California Family Minute  >  Religious Freedom Sunday Is This Sunday, January 10th  >  California Family Minute  >  California Family Minute  >  California Family Minute

California Family Minute

December 22, 2010

Research on Marriage, Families, and Children

by Rebecca Burgoyne, 
CFC Research Analyst

Last month headlines fixated on a study produced by the Pew Research Center in association with Time magazine. The Associated Press, writing about the study, asked, “Is marriage becoming obsolete?” Thirty-nine percent of 2,691 respondents to the Pew survey answered yes. But that means a majority – 61 percent do not believe marriage is on the decline.

Writers dissected the headline from every angle – from misleading headlines to the social ramifications. While an increasing number of people seem willing to redefine marriage and family, a strong majority recognize the importance of the family, and 67 percent say they are more “optimistic” about the future of marriage than the education system, the economy, or morals and ethics. 

Families remain very important to us, and are defined – according to the Pew study – primarily by children and kinship. Is it any wonder that homosexual activists have adopted the vernacular of the family in a heated battle for normalization and acceptance, including “marriage” and “parenting?”

Recent court decisions in favor of same-sex marriage have ignored large bodies of evidence confirming the traditional family with both a mother and a father as the best place for raising happy, well-adjusted children, and have instead helped redefine marriage as only an “emotional commitment” between two people. In other words, the societal purposes of the institution of marriage are being disregarded. 
  • In Perry v. Schwarzenegger, Judge Vaughn Walker rejected evidence pertaining to child rearing and the “artifact” of gender, declaring, among other things, that “same-sex parents and opposite-sex parents are of equal quality.”
  • In Florida, earlier this fall, an appellate court overturned a ban on homosexual adoption by rejecting parenting evidence and ruling that “gay people and heterosexuals make equally good parents.” 

And, with marriage already strained – under attack by divorce, cohabitation, and single-parenting by choice – the arguments appear to be working. Pew found that nearly all of us – 99 percent – agree that a married couple with children is a family. The numbers are more stingy for a single parent and a child (86 percent), a cohabitating couple with a child (80 percent), and a same-sex couple with children (63 percent). Children are clearly the key in how we define a family. The numbers plummet for those who define married, cohabitating, or homosexual couples without children as families.

Marriage is more than an emotional commitment based upon the self-interests of two people. It is not primarily about self-fulfillment, divorced from the responsibilities of raising happy, healthy, well-adjusted children.   We recognize what is best for children, families, and society. Strong majorities believe single motherhood is bad for society and that a child needs both a mother and a father to be happy. Children and kinship matter when defining families. 

Children need both a mother and a father. We know that innately, and social science bears it out. Sociologist David Popenoe says, “We should disavow the notion that ‘mommies can make good daddies,’ just as we should disavow the popular notion of radical feminists that ‘daddies can make good mommies.’ …The two sexes are different to the core, and each is necessary – culturally and biologically – for the optimal development of a human being.” 

No, marriage is not becoming obsolete – when ninety-five percent of those under 30 claim they plan to get married and most of us name our family as the most important element in our lives. 
 
For more information: 
  • Printer-friendly version