Cohabitation Destroys Marriage & Devastates Children - Ethics & Religion Col. #1,615

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Subject: Cohabitation Destroys Marriage & Devastates Children - Ethics & Religion Col. #1,615
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August 8, 2012

Column #1,615

Cohabitation: Destroys Marriage, Devastates Children

By Mike McManus

 

            Cohabitation – not marriage – is the dominant way male-female unions are now formed in the United States. Last year 7.6 million couples were cohabiting – an 18-fold hike since 1960.  Only 2.2 million couples marry in a year.

 

            Cohabitation is the snake in the grass that is killing marriage. 

 

            While many cohabitants say they are “testing the relationship’s potential for marriage,” the deeper reasons differ sharply by gender.

 

            Women think that by living with a man, they are taking a step toward marriage.  However, many men cohabit to avoid a commitment to marriage.  They like female companionship, available sex and sharing of rent.

 

            However, their clash of values prompts most cohabitators to break up.  While two-thirds of those marrying are cohabiting, that’s only 1.5 million couples. 

 

            What happened to the other 6 million?  They broke up, experiencing “premarital divorce” which is as painful as a real divorce.  It is particularly devastating for women, who often never marry.  Indeed, there were only 21 million never-married Americans in 1970 but 63 million in 2010.  That’s a tripling at a time the population grew only 50%.

 

            No wonder America’s marriage rate has plunged 54% since 1970. 

 

            What’s more, cohabiting couples who do marry – are more likely to divorce than those who remained apart until the wedding. Various studies say the odds increase by 26% to 65%.

 

Thus, cohabitation is a snake which both diverts tens of millions from marrying, and increases the odds of divorce for those who do marry.

 

Result: three-fourths of adults used to be married. Now only half are.

 

            What has been less recognized is that cohabitation is devastating to children. Most unwed births are to cohabiting couples.  Out-of-wedlock births have jumped from 5% of births in 1960 to 41%, paralleling soaring cohabitation.  That figure is 20 times the 2% out-of-wedlock birth rate in Japan!

 

            “Cohabitation has replaced divorce as the main reason for family instability today.  By age 12, about 24% of children will have experienced the divorce of their married parents, versus 42 percent of children who will live with cohabiting parents,” according to “Why Marriage Matters,” writes Alysse ElHage in “Family North Carolina.”

 

            These children are more likely to have behavioral and health problems, and to fail in school, and are six times more likely to be poor than those with married parents. 

 

            Brad Wilcox, director of the National Marriage Project, describes their plight as “the dark underbelly of cohabitation.  Children in cohabiting households are significantly more likely to suffer from physical, emotional and sexual abuse than children in either intact married families or single parent families.”

 

            A question: have you ever heard a sermon opposing cohabitation?  I bet not.  I have asked hundreds of pastors in different cities if they have ever preached on it, and only one hand in 50 goes up. 

 

            Why?  Paul wrote to the Corinthians, “Flee fornication.”  What is cohabitation but fornication raised to the 100th power?  What could your pastor say, after quoting Scripture?

 

You can’t practice permanence.”  Evidence: nine out of ten couples who begin their union cohabiting – will break up before or after the wedding.

 

“There is a better way to test the relationship” with a premarital inventory and by meeting with a Mentor Couple to discuss the issues that it surfaces.

 

My wife and I pioneered training couples in healthy marriages to be Marriage Mentors in our home church in the 1990s.  During that decade, our Mentor Couples prepared 288 couples for marriage, 58 of whom decided not to marry.  That’s a huge 20% who discovered they had chosen the wrong person.

 

Of the 230 couples who did marry, we know of only 16 divorces.  That’s a 7% failure rate - or a success rate of 93% over two decades.

 

That’s virtual marriage insurance.  

 

Another reason for soaring cohabitation is government pays for it.   If a woman has a unwed birth, she is not asked if she is living with the father with access to his income as if married.  Government thinks of her as a single mom needing welfare, Medicaid, food stamps, and subsidies costing taxpayers $20,000 a year in 2004 according to Heritage Foundation. 

 

However, if she marries the father, (in the best interest of all) she loses virtually all subsidies.  Result: unwed births rise and marriages plunge each year.

 

I suggest that a Presidential candidate or a governor might say, “I propose that if any cohabiting couple with a child decides to marry, government will not reduce benefits for two years, and after that, they would be tapered off over 3-4 years.”

