The Pew Research Center survey on marriage and parenting found that children had fallen to eighth out of nine on a list of factors that people associate with successful marriages ”” well behind “sharing household chores,” “good housing,” “adequate income,” a “happy sexual relationship” and “faithfulness.”
In a 1990 World Values Survey, children ranked third in importance among the same items, with 65 percent saying children were very important to a good marriage. Just 41 percent said so in the new Pew survey.
Chore-sharing was cited as very important by 62 percent of respondents, up from 47 percent in 1990.
The survey also found that, by a margin of nearly 3-to-1, Americans say the main purpose of marriage is the “mutual happiness and fulfillment” of adults rather than the “bearing and raising of children.”
The survey’s findings buttress concerns expressed by numerous scholars and family-policy experts, among them Barbara Dafoe Whitehead of Rutgers University’s National Marriage Project.
“The popular culture is increasingly oriented to fulfilling the X-rated fantasies and desires of adults,” she wrote in a recent report. “Child-rearing values ”” sacrifice, stability, dependability, maturity ”” seem stale and musty by comparison.”
When narcissism marries, the result is narcissism times 2. The Pew results aren’t surprising, but it is hard not to despair. Marriage has become the equivalent to a first rate TV and a subscription to net-flix. Wha does one do about this? Or is this the sign of our decadence and decline about which no country has ever been ble to reverse. ANd so we are going to become a Hispanic country. I think of Vico and his circular view of history. The Hispanics are the new barbarians, still vital and burgeoning, against which an attentuated and etiolated ethos has no response – except a death wish. Poor America. LM
:ohh: The only thing that’s really intriguing about this finding is how closely these views tally with those in Western Europe – where people no longer bother marrying when cohabitation will secure the same desired ends in a less costly and painful manner. For those of us committed to family as the microgenerator of flourishing human life from birth to death, it’s clear why we might choose to marry against society’s prevailing social and cultural predilections. But given how similar many Americans’ desires seem to be to those of secular Europeans, why do Americans still bother to marry in so much greater numbers?
I believe that the results prove that modern education has failed.
Period.
DonGander
Sharing household chores, faithfulness, etc are good things. However, this confirms what we have been saying here anecdotally about the devaluation of children as marriage has been redefined as a personal good, rather than a social good.
I do see some good news in the article:
[blockquote]According to the survey, 71 percent of Americans say the growth in births to unwed mothers is a “big problem.” About the same proportion — 69 percent — said a child needs both a mother and a father to grow up happily.[/blockquote]
Funny, when I read these survey results, I keep hearing the same thing over and over again…”Me!…ME!…..IT’S ALL ABOUT ME!….And if you missed it the first time…well….ME!”
And I totally don’t buy this malarky about the poor two wage earner parents struggling to make ends meet. Only by the embrace of rampant materialism have we put ourselves in this situation. I know people who are working like fiends who have NO kids. Who, exactly are they working for? For their own retirement?
The truth is, all I hear is more “me!”.
Kids are a lot of work, you bet, I have 3 and they are an everyday event, even now that they are old enough (17, 11, 10) to do their own things during the day.
The real question I have to ask myself is: Am I raising good parents? Or am I raising children who will be adept at taking care of themselves? Or neither?
My parents, having raised 5 kids (I remember computing once that they were literally in parent mode from 1961 until 1995) advised all of us not to have them, or else to wait until we were older to start, and to just have 2 at the most. That got me thinking that perhaps society had put so much expectation on them, for all the STUFF that kids needed (private school, college educations, etc) that we were building a system that is designed to make child rearing so expensive as to minimize children. In fact, (I was the oldest) this hit me at about 18, so I started earning my own keep and stopped taking anything from them at 19. I’m not sure it helped.
Expectations. Materialism. Keeping up with the Jones’. These are the temptations that are driving people out of the parenting business.
Just my 2 cents….
KTF!…mrb
Mike Bertaut, it is nice to know that there are yet a few out there like you. One thing that helped me more than anything else to raise a boy to functional adulthood, was the fact that it wasn’t my job to come up with an infinite list of things that my son must know upon his going it alone. No, it was simply my job to see that he had the charactor to meet both God and Mankind successfully. We literally had no rules in our house (like not throwing balls in the house, etc.) but my word was law and I always supported my wife. Our actions and experiences were without limit (by man-made rules) but there was one word that my son learned early and never forgot – “enough”. We did have an ordered home.
Now I see a son and his wife and three grand-children whom I adore being around and comforted by. I see my grandchildren growing in character (wisdom, stature, favor with God and Man) There is no greater wealth that God could possibly give me on this earth.
