In the eyes of children, is it paramount that they were “planned” and “wanted”? Or does the family structure of their home matter more?

These are two of the many thought-provoking questions about donor-conceived children and “diverse” family forms in a report released Thursday from the Commission on Parenthood’s Future at the Institute of American Values (IAV).

Already, leaders in family law and family diversity are calling “intentional parenthood” a good thing because all these children “are planned and wanted,” said Elizabeth Marquardt, principal investigator and author of “One Parent or Five: A Global Look at Today’s New Intentional Families.”

But what do children think about being created to live in a home that is intentionally missing a parent? Little research has been done on this, but many young adults who were conceived by anonymous sperm donation believe “it is wrong that they were intentionally denied knowledge of their father’s identity,” said Ms. Marquardt, who directs the Center for Marriage and Families at IAV.

“If we are concerned about child outcomes,” she said, “I would suggest that it’s not just being wanted - which I think is important - but it’s also the family structure in which the child is born or raised that matters as well.”

In many cases with egg, sperm or embryo donation, she added, people are setting out to “deny a child one or both of their parents, before they are even conceived. And that is painful for some of these children.”

Labels: children, culture, donor conception, Elizabeth Marquardt, family structure, more than two parents, parenting

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...Until quite recently, such population growth always came primarily from increases in the numbers of young people. Between 1950 and 1990, for example, increases in the number of people under 30 accounted for more than half of the growth of the world's population, while only 12 percent came from increases in the ranks of those over 60.

But in the future it will be the exact opposite. The U.N. now projects that over the next 40 years, more than half (58 percent) of the world's population growth will come from increases in the number of people over 60, while only 6 percent will come from people under 30. Indeed, the U.N. projects that by 2025, the population of children under 5, already in steep decline in most developed countries, will be falling globally -- and that's even after assuming a substantial rebound in birth rates in the developing world. A gray tsunami will be sweeping the planet.

Which countries will be aging most rapidly in 2025? They won't be in Europe, where birth rates fell comparatively gradually and now show some signs of ticking up. Instead, they'll be places like Iran and Mexico, which experienced youth bulges that were followed quickly by a collapse in birth rates. In just 35 years, both Iran and Mexico will have a larger percentage of their populations over 60 than France does today. Other places with birth rates now below replacement levels include not just old Europe but also developing countries such as Brazil, Chile, China, Lebanon, Tunisia, South Korea, and Vietnam.

Because of the phenomenon of hyper-aging in the developing world, another great variable is already changing as well: migration. In Mexico, for example, the population of children age 4 and under was 434,000 less in 2010 than it was in 1996. The result? The demographic momentum that fueled huge flows of Mexican migration to the United States has waned, and will wane much more in the future. ...

Another related megatrend is the rapid change in the size, structure, and nature of the family. In many countries, such as Germany, Japan, Russia, and South Korea, the one-child family is now becoming the norm. This trend creates a society in which not only do most people have no siblings, but also no aunts, uncles, cousins, nieces, or nephews. Many will lack children of their own as well. Today about one in five people in advanced Western countries, including the United States, remains childless. Huge portions of the world's population will thus have no biological relatives except their parents.

Labels: aging, demographics, family size, family structure, Marriage, religion, siblings

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Marriage matters, but why?

For more than 20 years, social scientists have consistently found that children do better raised by their mothers and fathers united by marriage.

For most of that time policymakers have focused on the problem of "father absence," and it is a real problem. Very few boys and girls have involved, loving, supportive fathers if the man that made them is not married to their mama.

But a new crop of research is challenging the idea that the main or only problem with the decline of marriage is the absence of fathers. An equally big or even bigger problem may be the churning romantic lives of unmarried and divorced mothers. ...

Many family scholars, consistent with the liberal leanings of the academy, are responding to the accumulating evidence that marriage matters by urging society to make cohabiting and dating relationships as stable as marriages. Good luck with that one.

Here's the bottom line: When mothers' romantic lives churn, babies' and children's lives churn too.

Mothers, marriage matters because it restrains our romantic yearnings and our romantic losses. The restless search for soul mates is not really compatible with making your child feel he or she is the center of your world, infinitely beloved.

Labels: children, cohabitation, culture, dating, family structure, Maggie Gallagher, Marriage, motherhood, out-of-wedlock births, single parenting, unmarried parents

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Seven years ago, when Sabrina Morgan, 33, was single and desperate for a child, she found herself chatting to Kam Wong, 41, a gay man who was longing to be a father, in an online fertility forum. 'I instantly thought he was genuine, down-to-earth, laidback and flexible,’ says Sabrina.

'We exchanged pictures. It wasn’t about sexual attraction, obviously, but it was important what he looked like. I asked him if he had any history of baldness and loose teeth. It was part humour but it was also my way to steer towards more serious questions, like does he have any genetic health conditions.’

