Broken Families

Homeschool

Statistics

"A father to the fatherless, a defender of widows, is God in his holy dwelling. God sets the lonely in families..." Psalm 68:5-6

Who is breaking up?

"Half of all children [in the U.S.] will witness the breakup of a parent's marriage. Of these, close to half will also see the breakup of a parent's second marriage."¹

Christians are more likely than non-Christians to experience divorce. (Among Christians, 27% report they've gone through a divorce; only 24% of non-Christians report that they have.)²

Among people attending mainline Protestant churches, one in four (25%) has gone through a divorce; twenty-nine percent of Baptists have gone through a divorce; and roughly one out of every three (34%) non-denominational Protestant church members have gone through a divorce.³

Between 1950 and 1980, the number of children involved in divorces and annulments rose 175 percent.⁴ From 1970 to 1994, the number of divorced adults quadrupled, making "divorced persons" the fastest-growing marital status category in the United States.⁵ Forty percent of children growing up in America today are being raised without their fathers⁶ and The number of single fathers in America has tripled since 1980⁷.

The decay of the family

Studies in the early 1980s showed that children in repeat divorces earned lower grades and their peers rated them as less pleasant to be around.⁸ Teenagers in single-parent families and in blended families (stepfamilies) are three times more likely to need psychological help within a given year.⁹

"Compared to children from homes disrupted by death, children from divorced homes have more psychological problems."¹⁰Children of divorce are four times more likely to report problems with peers and friends than are children whose parents have kept their marriages intact.¹¹ People who come from broken homes are almost twice as likely to attempt suicide than those who do not come from broken homes.¹²

Other effects on the family

Children of divorce are about two to three times more likely to live grow up with a parent who struggles with alcoholism than children from an intact marriage.¹³

Children of divorced parents are roughly two times more likely to drop out of high school than their peers who benefit from living with parents who did not divorce.¹⁴Girls from a broken family are twice as likely to become teen mothers than girls living with biological parents who have not divorced.¹⁵

Violence from broken homes

"A child living in a female-headed home is 10 times more likely to be beaten or murdered."¹⁶ Seventy percent of long-term prison inmates grew up in broken homes.¹⁷

Of the juvenile criminals who are a threat to the public, three-fourths came from broken homes.¹⁸ Fully 75 percent of those charged with homicide had parents who were either divorced or had never been married at all; that number rises to 82 percent of those charged with nonviolent larceny offenses.¹⁹
A survey of 108 rapists undertaken by Raymond A. Knight and Robert A. Prentky revealed the 60 percent came from female-headed homes,. 70 percent of those describable as 'violent' came from female-headed homes. 80 percent of those motivated by 'displaced anger' came from female-headed (single-parent) homes.²⁰

The good of not breaking up

Children living with both biological parents are 20- to 35-percent more physically healthy than children from broken homes.²¹

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Footnotes:

¹ Furstenberg, Peterson, Nord, and Zill, "Life Course," 656ff. Cited on page76 of The Abolition of Marriage, by Maggie Gallagher

²Press Release: "Christians Are More Likely to Experience Divorce Than Are Non-Christians." Released by the Barna Research Group, 12/21/99, www.barna.org/cgi-bin/MainTrends.asp

³ Barna Research Group, 12/21/99, www.barna.org/cgi-bin/MainTrends.asp

⁴ Brian Willats, Breaking Up is Easy To Do, available from Michigan Family Forum, citing Statistical Abstract of the United States, 1993

⁵ Arlene Saluter, Marital Status and Living Arrangements: March 1994 , U.S.. Bureau of the Census, March 1996; series P20-484, p, vi.

⁶ Wade Horn and Andrew Bush, "Fathers, Marriage, and Welfare Reform," Hudson Institute Executive Briefing, 1997, Hudson Institute, Herman Kahn Center, 5395 Emerson Way, Indianapolis, IN 46226, (317) 545-1000. Quoted and condensed from National Center for Policy Analysis, Policy Digest, Monday, July 28, 1997 -- "Making Ideas Change the World"

⁷ From the Census Bureau web page: http://www.census.gov/population/www/socdemo/hh-fam.html

⁸ Andrew J. Cherlin, Marriage, Divorce, Remarriage (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1981), page 71. Cited on page 77 of The Abolition of Marriage, by Maggie Gallagher

⁹ Peter Hill, "Recent Advances in Selected Aspects of Adolescent Development," Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry 34, no. 1 (1993): 69-99. Cited on page 72 of The Abolition of Marriage, by Maggie Gallagher

¹⁰ Robert E. Emery, Marriage, Divorce, and Children's Adjustment (Newbury Park, Calif.: Sage Publications, 1988), pages 57 and 67. Cited on page 60 of The Abolition of Marriage, by Maggie Gallagher

¹¹ Dorothy Tysse and Margaret Crosbie-Burnett, "Moral Dilemmas of Early Adolescents of Divorced and Intact Families: A Qualitative and Quantitative Analysis," Journal of Early Adolescence 13, no. 2 (May 1993): 168-182`

¹² Carmen Noevi Velez and Patricia Cohen, "Suicidal Behavior and Ideation in a Community Sample of Children: Maternal and Youth Reports," Journal of the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry 273 [1988]: 349-356

¹³ Lee Robins and Darrel Regier, Psychiatric Disorders in America: The Epidemiologic Catchment Area Study (New York: Free Press, 1991), p. 103

¹⁴ Sara McLanahan and Gary Sandefur, Growing Up With a Single Parent: What Hurts, What Helps , (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1994), p. 41

¹⁵ Ibid, pg. 53

¹⁶ The Legal Beagle, July, 1984. Cited in Amneus, The Garbage Generation, page 113

¹⁷ Sara McLanahan and Gary Sandefur, Growing Up With a Single Parent: What Hurts, What Helps , (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1994), p. 41

¹⁸ Ramsey Clark, Crime in America: Observations on Its Nature, Causes, Prevention and Control (New York: Pocket Books, 1970), p.39. Cited in Amneus, The Garbage Generation.

¹⁹ Dewey G. Cornell, et al., "Characteristics of Adolescents Charged With Homicide: Review of 72 Cases," Behavioral Sciences and the Law, 5, No. 1 [1987], 11-23; epitomized in The Family in America: New Research, March, 1988. Cited in Amneus, The Garbage Generation, page 216

²⁰ "No-Fault Divorce: Proposed Solutions to a National Tragedy," 1993 Journal of Legal Studies 2, 19, citing R. Knight and R. Prentky, The Developmental Antecedents and Adult Adaptations of Rapist Subtypes, 14 CRIMINAL JUSTICE AND BEHAVIOR 403-426 (1987).

²¹ Deborah A. Dawson, "Family Structure and Children's Health and Well-being: Data from the National Health Interview Survey on Child Health," Journal of Marriage and the Family, 53, pp. 573-579