Youth Ministry Initiative

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Year of Publication

1997

From Don S. Browning et al, From Culture Wars to Common Ground - Religion and the American Family Debate (1997) page 58:

Social scientists Jan Dizard and Howard Gadlin in The Minimal Family (1990) agree with the authors of Habits of the Heart that expressive individualism is the central value that Americans today bring to their marriage and family relations.34

Notes:
  1. 34 Jan Dizard and Howard Gadlin, The Minimal Family (Amherst, Mass.: Univ. of Massachusetts Press, 1990), 11-13.
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1997

From Don S. Browning et al, From Culture Wars to Common Ground - Religion and the American Family Debate (1997) page 55:

This helps explain why parents today spend less time with their children than pre-1960 parents spent. Overwork has created what social scientists call the parenting deficit” – a lowered capacity of parents to spend sufficient amounts of time with their children. According to a study done at the University of Maryland in 1985, parents spent an average of seventeen hours each week with their children as compared to a total of thirty hours in 1965.20

Notes:
  1. 20 Amitai Etzioni, The Spirit of Community: Rights, Responsibilities, and the Communitarian Agenda (New York: Crown Publishers, 1993), 64; for similar statistics see also Slyvia Hewlett, When the Bough Breaks: The Cost of Neglecting Our Children (New York: Basic Books, 1991), 15.
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1997

From Don S. Browning et al, From Culture Wars to Common Ground - Religion and the American Family Debate (1997) page 50:

Furthermore, these four factors interact, a point often overlooked. How they interact is the key issue addressed in this chapter. Their interaction has produced the postmodern context for family formation and maintenance – a context involving a new fourfold democratization of marriage and families, what we call the democratization of intimacy, work, value formation, and parenting

Author 
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1997

From Don S. Browning et al, From Culture Wars to Common Ground - Religion and the American Family Debate (1997) page 53:

By the late 1980s, social scientists were reporting that 27 percent of all children at any given time were living in a single-parent home, generally with their mother.9 For children born between 1970 and 1984, it was estimated that 44 percent would live with a single parent before reaching the age of sixteen.10 As we will see more fully later, on average the children of single parents do not do as well on almost all indices of child well-being: physical and psychological health, performance in school, entry into the job market, family formation, and marital stability.

Notes:
  1. 9 Donald Hernandez, America’s Children (New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 1993), 65.
  2. 10 Larry Bumpass and James Sweet, Children’s Experience in Single-Parent Families: Implicatios of Cohabitation and Marital Transitions,” Family Planning Perspectives 21 (November/December 1989):256-60
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1997

From Don S. Browning et al, From Culture Wars to Common Ground - Religion and the American Family Debate (1997) pages 52-53:

When the phenomenon of divorce is placed beside the rising rate of out-of-wedlock births, which has increased from 5 percent of all births in the early 1960s to more than 30 percent today, marital and family stability looks precarious indeed.2 It is true that the rates for divorce and out-of-wedlock births are higher in lower socioeconomic groups. High rates of divorce, however, occur in all classes. The rate of out-of-wedlock births, although still low among the educated, has actually doubled among this group over the last decade. Births to never-married mothers” ages eighteen to forty-four jumped from 17.2 percent in 1982 to 32.5 percent in 1992. Births to never-married mothers with one or more years of college rose even faster, from 5.5 percent in 1982 to 11.3 percent in 1992. For never-married mothers with graduate or professional degrees, it doubled, moving from 2.2 to 4.1 percent.3 Such trends demonstrate that out-of-wedlock births are no longer a phenomenon confined to inner-city black populations. Although the rate of such births in the black community rose from 22 percent in the 1960s to 68 percent in 1994, the rate of increase in the white community during the past decade was greater. The birthrate for unmarried white women was 23 percent by late 1994, 1 percent higher than it had been for blacks three decades earlier.4 The rate of spread throughout the population plus the increase in cohabitation has led to new talk about an emerging culture of “nonmarriage.”5 These statistics led Charles Murray to write his essay predicting the creation of a “new white underclass.”

Notes:
  • 2 Marriage in America: A Report to the Nation by the Council on Families in America (New York: Institute for American Values, 1995), 7.
  • 3 Carol Lawson, “When Baby Makes Two: More Women Choose Single Motherhood,” New York Times,Aug. 5,1993; “More Unmarried U.S. Women Are Becoming Mothers, Census Says,” Chicago Tribune, July 14, 1993; Amara Bachu, Fertility of American Women(Washington, D.C.: Bureau of the Census, Current Population Report, P20-470), xix.
  • 4 Tamar Lewin, “Birth to Young Teen-Agers Decline, Agency Says,” New York Times, Oct. 26, 1994, sec. A.
  • 5 Marriage in America, 4.
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1997

From Don S. Browning et al, From Culture Wars to Common Ground - Religion and the American Family Debate (1997) page 52:

The divorce statistics are well known but so fundamental that they must be reviewed. The rate of divorce has steadily increased for more than one hundred years. It has risen from 7 percent in the 1860s to more than 50 percent today. In fact, demographers Martin Castro and Larry Bumpass predicted in 1989 that if the rate continued to rise at the level of that decade, 60 percent of new marriages would end in divorce.
1 The rate has, in fact, moderated somewhat.

Notes:
  1. 1 Martin Castro and Larry Bumpass, Recent Trends in Marital Disruption,” Demography 26 (February 1989):37-51
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