For Kam, who is in a long-term relationship, contacting Sabrina was about more than being a sperm donor: 'I adore children. The desire to have my own has always been with me. Because of my sexuality I thought it might never happen. The urge grew stronger in my thirties until one day I researched options. When I met Sabrina I was very nervous. This was my chance to fulfil my dreams.’ ...

Tomorrow sees the launch of pollentree.com, started by Patrick and Rita D’Alton-Harrison, ex-lawyers from north London. Rita had the idea after a number of single female friends asked for legal advice on sperm donation. 'One had looked into IVF but found the prices extortionate so turned to the internet to seek a donor. I was horrified. That’s when we had the idea to create a safe environment for women like her to explore all parenting routes.

'We can’t believe the number of young, straight women joining our site who say they are simply not prepared to wait for Mr Right. The attitude seems to be, “I’m not going to compromise with a relationship just to have children.”’

Catherine started her online search after a break-up from a three-year relationship with a man who didn’t want children. 'I’d just turned 39 and thought, “I don’t have time for this to happen again.” In a worst-case scenario I would seek an anonymous donor, but I’ve always thought a child needs a father. At the very least I wanted a donor who would visit regularly.’ ...

Leila’s first 'date’ in her co-parent search, was Paul, a 43-year-old pilot. 'We met at a Café Rouge for drinks. It felt more intense than a date. You are choosing someone who will pass on traits to the person you are going to spend the rest of your life with – your child.

'He was clean-cut with dark hair and green eyes. He told me he was a strict Catholic and had had only one serious relationship, with a girl from his church, who didn’t want children. He ached to be a parent and this was the quickest way he could make that happen.’

After three meetings they set a date to do the deed. 'You’d think that would be less weird than having sex. It was more weird. Picture it: there’s a stranger in your bathroom masturbating while you go for a walk around the block. When you get back he hands you a pot and leaves. You’re left to do the female bit, which is messy and uncomfortable.’

A pregnancy test 10 days later came out negative. After finding the encounter with Paul so awkward, Leila decided to try natural insemination (NI) – a euphemism in fertility forums for full sex – with her next potential suitor, Carl. 'I can see that could be unthinkable for a woman who is gay, in a relationship or has been assaulted ,’ she says. 'But I’m single. I don’t have barriers about sex.’

Labels: culture, donor conception, family structure, Fathers, more than two parents, parenting, sex, United Kingdom

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Yesterday, the National Marriage Project released a major report stating that cohabitation is the biggest threat to American children, eclipsing divorce and overshadowing single motherhood. While the study’s authors, led by the University of Virginia’s Brad Wilcox, admit that this is more of an issue for black and low-income families (which are more likely to have unmarried parents), the authors say that all kids “exposed to cohabitation”—as if it were a disease, or a fatal contaminant—have more emotional problems, less involved and less affectionate fathers, a greater risk of school failure, a higher risk of infant mortality, and worse physical health than kids with married parents. That’s despite economics, class, or race.

“Cohabitation is not a functional equivalent of marriage,” the study claims. And as Wilcox said at an event last night at the Institute for American Values, where he discussed the study, “cohabitation and kids don’t mix.”

In an interview this morning, I asked Wilcox how my kid—the daughter of married parents—will fare compared to the children of my unmarried friends. He told me that my daughter will always know that her parents made a commitment to each other, and transversely, to her, and that society lauds that commitment. Her friends with cohabitating parents will never have that stability, the assurance of that socially accepted bond. ...

I’m currently researching a book on only children and have come across a great deal of analysis on how children growing up in non-normative family structures are made to feel like outsiders. I can’t help but wonder if the psychological stress of being raised by cohabiting parents is akin to the experience of being an (oft-stereotyped) only child, at least in the upper economic brackets. In Sweden, where it’s become normal to parent without a marriage certificate, kids with unmarried parents don’t feel this way.

Labels: children, cohabitation, culture, family structure, Marriage, parenting, Sweden, unmarried parents

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JONATHAN TURLEY, a law professor at George Washington University, is representing the family featured on the reality show "Sister Wives" in their legal challenge to Utah's law against polygamy. It's a big, unusual family. Kody Brown is "married" to four women and father to 16 children. "One of the marriages is legal", Mr Turley writes, "and the others are what the family calls 'spiritual.' They are not asking for the state to recognise their marriages. They are simply asking for the state to leave them alone." Mr Turley goes on to make what I find to be a persuasive case. ...