 

That would save billions by reducing cohabitation and increasing marriage, protecting children .   

Copyright © Michael J. McManus is President of Marriage Savers and a syndicated columnist.

 

 

 

My new email address is mike@marriagesavers.org

Michael J. McManus
syndicated columnist
"Ethics & Religion"
President & Co-Chair
Marriage Savers
9311 Harrington Dr.
Potomac, MD 20854
www.marriagesavers.org
301-469-5873

 

 

Tip of the Week: July 30, 2012

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Subject: Tip of the Week: July 30, 2012
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Council for Relationships
Helping People Live Their Best Lives
Tip of the Week: Distance That Makes Hearts Grow Closer

                                                      

One of the great joys of working with couples in therapy is coaching them on distance and love strategies to remove the obstacles that are keeping them from the happy, intimate relationship they are wanting for themselves. It may sound strange but one path to greater closeness is a little distance.   I don't mean separate vacations or any kind of geographical distance. Instead, I mean getting a little distance from painful and destructive ways of communicating and moving toward clearer communication that comes from the heart.

 

 

Wanda Sevey, M.Div, LMFT is a Senior Staff Therapist and Director of CFR's New Jersey office. She can be reached at 856-783-4200 ext. 1.

 

 

 

 

Interesting Blog Post of the Week:
Fathers Play An Important Role in Baby's Development

A new study published in the Journal of Child Psychology and Psychaitry reported that Dads can have a major influence on the developmental and behavioral growth of their infant children. To read more about this study click through to our blog.

 

 

 

CFR Video of the Week: George James, LMFT

Watch CFR's George James as he talks to 
the 10! Show's Jillian and Bill Henley about the tragic shooting in Aurora, Colorado, what might have been going through the shooter's mind, and how to talk to your children about the mass shooting. 

 

 

 

 

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Handout for Scott's plenary at NARME



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From: Scott Stanley scott@stanleyemail.com>
Date: Fri, Jul 27, 2012 at 2:32 PM
Subject: Handout for my plenary at NARME
... Bill Coffin billcoffin68@gmail.com>


hello all,

Feel free to post my talk notes that are attached.  I added annotations for key points that I made verbally but would not have been on the panels I used so people can get all the points without having to hear the talk. 

It was really great seeing all of you this week.  

Best,

Scott

Care for the Family E-Family Newsletter

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Date: Fri, Jul 27, 2012 at 7:05 AM
Subject: E-Family Newsletter
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When you first get married, your thoughts are full of all the fantastic things you’ll be able to do as a couple now that you have actually achieved the much-anticipated state of ‘spending the rest of our lives together’… Read more »
 

How is it possible that a child, so recently only a toddler, is almost ready to start school?
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Executive Summary & Full Report Released - Counting Couples, Counting Families

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Subject: Executive Summary & Full Report Released - Counting Couples, Counting Families
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Executive Summary & Full Report Released

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Counting Couples, Counting Families 

2011 Research Conference

 

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Counting Couples, Counting Families
2011 Research Conference
Executive Summary & Full Report

 

We are pleased to announce the release of our 2011 research conference executive summary and full report Counting Couples, Counting Families. The materials are a culmination of the third Counting Couples conference in 2011 and two previous national conferences in 2001 and 2003 detailing comprehensive recommendations to facilitate standardization of family measurement across surveys. Sessions on marriage and remarriage, cohabitation, family structure and instability, family ties across households, and future directions provided rich insights into issues that need to be considered in seeking ways to measure family structure and dynamics. 

 

  • Conference Resources
    • From this site, you may access materials for Counting Couples I and II research conferences

 

 

The National Center for Family & Marriage Research, established in 2007 by the Office of the Assistant Secretary for Planning and Evaluation (ASPE) in the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, provides scientific leadership, intellectual energy, and administrative assistance to support inter-disciplinary, policy-relevant research on U.S. families.

 

  

Sponsors

 

National Center for Family & Marriage Research

 

Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (DBSB)

    

 

Organizing Committee Representatives  

from the... 

