Index will track health of marriage in U.S.
The Layman, Posted Tuesday, November 17, 2009
Seeing the need to track another key indicator in the health of the country, the Institute for American Values and the National Center on African American Marriage and Parenting have established the U.S. Marriage Index. In announcing the index Oct. 2, the organizations hope to get the attention of American policy makers and citizens on the importance of marriage trends.
“A large body of research suggests that the status of our marriages influences our well-being at least as much as the status of our finances,” the IAV report states. “But consider this puzzle. Why do we so carefully measure and widely publicize our leading economic indicators, and do everything we can to improve them, while rarely bothering to measure our leading marriage indicators, or try to do anything as a society to improve them?”
Using five indicators, the index shows a “dramatic decline” in the health of marriage in the last four decades. According to the study, the marriage index has fallen from 76.2 in 1970 to 60.3 in 2008. The African-American community has shown a far greater decline, the study claims, dropping from 64.0 in 1970 to 39.6 in 2008.
“There’s nothing inevitable about this trend,” said Linda Malone-Colón, a professor of psychology and founding executive director of The National Center on African American Marriages and Parenting at Hampton University said. “We absolutely can take positive steps to improve this number, and we have to.”
To generate the index measures, the study focuses on several leading indicators: the percentage of adults married; the percentage of married persons who are “very happy” with their marriage; the percentage of first marriages that are intact; the percentage of births to married persons; and the percentage of children living with their own married parents.
The principal contributors to the study include: Malone-Colón; David Blankenhorn, founder and president of the Institute for American Values and an author; and Elizabeth Marquardt, vice president for family studies at the Institute for American Values and also an author.
The report’s authors characterize the marriage index as one that’s just as important as highly-publicized economic indexes that are so much a part of public policy and a leading indicator of the nation’s health. The report implies that putting a greater emphasis on improving the marriage index could improve the overall health of the nation.
“We do not, as in the case of the economy, have generally accepted leading measurements, or even much of a sense that such measurements (even if we did agree on them) would truly matter to our well-being and therefore call for a collective response,” the report states. “The absence of a clear, compelling, and commonly-agreed upon set of leading marriage indicators prevents us from focusing clearly on the health of marriage in America. Consequently, policy makers and opinion leaders rarely seem to care about marriage trends, or even notice them.”
In the report, Malone-Colón and Blankenhorn suggest 101 ideas for ending the country’s marriage index decline, including marriage education, community initiatives, reduction of unnecessary divorces, asking the president to deliver a state of marriage report and efforts to protect the “legal bounds” of marriage. It does not explain what is meant by “legal bounds,” but does encourage an examination of the issue of same-sex unions and encourages the distinguishing of married couples from “other personal relations.”
One section of ideas focuses on the Church having a key role in strengthening marriage, including a challenge to no longer be “value neutral” on family matters. The Church-related suggestions are:
- Churches should join with government, the market and other institutions of civil society to launch a constructive critique of media images of marriage and family.
- Churches should retrieve, in a critical manner, their marriage and family traditions.
- Churches should help society understand that public policy should not and cannot maintain “value neutrality” on family matters.
- Convey to all members of your congregation that marriage is not just a private matter, but an accountable promise before God and the faith community.
- Create a national Interfaith Council on Marriage devoted to strengthening marriage in U.S. houses of worship and in the nation.
- Youth pastors should help to reconnect marriage and childbearing in the minds of young people.
- Divinity schools and other institutes that train clergy should incorporate the best scholarship on marriage and families into their training programs
The Institute for American Values is a nonprofit, nonpartisan organization based in New York City with a stated-goal of studying and strengthening American values. The Institute implements its program through three organizations: the Center for Marriage and Family, the John Templeton Center for Thrift and Generosity, and the Center for Ijtihad/Reason.
With its focus on strengthening families in the African-American community, the National Center on African American Marriage and Parenting is based at Hampton University, a historically African-American university in Hampton, Va. Malone-Colón is the center’s founding executive director.