Imagine the family of a twice-divorced, thrice-married woman with one child from each union. Let's say she's a stay-at-home mom who has custody of all the kids, and gets child-support payments from her first two husbands. So, children with three different fathers live together in a single household, supported by a portion of three different mens' income. How is this not de facto polyandry? How significant is it, really, that her first two husbands don't happen to live with their kids and her third husband? Suppose they move in. What then? Is it okay as long as they pay rent? As long as they no longer love the mother of their children, or vice versa? I say it's okay as long as everyone involved says it's okay. ...

But isn't polygamy, as it actually exists, a backward practice hostile to the interests of women? What about fundamentalist Mormon compounds in which children are raised in isolation, indoctrinated/brainwashed, teenage girls are married off to their uncles and impregnated, while surplus boys are ejected without the tools to cope with the outside world. Mr Turley replies:

Of course, the government should prosecute abuse wherever it is found. But there is nothing uniquely abusive about consenting polygamous relationships. It is no more fair to prosecute the Browns because of abuse in other polygamous families than it would be to hold a conventional family liable for the hundreds of thousands of domestic violence cases each year in monogamous families.

I think this is the right way to think about it. I would add that conventional monogamous marriage was in fact an abusive, exploitative, patriarchal arrangement until very recently. In 1993, North Carolina was the last state to recognise spousal rape as a crime.

Labels: cohabitation, culture, divorce, family structure, Marriage, polygamy, remarriage

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Statistics Canada will no longer collect and crunch numbers on the country’s annual marriage and divorce rates, a sign both of cost cuts at the agency and the changing nature of relationships, as definitions get fuzzier and harder to track.

The national statistical agency published its last national figures on marriage and divorce rates last week. It has been collecting divorce data since 1972 and marriage data since 1921. It pegs the cost of reinstating the collection at $250,000. ...

It will also be trickier to assess what is going well. This week, Ontario said it would require every couple in the province hoping to split to attend an information session on alternatives to going to court before getting a divorce. Evaluating whether measures like that work, five years later, has become much more difficult, Mr. Benmor said.

Statscan says it will still examine trends in family composition through its census, conducted every five years, and general social surveys. But annual data on marriage and divorce rates won’t be replaced.

Labels: Canada, committed relationships, common-law, divorce, divorce reform, economics, family policy, family structure, Marriage

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On a leafy drive in west Los Angeles, at a newly renovated home with cathedral ceilings and a backyard pool, 4-year-old Kate Eisenpresser-Davis' friends have been known to pose an intriguing question: "Why does Kate have three mommies?"

Lisa Eisenpresser, 44, and her partner, Angela Courtin, 38, share custody of Kate with Eisenpresser's ex-partner.

When asked to describe their life, Eisenpresser and Courtin respond with the same word: "Normal." Days are spent searching for the right balance between work and home, and zigzagging through Mar Vista to meetings, school and gymnastics.

Courtin is pregnant. Kate will soon have a sister, Phoebe, conceived from Eisenpresser's egg and sperm from a donor — the same 6-foot-1 Harvard grad, who scored a 1580 on the SAT, who served as Kate's donor. ...

New census figures show that the percentage of Californians who live in "nuclear family" households — a married man and a woman raising their children — has dropped again over the last decade, to 23.4% of all households. That represents a 10% decline in 10 years, measured as a percentage of the state's households.

Those households, the Times analysis shows, are being supplanted by a striking spectrum of postmodern living arrangements: same-sex households, unmarried opposite-sex partners, married couples who have no children. Some forms of households that were rare just a generation ago are becoming common; the number of single-father households in California, for instance, grew by 36% between 2000 and 2010. ...

The Times interviews also suggest that the state's stagnant economy has contributed to the erosion of traditional family models.

Marriage typically carries a host of financial benefits — a facet of traditional households touted by both social conservatives and gay rights activists pushing for the right to wed. But in Culver City, 49-year-old Xaime Casillas has declined to marry Claudia Bracho, the mother of his 16-month-old son and his partner of nearly 10 years, because he owns two properties that have fallen into foreclosure.

But, said Casillas, "I couldn't see my lady, my partner, marrying into a financial mess."

Labels: California, cohabitation, culture, economics, family structure, gay couples, gay parenting, Marriage, more than two parents

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HBO’s Big Love and TLC’s reality-TV offering Sister Wives have thrust polygamy into popular culture in the United States. Estimates are that somewhere between 50,000-100,000 families in this country are currently risking criminal prosecution by practicing plural marriage.

Proponents and detractors of polygamy use same-sex marriage to support their arguments, but that’s just a distraction, says Adrienne Davis, JD, an expert on gender relations and the William M. Van Cleve Professor of law at Washington University in St. Louis. ...

In her recent article, “Regulating Polygamy: Intimacy, Default Rules, and Bargaining for Equality,” published in the Columbia Law Review, Davis approaches polygamy as a problem of bargaining, cooperation and strategic behavior.

