Michael Snyder – October 6, 2020
The numbers that I am about to share with you are extremely sobering, and they should be a massive wake up call for all of us. Yesterday, I wrote an article about how our society is breaking down everywhere we look, and nowhere is this more evident than in our marriages and in our families. But without strong marriages and strong families, no society can thrive for long. Recently, the Social Capital Project of the Joint Economic Committee Republicans released a report entitled “The Demise of the Happy Two-Parent Home”, but you probably never heard about it until now because it was almost entirely ignored by the mainstream media. I have never seen a congressional report document the collapse of marriage and family in American society to such an extent, and to be honest it is quite surprising to see such a quality piece of work come out of Washington.
I have selected nine of the most alarming quotes from the report and put them in bold below. Following each quote from the report, I am going to share some of my own commentary…
#1 Overall, between 1962 and 2019, the percentage of women ages 15-44 who were married dropped from 71 percent to 42 percent (Figure 1).16 Furthermore, Figure 2 shows the percentage of women ages 30-34 who had never married increased from 7 percent in 1962 to 35 percent in 2019.17
Numbers for men are similar, but they were not included in the report. We have never seen marriage rates collapse like this ever before, and most of the decline can be attributed to the fact that many young Americans simply do not see any reason to get married anymore.
These days, many would prefer to be free to run around having sex with whoever they want. When they become dissatisfied with their current sexual partner, they just move on and find someone else.
#2 Today, around 45 percent of American children spend some time without a biological parent by late adolescence.3 That is up from around one-third of children born in the 1960s and one-fifth to one-quarter born in the 1950s.4
Study after study has shown that children do better with two parents, and so the fact that nearly half of our children have been raised by just one parent for at least a portion of their lives is extremely alarming.