Time to ask “But what about the children?”
by Nina Power, The Critic:
Not talking about the facts is counterproductive.
Since the sexual revolution, the West has engaged in a project of limit-destruction in the name of the sanctity of desire. Boundaries are there to be transgressed in the name of self-expression. The Id has been unleashed; fantasy is no longer a matter for private dabbling, but public display.
We have replaced older virtues — fidelity, forbearance, duty — with new modes of living: desire is unbounded, love is love, and the freedom of the individual is the highest good. The problem with our unshackled, “liberated” universe is the unwillingness of reality and Nature herself to bend to our will. We increasingly find ourselves at odds with what we want to be true and what is true — and we don’t like it.
Melissa Kearney’s The Two-Parent Privilege is an account of what are, on the surface, rather obvious points. Kearney is an economist and a numbers-and-graphs person, so all of her arguments are swimming, if not drowning, in data and generalisations. She notes, first, that over the past 40 years or so, America “has engaged in a vast experiment of reshaping the most fundamental of social institutions — the family — and the resulting generations of data tell us in no uncertain terms how that has played out for children”.
Only 63 per cent of US children, Kearney notes, are now raised in a home with married parents. This is not because parents are cohabiting without getting married — it is because vast quantities of women, particularly black women, are single parents. This is not because there is a financial incentive for women to do so, a point Kearney carefully unpicks. It is because the kinds of jobs for non-college educated men, which would engender the economic stability required to be a good father and husband, no longer exist.
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