She proposes some default rules that might accommodate polygamy, while ensuring against some of its historic and ongoing abuses. ...

She says that conventional family law, which limits its focus to “couples,” may not be up to the task of regulating polygamy, but a legal platform such as business law may address polygamy’s central conundrum: ensuring fairness and establishing baseline behavior in a relationship characterized by multiple partners, ongoing entrances and exits, and life-defining economic and personal stakes. ...

She notes that competition among families for emotional and economic resources is not unique to what we might think of traditional polygamy.

“With regard to children, family law already accommodates intimate multiplicity, or what might be thought of as ‘de facto’ and serial polygamy,” Davis says.

“Is it better to channel legal energy into continuing to root out, repress, and punish polygamy, or into admitting it into the marriage pantheon? The answer may hinge on whether polygamy could be effectively regulated.”

Labels: children, culture, family structure, law, Marriage, more than two parents, polygamy

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The role of fathers in the modern American family is changing in important and countervailing ways. Fathers who live with their children have become more intensely involved in their lives, spending more time with them and taking part in a greater variety of activities. However, the share of fathers who are residing with their children has fallen significantly in the past half century.

In 1960, only 11% of children in the U.S. lived apart from their fathers. By 2010, that share had risen to 27%. The share of minor children living apart from their mothers increased only modestly, from 4% in 1960 to 8% in 2010.

According to a new Pew Research Center analysis of the National Survey of Family Growth (NSFG), more than one-in-four fathers with children 18 or younger now live apart from their children—with 11% living apart from some of their children and 16% living apart from all of their children.1 ...

Almost all fathers who live with their children take an active role in their day-to-day lives through activities such as sharing meals, helping with homework, and playing. Fathers who live apart from their children are much less likely to be involved in these types of activities. Many compensate by communicating with their children through email or by phone: four-in-ten nonresident dads say they are in touch with their children several times a week. At the same time, however, nearly one-third of fathers who do not live with their children say they talk or exchange email with them less than once a month. Similarly, one-in-five absent fathers say they visit their children more than once a week, but an even greater share (27%) say they have not seen their children at all in the past year.

The analysis of the NSFG was paired with a new Pew Research survey of attitudes toward fatherhood that finds a strong majority of the public saying children need a father in the home. Fully 69% say having a father in the home is essential to a child’s happiness. Only a slightly higher share (74%) says the same about having a mother in the home.

Labels: children, class, culture, economics, family structure, Fathers, Marriage, men, motherhood, out-of-wedlock births, parenting, race, single parenting

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...In fact, the fight for marriage equality works in tandem with the movement to strengthen the black family. Achieving marriage equality will actually help save the black family.

First, laws that prohibit same-sex marriage disproportionately harm black same-sex couples. According to the last Census, twice as many black same-sex couples are raising children as white same-sex couples. Black same-sex couples are also much more likely to be struggling economically. Achieving marriage equality will grant important benefits to these couples that will allow them to take care of and provide for their children and themselves.

But marriage equality helps the black community in a much broader way. Marriage equality is not just about relationship recognition. It's about family recognition, and the black community benefits from laws and policies that recognize the diversity of how families look, and demand equality for all families. ...

Likewise, marriage equality is not just about DOMA. It's not just about Prop 8. The fight for marriage equality is about fighting for equal recognition of all families. It's about combating the assumption that someone else can tell us what our families should look like. And in the black community, that assumption is dangerous, because black families are becoming increasingly nontraditional. Black families are more likely to be headed by single mothers. However, many of those mothers live with another person who helps raise the children, regardless of whether they are biologically or legally recognized as a parent. Black families are also more likely to consist of multi-generational households [pdf]. And the same policies that allow a same-sex couple to parent their children with access to all benefits they would otherwise receive grant those same benefits to aunts and uncles to raise their nieces and nephews and grandparents to raise their grandchildren. They are the same policies that allow a boyfriend to take time off work to care for his girlfriend's sick child even when there is no biological relationship. The principle that all families look different and all must be respected lies at the foundation of the struggle to strengthen the black family.

Labels: beyond marriage, children, cohabitation, culture, extended family, family structure, gay marriage, gay parenting, grandparents, Marriage, parenting, race, single parenting, unmarried parents

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I had an interesting argument with Charles Murray at yesterday's Cato Book Forum. While he expressed fundamental agreement with my views on nature and nurture, he thought parental marital status was an important exception. Children of divorce do worse than children whose parents remain married; children of never-married parents do worse than children of divorce. At least at first, Murray seemed to see these disparities as entirely causal: getting married causes your kids to do better in life; getting divorce causes some (but not all) of that benefit to go away.