Where is money in all of this? Will my wife earning money improve on my situation?
I see so many homes where the child is a mini-dictator, demanding of an infinite want, and I so feel sorry for those parents that have been taught that that is there lot. They are even told by the Church that that is “love”. God keep us from such “love”.
DonGander
I don’t know that the concern is called for. The question on the survey was the importance of the listed items [i]in making a “successful marriage”[/i], not the importance of those items to the respondent in general. One can place a very high priority on children without believing that the decision to have children “makes” the marriage more “successful”, or that not having children makes a marriage likely to be “less successful”.
One way to think of this would be to interpret the answers in reverse: if the question were which of the (reversed) items made significant contributions to [i]unsuccessful[/i] marriages, would we be that surprised to see things like unfaithfulness, unhappy sexual relationships, unfair division of chores, inadequate income, and poor housing were considered more detrimental to marriage than not having children?
I think #7 makes a good point. And with people living longer they spend much more time as a an empty nest couple, potentially, than they do as parents. So thinking about what makes a good marriage is important, don’t you think?
What 7 and 8 say is true enough as far as it goes, but if you put the poll with what we all see, day in and day out, in papers and movies and on the street and in the classrooom, then the conclusion of endless narcissism is solid as a dumdum bullet.
The birthrates continue to fall in Europe – the data is clear – and they have begun to fall wherever prosperity is setting in strongly – and the numbers also show that abortion on demand and sex-testing in many parts of the world is producing a heavily male population.In any case, Europe, if it continues as it now goes, will die of old age shortly because it doesn’t want children. America looks as if it is no different for exavctly the same reasons.
What then? Learn to speak Spanish,folks. ANd we may say that if all this comes to pass, we will deserve exactly what we get. TEC and its passion for homosexuality is symptom; put it with the poll, and what do yousee? Larry
LM, #1, I trust you mean “new barbarians” in the sense of those invading another country. Like the Franks and Germans invading (partially being invited) an enervated western Roman Empire (Christian, by the way). My own experiences with Hispanics here (I do not know whether they are legal or not) is that they are hard-working people who put family and children very high on their scale of values (like the Hispanic families that belong to my wife’s RC parish). Let’s hope that these “new barbarians” are not enervated by contact with us privileged “natives” who assume we have everything coming to us.
BfB: Yes, that is what I mean by new barbarians. They may be ignorant, untutored and unsophisticated, but the simplest desires in life drive them forward without much reliance of polls, doctorates, social acceptance, lifestyles, upscale, the Jones’s competition… all of what the Pew poll shows us that Americans want: Comfort, safety, entertainment, all that we ordinarily call hedonism and the unremitting cultivation of Self. They are the Visigoths moving into Spain, the Celts moving into England, and we are the Romans of the 4th and 5th C, waiting for a Theodoric to appear.
Mind you, I am absolutely against allowing illegals to remain in place, Hispanics or otherwise. That is, I am unwilling to leave my identity undefended. Whole portions of the US are turning into a third world country and I will not accept that. My attitude is one of self preservation: Catch them and send them back, and do what is necessary to keep them from returning. The Hispanics are like ants, throwing their bodies in the moat so others may cross. I don’t care whether they are hardworking or not, too many too soon is socio/economic poison, and America is quite capable of dying from it.
We have forgotten the simple desires, or sophiticated them out of existence. This is why having children is held in such low esteem. They ARE trouble, the ARE expensive (and ever more expensive), their demands are importunate and unceasing, and we have allowed them to become utterly spoiled by feeding their ravenous appetite for attention. Why have problems when you can avoid having them? But the Hispanics simply have children because that’s what you happens when men have sex with women; the bees pollinate the apple blossoms and you get apples. What’s the deal? But we have found out how to play with pistils and stamens without the apple problem. Good for us? Watch out for the new barbarians. As always, they will eat the etiolated culture alive. Larry
But this doesn’t mean that I don’t know what they want. They want “lebensraum” like all the other hordes, a new place to settle so that they can live their lives with less misery than in their homeland. We are fortunate that so far, the Hispanics have not found an Attila or a Gaiseric, to turn the search for living space into a hunger for conquest.
Salient comments Larry. That is where multiculturalism will come back to bite its current proponents in the derriere. Do they really think that pan-Hispanic nationalists and pious Hindus and Muslims will buy into their secular, non-sectarian vision?
As I sometimes put it, it’s going to be real funny watching all these old ex-hippies’ eyes widen as their Hispanic and Asian nurses start yanking the feeding tubes and shutting off the ventilators to free up more resources for Hispanic and Asian obstetric and pediatric care.