Opinion & Commentary
The damage done by the decline of marriage
In the past generation, Australian family life and marriage have undergone a revolution that has left wounds in the lives of thousands of adults and children, and, directly or indirectly, in the quality of life for many others. The litany of change and decay has become so familiar that we tolerate horrors that once would have appalled us.
Forty years ago, 90 per cent of children were reared to maturity by their married, natural parents. Today, that figure is 68 per cent. More than one in four children are living in a sole-parent family or step/blended family from which one natural parent is absent, nearly always the natural father.
Violent juvenile crime has increased four-fold since the mid-1970s, along with a 50 per cent increase in juvenile property crime. Adult crime has increased still more. The News South Wales Bureau of Crime Statistics and Research tells us that critical factors underlying criminality are parental neglect and lack of supervision. Both are strongly associated with disorders, reconstituted and sole-parent families, and the poverty and stress that are more common when the home is no longer the place where two natural parents live and work together.
The proportion of children born to unmarried mothers has increased six-fold since the 1960s. Rates of child abuse are eight to 10 times higher in step/blended and sole-parent families than in natural, two-parent families.
Divorce has increased four-fold since 1960. About 46 per cent of marriages will end in divorce, and about 50,000 children are affected by divorce each year. Cohabitation has increased rapidly, but cohabiting relationships are even more unstable than marriage. Cohabitation does not lead to stronger marriages. Six per cent of children live with cohabiting parents.
Forty years ago, 10 young male adults out of every 100,000 of the population killed themselves. Today, it is 40 out of every 100,000. Suicide is associated with loss of family bonds, social isolation, drugs and unemployment.
High levels of unemployment have been entrenched since the 1980s. In 2000, there were 420,000 families with dependent children in which no parent had a job and were sustained by welfare. The percentage of the population on disability pensions has increased more than three-fold in the past 30 years. A rapidly ageing population and fertility rates below population replacement promise a horrendous welfare bill for the future and fewer young people to pay it.
In real terms, the cost of national welfare has increased five-fold since the 1960s. Working families on middle to lower incomes pay most of the bill. So their taxes are much higher today than 30 years ago. Large proportions of mothers therefore need to give up a preference for staying at home with young children to work for extra family income. And hundreds of thousands of preschool infants spend many hours a week being looked after by strangers.
The consequences of divorce for children may mean, on average, a period of emotional disturbance, separation anxiety, unhappiness, often-difficult life adjustments, lower school and career performance, and, for many, difficulties with relationships in adulthood.
Marriage used to be the central institution protecting the conjugal union and the legitimate expectations of spouses. Australian family law, since 1975, has removed many of those protections by turning its face away from those aggrieved by marital misconduct. When misconduct is ignored we can expect more of it. When marriage becomes more uncertain, and when injustice counts for nothing, men and women will invest less in marriage and it will become even weaker. When the going gets tough, exit is easy and the less devoted will go.
Devotion to marriage is now risky. Little wonder that more and more women look to protect their futures by investing more in their occupational skills and thinking twice about having children, while men look to prenuptial contracts to protect their property. We cannot afford to be heedless of what family law is doing to marriage – and to the children who fare better within it than without it.
But we also need to look to those institutions that create friendly or hostile environments for marriage and children. The labour market and employment are crucial to enduring marriage and family formation.
The costs of the welfare burden have led to the relative impoverishment of working families, and reducing those costs is the essential prelude to urgent reform of family taxation. Without taxation reform, the costs of children – both direct and in terms of opportunities given up – will remain punishingly high for all but the rich.
In all of this we have a deserving agenda for the attention of government.
About the Author:
Barry Maley is Senior Fellow at the Centre for Independent Studies and author of Family and Marriage in Australia, published by CIS.