I objected that divorce and single parenthood are not random. People who divorce are on average more impulsive and quarrelsome. Single parents are on average more impulsive and less achievement-oriented. Since these traits are heritable, we'd expect children of divorce and children of single parents to have worse outcomes - even if they were adopted at birth by Ozzie and Harriet.

I also mentioned that if Murray were right, he shouldn't express fundamental agreement with me. After all, about 40% of divorces end in marriage, and about 40% of kids are born out of wedlock. So if marital status matters as much as Murray says, my results hold only for (1-.4)*(1-.4)=36% of the population. ...

A few hours after the talk, Garett Jones reminded me that there's at least one paper that tries to adjudicate my dispute with Murray: O'Connor et al's "Are Associations Between Parental Divorce and Children's Adjustment Genetically Mediated?" published in Developmental Psychology in 2000. The study uses the Colorado Adoption Project to measure the causal effect of divorce. The results are mixed...

I have a knee-jerk horror of divorce. But if you asked me, "What's so bad about it?" I'd still downplay what social scientists call "adult outcomes." Instead, I'd focus on the parent-child relationship. Getting a divorce won't ruin your child's life, but it is fairly likely to forever maim or destroy the way your beloved child feels about you.*

Labels: adoption, children, divorce, family structure, Marriage, parenting

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For the child of lesbians, Mother’s Day is never simple. Sunday was no exception.

For starters, how many Mother’s Day cards should my daughter buy? As with everything else in our family, this one is particularly complicated. You may want to jot down a few notes.

My daughter has two moms, one stepmom, one ex-stepmom and one future stepmom, maybe. Every year, she scopes out Mother’s Day cards in multiple configurations, depending on relationship statuses.

My (now ex-) wife gave birth to her via artificial insemination 25 years ago. Some time later, we divorced. We each remarried. More precisely, I remarried and she got into a committed relationship, during which her partner bore a son and daughter. Both were the products of AI, which in this case had nothing to do with Allen Iverson, that we know of.

Many years later, she and her partner broke up. They worked out a time-share for the kids, who were raised with my daughter as her brother and sister. The fact that the (now ex-) partner and her progeny moved across the street streamlined the process considerably.

Labels: children, cohabitation, committed relationships, culture, divorce, donor conception, family structure, lesbians, motherhood, parenting, stepparents

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...We might well succeed in displacing the family as we know it and replacing it with “families of choice” or some other rubric for non-natalism. For that matter, I am not clear that we can now stop ourselves from carrying this radical change forward. But I am not optimistic about the consequences. It looks to me that we are turning away from something basic in the way human societies organize themselves. In the hope of achieving a greater equality we may put at risk the means by which the rough kind of equality and cooperation became possible in the first place.

Before someone else says it, let me acknowledge that this is a speculation on my part. But it is no more speculative than the vision offered by advocates of same-sex marriage. And it has the advantage of being based on a few millions years of human evolution rather than a few decades of law review articles.

Labels: culture, family structure, gay marriage, Marriage, universities

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The American public is sharply divided in its judgments about the sweeping changes in the structure of the American family that have unfolded over the past half century. About a third generally accepts the changes; a third is tolerant but skeptical; and a third considers them bad for society.

This finding emerges from an analysis that the Pew Research Center conducted of responses to a survey in which a nationally representative sample of 2,691 adults were asked whether they considered the following seven trends to be good, bad or of no consequence to society: more unmarried couples raising children; more gay and lesbian couples raising children; more single women having children without a male partner to help raise them; more people living together without getting married; more mothers of young children working outside the home; more people of different races marrying each other; and more women not ever having children.

About a third (31%) of survey respondents are Accepters. Anywhere from half to two-thirds of this group say these trends make no difference to society. But of the remainder who express an opinion, more say that most of the trends are good than say they are bad. Women, Hispanics, East Coast residents and adults who seldom or never attend religious services are more likely than others to be represented in this group.

A similar share of the public (32%) rejects virtually every trend that the Accepters tolerate or endorse. A majority say five of the seven changes are bad for society; the only trends they generally accept are interracial marriage and fewer women having children. They are the only group in which a majority (61%) says it is harmful for mothers of small children to work outside the home. Whites, older adults, Republicans, the religiously observant and married adults are overrepresented in this group. They are the Rejecters.

The third and somewhat larger group (37%) are the Skeptics.1 While they generally share most of the tolerant views of the Accepters, they also express concern about the impact of these trends on society. On one of the trends—single motherhood—they and the Accepters have stark differences. Virtually all Skeptics say mothers having children without male partners to help raise them is bad for society. Among Accepters, just 2% say this. When asked about the six other trends examined in the survey, a majority of Skeptics say each makes no difference or is good for society. Young people, Democrats and political independents, and minorities are disproportionately more likely to be in this group. ...

