magazines and the airwaves. Nearly 23m Americans watched Prince William being joined in holy matrimony to Kate Middleton. Millions more have wallowed in the break-up of Arnold Schwarzenegger’s marriage after revelations that he fathered a son with a maid. And the tumescent tweets of congressman Anthony Weiner have stirred up endless speculation about the health of his own year-old marriage and the forbearance of his newly pregnant wife.

Less titillating are revelations about the sorry state of marriage across the United States. Data from the Census Bureau show that married couples, for the first time, now make up less than half (45%) of all households.

The iconic American family, with mom, dad and kids under one roof, is fading. In every state the numbers of unmarried couples, childless households and single-person households are growing faster than those comprised of married people with children, finds the 2010 census. The latter accounted for 43% of households in 1950; they now account for just 20%. And the trend has a potent class dimension. Traditional marriage has evolved from a near-universal rite to a luxury for the educated and affluent.

There barely was a marriage gap in 1960: only four percentage points separated the wedded ways of college and high-school graduates (76% versus 72%). The gap has since widened to 16 percentage points, according to the Pew Research Centre. A Census Bureau analysis released this spring found that brides are significantly more likely to have a college degree than they were in the mid-1990s.

“Marriage has become much more selective, and that’s why the divorce rate has come down,” said Bradford Wilcox, director of the National Marriage Project at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville. The project found that divorce rates for couples with college degrees are only a third as high as for those with a high-school degree.

Americans with a high-school degree or less (who account for 58% of the population) tell researchers they would like to marry, but do not believe they can afford it. Instead, they raise children out of wedlock. Only 6% of children born to college-educated mothers were born outside marriage, according to the National Marriage Project. That compares with 44% of babies born to mothers whose education ended with high school.

“Less marriage means less income and more poverty,” reckons Isabel Sawhill, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution. She and other researchers have linked as much as half of the income inequality in America to changes in family composition: single-parent families (mostly those with a high-school degree or less) are getting poorer while married couples (with educations and dual incomes) are increasingly well-off. “This is a striking gap that is not well understood by the public,” she says.

Do not expect the Democratic Party, however, to make an issue of the marriage gap in next year’s elections. Unmarried women voted overwhelmingly for Barack Obama. “You don’t want to suggest to someone who isn’t married and has children that they should be married,” says Ms Sawhill. “That is a denigration of their lifestyle.”

http://www.economist.com/node/18867552

[SFatima]

If anyone heard that by the end of times, marriage will be scarce and difficult to pursue, and zina( prohibited sexual relations) will be rampant and easier to indulge in. Astaghfirullah, May Allah swt save us from all errors ameen