 

National Center for Family & Marriage Research

 

U.S. Department of Health and Human Services

-Office of the Assistant Secretary for Planning and Evaluation

-Eunice Kennedy Schriver National Institute of Child Health & Human Development

-National Center for Health Statistics

-Administration for Children & Families

 

U.S. Census Bureau

 

U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics

 

National Center for Education Statistics

 

Federal Interagency Forum on Child and Family Statistics 

 

National Center for Family & Marriage Research | 005 Williams Hall | Bowling Green State University | Bowling Green | OH | 43403

July Newsletter Coalition for Divorce Reform

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Newsletter
July / 2012
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Support the Coalition for Divorce Reform by:

 

 

 

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Read our latest blogs and share them on Facebook.

 

 

 

 

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Google "divorce" you'll get nearly 290 million hits!

 

In the opening pages you'll find sites that offer divorce advice and other resources to help you through divorce, the latest celebrity gossip and listings for divorce attorneys. Further down in the search, perhaps further down than most people scroll, you'll find what people really need to find first --sites that talk about the serious negative, lifelong consequences of divorce for women, men and children, including studies showing that children suffer the most.

 

Here are some startling statistics from those studies:

 

1. Children from divorced families died on average almost five years earlier than children from intact families.

 

2. Facing parental divorce during childhood was the single strongest predictor of early death.

 

3. Parental divorce during childhood was a much stronger predictor of mortality risk than parental death.

 

4. Divorce lowered the standard of living for children and put them at significantly increased risks for divorce themselves, drug and alcohol abuse, teen pregnancy, and on and on.      

 

So what can you do?  You can support one of the most important websites in the Google search - the Coalition for Divorce Reform (CDR). Because the CDR is working to address the most important social problem in America - family breakdown. We are working to inform people about the harmful effects of divorce and the very real possibilities for reconciliation. We are also working to secure passage of our model legislation, the Parental Divorce Reduction Act, so that more of our nation's children grow up in two-parent, intact families.

 

Please consider working with us,offering your financial support,and reading and sharing our recent blogs, which are excerpted below.

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Are Affairs Okay?
By Michele Weiner-Davis

 

Are affairs okay? Yes, at least according to one of the media darlings in the therapy profession, Esther Perel, psychotherapist and author of Mating in Captivity. To Perel, infidelity can spice up a relationship. She is convinced that Americans are too parochial about their views of infidelity and she wants us to loosen up.

 

I attended one of Perel's workshops where she described her work with couples and how she handles betrayal in marriage. Occasionally, an unfaithful spouse contacts her and she offers "couples therapy" with this spouse and his or her affair partner. When she discussed her approach, I couldn't help but notice a queasy feeling in.. read more here

Helping Couples in the Divorce Decision-Making "Wilderness"
By Dr. Alan J. Hawkins

 

Several years ago, I accepted a student into our doctoral family studies program. Tamara Fackrell was a practicing divorce attorney and mediator. She was skilled in her practice at helping her clients deal more effectively with ending their marriages and move on with life.  She did this responsibly, not hiding the difficulties that faced them during and after the divorce and usually encouraging her clients to be cautious; if there were possibilities for reconciliation, she urged them to explore that possibility.  While some divorces clearly were needed, she believed that repairing and saving a marriage was often possible.  She told me a few stories ...read more here 

Minimizing Your Life, Maximizing Your Marriage
By Naomi Grunditz

 

When it comes down to it, we need just as much relationship counseling for our relationship with our work lives as we do with our spouses. And the latter may be the truly dysfunctional one. 

 

America has the highest divorce rate in the world. We also have one of the most stressed out and over-worked workforces in the world. More and more, I believe these two facts are more than coincidences.  Let's look at some sobering statistics about our relationship with work..read more here

The Mouths of Babes
By Beverly Willett

 

We have a tradition at the Episcopalian parish I attend. Every Sunday after mass, parishioners and visitors gather in the parish hall to greet one another and snack on refreshments provided by the Hospitality Guild. A few minutes into the get-together Father Cullen, our priest, rings a bell on the wall next to the kitchen.

 

"Are there any birthdays this week?" he asks. Each celebrant steps forward, in turn, and Father Cullen asks whether they want the tempo "fast, medium or slow." Everyone laughs, and then he cues one of the choir members for a pitch, and we all sing "Happy Birthday."

 

One Sunday, several months ago, a little girl, no more than five or six, wandered up to Father Cullen. "Is it your birthday?" he asked..read more here 

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