Overall, relatively small percentages of Accepters, Rejecters and Skeptics say any of the seven trends have been “a good thing for society.” But the three groups differ sharply on whether each of these seven changes has been bad or has had no significant impact.

Perhaps the most striking difference occurs in attitudes toward single motherhood between the two more tolerant groups. Virtually all Skeptics (99%) say the increase single in motherhood is bad for society. In contrast, nearly nine-in-ten Accepters say the increase in single women having children has made no difference (74%) or is “a good thing for society” (13%).

So sizable is the difference between Accepters and Skeptics on this single trend that the division of the Accepters and Skeptics is driven primarily—though though not solely—by views on single motherhood. In fact, these two generally similar groups would merge into a single cluster if the question about single motherhood were removed from the analysis.

Labels: childfree, cohabitation, culture, family structure, Fathers, gay parenting, Marriage, motherhood, single parenting, unmarried parents

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...Today there are two main obstacles to the full democratization of marriage: first, a conviction that God holds only certain unions to be holy; second, a conviction that the multigenerational natural family is a uniquely noble moral project for human beings. The second conviction is not inconsistent with Biblical religion, but it is inconsistent with the egalitarian morality of a democratic age. Viewing marriage as the fulfillment of God’s plan is far less repugnant to the democratic creed than viewing traditional marriage as a prestigiously challenging and powerful vehicle for the production of superior human beings.

It is essential to recall that marriage as practiced in more deeply religious times was not more democratic. The aristocratic aspect of marriage is, in some respects, deeply antagonistic to the Christian conception of personal love. But the aristocratic tradition of marriage was successfully integrated into the Christian one—leading to what we today consider “traditional marriage.” The current predicament of traditional marriage challenges Tocqueville’s belief that Christianity supplies democratic people with the resources they need to observe noble truths in an egalitarian setting. Christianity today struggles even to articulate a reason why the noble or aristocratic view of the natural family should not be dismissed forever. Democratic life already makes the pursuit of that noble ideal a costly, lonely, and risky business. Why, at a time when religions and creeds themselves are being relentlessly democratized, would a Christian denomination add to its burdens the responsibility of defending a moral view that has never fit neatly within its dogma?

Traditions cannot be thought of except in relation to institutions. As far as our current struggle is concerned, what is true of marriage is true of any cultural institution that carries traditions that reach back behind the democratic age for at least some of their foundations. Unable to provide their own foundations, traditions in a democratic age are likely to fall back upon the authority of the state—the only institution that can officialize the openness of traditions to all. The decision of the California Supreme Court in re Marriage Cases and the plurality opinion of the U.S. Supreme Court in Planned Parenthood v. Casey testify to that. In the absence of any other commanding creedal institutions, any state functioning in this way controls culture in the manner recommended by Hobbes.

If our democratic age cannot abide such a closed system, the alternative may be a tacit agreement to keep two sets of cultural books, so to speak—with official and unofficial spheres of life largely replacing the customary public and private. What Tocqueville calls the “constant agitation” of democratic life will deepen considerably if unofficial culture organizes itself around experiences of unequal power and status that are prohibited in the official culture. At any rate, a government that cannot remain solvent and enforce the rule of law is probably unable to bear the mantle of Hobbesian cultural authority. The authority of current traditions may prove more resilient, and more resistant to full democratization, than many traditionalists seem to fear.

Labels: culture, family structure, law, Marriage

VOTE

More than 40 percent of American adults have at least one step relative, a new survey finds.

While people with step relatives are more likely to say their family life has turned out differently than they expected compared with people without step relatives, 70 percent say they're very satisfied with their family life, according to the Pew Research Center report.

Blood ties still bind, however: The survey found that people feel a greater sense of obligation to their biological relatives compared with their step relatives.

In parallel with these findings, marriage in general has undergone many changes over the last 50 years. A previous Pew study found that in 1960, 72 percent of American adults were married. In 2008, that number was 52 percent.

Changing family structure

The Pew Research Center surveyed 2,691 American adults via phone in October 2010. The data were then weighted to create a representative sampled of all adults in the continental United States.

Major demographic changes, including a rise in divorce and more babies born to single moms, have contributed to the rise of the stepfamily over the past decades, the survey found. Overall, 42 percent of American adults have a step relative. Thirty percent of Americans have a step or half-sibling, 18 percent have a living stepparent, and 13 percent have a stepchild. ...

The survey asked respondents how obligated they would feel to offer help (financial or otherwise) to step relatives and found that people are more likely to offer help to step relations than close friends. For example, of people with a parent and stepparent, 85 percent said they would feel very obligated to help out their biological parent, while 56 percent say they would feel similarly obligated to help a stepparent. In comparison, 39 percent said they'd feel obligated to help out a best friend.

The findings aren't a surprise, family psychologists say, given that stepfamilies in the report may not have been together for very long.

