GOOD ENOUGH FOR THEE, NOT FOR ME:

The marriage gap that's destroying Middle America: This is the issue that should be top of the political agenda - and not only in the United States. (Carolyn Moynihan, 19 August 2011, Mercator.net)

While the attention of the world was riveted on the anarchy in England, two reports were published in the United States warning that family instability is making serious inroads into the working class and lower middle class of that country -- as it is in Britain and many others. Both reports are about the erosion of marriage; together they leave no-one, in America at least, with any excuse for ignorance on the subject.

In the first, The Marginalisation of Marriage in Middle America, the problem is outlined by two sociologists: W Bradford Wilcox, director of the National Marriage Project at the University of Virginia and a conservative; and Andrew J Cherlin, a professor at Johns Hopkins University and a liberal. Their views diverge on the importance of marriage, but they agree about two basic things: "that children are more likely to thrive when they reside in stable, two-parent homes," and "that in America today cohabitation is still largely a short-term arrangement, while marriage remains the setting in which adults seek to maintain long-term bonds."

Many social commentators are worried about the widening wealth gap in today's America. More worrying still is the marriage gap that has opened up between the working class -- basically, people with not much more than a high school diploma -- and the college educated middle class. Indeed, the latter gap is a significant contributor to the first.

Contrary to the impression you might get from reading the New York Times, college educated Americans are not generally engaged in pushing the sexual revolution to new extremes; they are busy creating what Wilcox and Cherlin call a "neotraditional style of family life". They "may cohabit with their partners, but nearly all of them marry before having their first child. Furthermore, while most wives work outside the home, the divorce rate in this group has declined to levels not seen since the early 1970s."

In contrast, working class young adults, who comprise half of the population aged 25 to 34, are defaulting on marriage:

"More and more of them are having children in brittle cohabiting unions. Among those who marry, the risk of divorce remains high. Indeed, the families formed recently in working-class communities have begun to look as much like the families of the poor as of the prosperous. The nation's retreat from marriage, which started in low-income communities in the 1960s and 1970s, has now moved into Middle America."

Compared to college graduates, moderately educated Americans are more than twice as likely to divorce in the first 10 years of marriage, and women are more than seven times as likely to bear a child outside of marriage. "Indeed the percentage of nonmarital births among the moderately educated (44 percent) was closer to the rate among mothers without high school degrees (54 percent) than to college-educated mothers (6 percent)."

We need to get the seriousness of this: back in 1960 the marriage gap barely existed; now there's a chasm opening up between the third of Americans with higher education and everyone else -- including the large class of ordinary working people that used to be the backbone of family values.

Many will say it doesn't matter. We are not looking at a boom in single mothers here, but of cohabiting couples having children, which means the kids still have a mother and father under one roof. Cherlin himself inclines to the view that a stable two-parent home is what matters, not marriage as such. The fact is, however, that cohabiting relationships are much less stable than marriage.

Much less.

US Demographers Sheela Kennedy and Larry Bumpass suggest that 65 per cent of children born to cohabiting parents will see their parents part by the time they are 12, compared to 24 per cent of the children of married parents. A British report last December found something similar: unmarried couples accounted for 59 per cent of break-ups affecting children up to the age of five, divorces for 20 per cent, and single parents headed 21 per cent of broken families with young children. Even in Sweden, the fabled home of non-traditional happy families, children born to cohabiting couples are 70 per cent more likely to see parents separate by the age of 15, compared to married parents.

Follow @brothersjudd