THYME Magazine

Citizen Journalism with a Better Flavor


Volume II, Issue XLIX

Who Need's Marriage?

That's what the 'other' Weekly News Magazine [click to read] asks this week. Another paternalistic piece of pap journalism, to be sure. This blog has just dealt with the real problems behind public housing [1.] and the welfare system that discourages marriage and encourages single parenthood certainly deserves mention.

A trio of City Journal articles deal with the problem quite nicely, they are:

Child-Man in the Promised Land [click to read]
The Carrie Bradshaw Lfestyle [click to read]
What Social Science Does--and Doesn't--Know [click to read]

The dissolving of traditional family structures carries with it veryreal costs. Some appear on the balance sheet, such as the increased financial burden on taxpayers to support those who live outside of whole families. Some are unmeasurable, such as the human potential lost when a child's only male role models are non-working gang members.

"It’s 1965 and you’re a 26-year-old white guy. You have a factory job, or maybe you work for an insurance broker. Either way, you’re married, probably have been for a few years now; you met your wife in high school, where she was in your sister’s class. You’ve already got one kid, with another on the way. For now, you’re renting an apartment in your parents’ two-family house, but you’re saving up for a three-bedroom ranch house in the next town. Yup, you’re an adult!" --Kay Hymowitz in City Journal.

Today, Ms. Hymowitz points out, the same young man lives in a sort of adolescent limbo. Society has in many quarters discarded a social order that served it well. In traditonal Faith communities you see a significant number of young people who buck this trend, but outside of such structure there are a lot of young adults "drinking the cream without buying the cow."

One only has to look at the poorest among us, those on public assistance, where marriage has been disincentivized for decades, to see the long-term results of such thinking. Multiple generations of fatherless children find family structure in gangs and generations of women have served as the sole head of households. So much human potential lost... is it worth it?

TIME concludes that marriage only works for the relatively well off, forgetting these observations.

Strong family structure came with the immigrants, who lived in the poorest of conditions to begin with. Three generations later, many of these families had become partakers of the 'American Dream.' They saw their sons and daughters buy homes and send their children into the professions. They watched Mom and Dad struggle to make a living and caught some values from them in the process.

Fragile Urban Families, Loutish Youths [click to read].