"This isn't a surprise really that some of them wouldn't be as close, because they may just be a few years old or relatively new compared to relationships with [biological] parents and kids," Larry Ganong, a University of Missouri professor who studies stepfamilies and family obligation, told LiveScience. ...

Despite "wicked stepmother" myths, 70 percent of stepfamilies were very satisfied with their family lives (as were 78 percent of families without step relatives). In fact, remarried couples were more likely than couples in their first marriage to say that their relationship was stronger than their parents' marriages. Some research suggests people on their second marriages have high standards for the relationship, Ganong said. The responses may reflect those standards.

Labels: culture, divorce, family structure, Marriage, remarriage, stepparents

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On March 25-26, 2011, I will be hosting a conference at American University Washington College of Law, co-sponsored by the National Center for Lesbian Rights and by our Journal of Gender, Social Policy, and the Law. The conference is entitled: "The 'New Illegitimacy': Revisiting Why Parentage Should Not Depend on Marriage."

The impetus for this conference -- actually the last straw -- was the ruling from the New York Court of Appeals last spring that a nonbiological mother was not a child's parent based on her role in her child's life but based solely on the fact that she was in a civil union with the child's mother when the child was born. I blogged about the case at length here. Massachusetts also determines when a child born to a lesbian couple has two parents based on whether the couple is married.

I sent the following call for papers to numerous family law academics:

It is an axiom of family law: children should not suffer as a result of being born to unmarried parents. This bedrock principle developed in the second half of the 20th century to sweep away the disabilities that plagued “illegitimate” children – those born outside of marriage – for centuries. Beginning in 1968, the US Supreme Court held in a series of cases that marriage of a child’s parents could not be the factor determining which children were eligible for, among other things, wrongful death recovery, worker’s compensation death benefits, and financial support and care by both parents.

Today, however, that principle is under attack. In some states, children born to lesbian couples find that their status depends upon whether their parents are married (or in a civil union). ...

Moreover, it is distressing that some support for same-sex marriage relies on the denigration of “illegitimate” children. Advocates often argue that denying same-sex couples with children the right to marry deprives those children of what those advocates allege is the security and stability offered by “legitimacy.” Arguing that same-sex couples must be allowed to marry to prevent the “illegitimacy” of their children flips on its head the modern understanding that neither law nor society should penalize children of unmarried parents. It may also make it more difficult to advocate recognition of parent-child relationships outside of marriage, including those formed when more than two adults plan for and raise a child together.

Labels: beyond marriage, children, de facto parenting, family structure, gay marriage, gay parenting, law, Marriage, more than two parents, Nancy Polikoff, single parenting

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...Still, even in a time of changing attitudes about who can be a parent, the legal and social definition of a family still has certain rules — a family can be run by a single mom or a single dad and, increasingly, by two moms or two dads, but it can’t have three parents, or four. For a long, long time — going back to when the English common law first started codifying such things — the law has set the maximum number of parents a child can have as two. Only two people, in other words, can enjoy the unique set of rights to determine a child’s life — and the unique set of responsibilities for the child’s welfare — that legal parenthood entails. That matches how most people think about parenthood: Two people, after all, are how many it usually takes to make a baby in the first place.

Now a few family-law scholars have begun to argue that there is nothing special about the number two — if three or four or five adults have a parental relationship with a child, the law should recognize them all as parents. Going beyond two, these scholars argue, would better reflect the dynamics of the modern family, and also protect the children in such families. It would ensure that, even in the event of a split or major disagreement between the adults in question, the children would not be deprived of the affection, care, and financial resources of any of the people they have grown up regarding as their mothers and fathers.

“The law needs to adapt to the reality of children’s lives, and if children are being raised by three parents, the law should not arbitrarily select two of them and say these are the legal parents, this other person is a stranger,” says Nancy Polikoff, a family-law professor at American University’s Washington College of Law.

In a few recent cases, courts seem to have agreed with the calls for multiple parents. But critics argue that tinkering with the definition of parenthood in this way threatens to dilute the sense of obligation that being a parent has always carried, and that increasing the number of legal parents only raises the likelihood that family disputes will arise and get messy and find their way into court. Not to mention that having judges routinely declare that Heather has two mommies and three daddies would represent a radical cultural shift, and one that, like gay marriage, many will find threatening.

Ultimately, the legal definition of parenthood is part of a broader philosophical question: What is a family? And what is it for? While some scholars have focused on expanding the number of parents, others argue that the law needs to do more to recognize the social context in which families exist, and the extent to which child care is actually performed by people who aren’t part of the nuclear family at all. ...

Today’s proponents of expanding the definition of parenthood argue that restricting the number of parents to two people also disadvantages children, at least those in certain nontraditional households. If a child grows up thinking of more than two people as parents, these lawyers and legal scholars argue, then the law should protect those relationships and the emotional connection and material support that come with them. Doing so may not be necessary as long as all of the parents get along and remain equally committed to the child — or children — but if the parents have a falling-out or if the custodial parents split up, then the people the law officially recognizes as parents hold all the cards, and can shut the others out of the child’s life.

In addition, in the eyes of the law, a child doesn’t have any claim on the financial resources of parental figures beyond the legally recognized two. The relationship is not unlike those of illegitimate children and their parents before 1968. With very few exceptions, it is today impossible for children to sue for child support, collect Social Security survivor benefits, or inherit by intestate succession from self-identified third or fourth parents, since the law doesn’t recognize the relationship.

To critics of the legal status quo, all of this means that, just as with illegitimacy laws, the courts are punishing children in the interest of preserving a traditional family structure, making their lives more uncertain by depriving them of emotional and financial support.

“I’m not saying all kids should have three [parents], or that two is good so why not three,” says Melanie Jacobs, a law professor at Michigan State University and author of a 2007 law review article entitled “Why Just Two?” “The law says someone is either a parent or a legal stranger, and in some cases that’s threatening to just take this person who has been a part of the child’s life out of the child’s life.”

Jacobs points to two recent decisions in particular that suggest how she would like courts to define parenthood in such families. In January 2007, the Ontario Court of Appeals granted full parental status to both members of a lesbian couple as well as their sperm donor, ruling that it was contrary to the child’s best interests to not recognize all three. In April of 2007, the Pennsylvania Superior Court was faced with a custody decision involving a child’s biological mother and her same-sex partner, who had split up, and a donor who had been a significant presence in the child’s life. The court ruled that all three should have custodial rights and that all three were responsible for child support. Additionally, in July of this year, the attorney general’s office in British Columbia proposed allowing for more than two parents in cases of sperm and egg donation.

Recognizing multiple fathers or multiple mothers, however, doesn’t necessarily mean that they all have the same rights. In the Pennsylvania case, the court did not decide that all three parents had equal custody or were responsible for the same amount of child support. Jacobs in particular has argued that expanding the number of legal parents a child has requires that courts begin to allow for degrees of legal parenthood, what she calls a scheme of “relative rights.” Whereas today the law tends to see someone as either a parent or a nonparent, she argues that it should instead recognize gradations. For example, she argues, a known sperm donor should perhaps have certain parental rights and responsibilities — visitation and the obligation to pay some child support — but not the right to demand custody.

For critics, “disaggregating” the rights and responsibilities of parenthood, as Jacobs suggests, exposes a larger problem with the idea of expanding beyond two in the first place. Traditional legal definitions of parenthood, though they may not exactly correspond with every family’s day-to-day reality, do lay out a set of hard and fast, inescapable obligations. If courts begin to experiment and innovate with what being a parent means, that may create uncertainty, and even a sense that parental obligations to children may be more negotiable than they once were.

Labels: child care, children, culture, de facto parenting, donor conception, Elizabeth Marquardt, family structure, June Carbone, more than two parents, Nancy Polikoff, parenting, remarriage

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Ottawa author, psychologist and relationship researcher Dr. Sue Johnson is on a mission: She wants the federal government to help improve marriages.

Reports on the state of our unions are numerous.

A Canadian's risk of divorcing by her 30th anniversary now stands at 38 per cent, a drop since the 1990s, the Vanier Institute of the Family, which conducts research on the changing nature of the Canadian Family, reported last year. The average age at divorce in Canada is 44 for men and 41 for women. ...

Johnson, the head of the Ottawa Couple and Family Institute and a professor of clinical psychology at the University of Ottawa, argues that Canada needs a national institution to co-ordinate strategies to build strong marriages.

"There is little support for the most basic unit in society. We don't have an active government policy for an institution that thinks about how to strengthen marriages," she says. "I'm not sure we have to throw millions at it. But you need a national commitment and a central organization." ...

Clarence Lochhead, executive director of the Vanier Institute of the Family, says Johnson's idea is interesting, but he hesitates to endorse it.

"It would be a good and healthy thing. But one would have to be careful about framing the need for such an agency and make sure that it's inclusive," he says.

The notion of family has proved be a fluid thing. Rather than "marriage," Lochhead prefers to use the term "relationship of care that involves commitment over time."

Even young people aspire to marriage and say they want to spend their lives with a single person, but that's not the reality for many Canadians, he says.

"We gave up on the idea of promoting a version of the ideal family, and concentrate on the lived reality."

Johnson says her idea is not about only heterosexual couples, or people in legal marriages, or even about keeping unhappy people together.

Labels: Canada, family structure, government interest in marriage, Marriage

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