Children require dependable adults. Raising them takes time, money, patience, and the willingness to remain responsible when responsibility has become inconvenient. None of this is a revelation. Yet suggest that a durable marriage can help supply these things, and one risks being treated as though one has proposed resturning to the Dark Age.

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A new Institute for Family Studies report maps a striking division in American family life. In the ten areas with the lowest proportions of married-couple households among households with children, the figures range from about 18 to 26 percent. At the opposite extreme, they approach 89 percent. The report uses 2020 Census data. These are substantial geographic differences, deserving something more intelligent than either a victory lap for traditionalists or an embarrassed change of subject. 

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First, however, let us resist the headline’s invitation to panic. A map showing where married parents are scarce cannot, by itself, establish that they are presently disappearing. Nor does the absence of a marriage certificate establish the absence of a second devoted parent. The researchers explicitly decline to establish causes, and use marriage as a proxy for stable two-parent homes. That distinction matters. Those who demand respect for evidence should occasionally demonstrate some. 

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Having made those qualifications, we need not retreat into the soothing proposition that every arrangement is equally capable of meeting every need.

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Marriage has a defensible public purpose quite apart from nostalgia, religious authority, or the contents of a wedding album. It makes a serious undertaking visible: two adults accept obligations that are meant to outlast the fluctuations of their appetite. Its usefulness lies partly in its resistance to the consumer’s assumption that dissatisfaction entitles him to an immediate replacement.

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A child cannot replace a father as casually as a father can replace a relationship.

This is where the rhetoric of adult liberation requires cross-examination. Freedom from coercion is indispensable. Freedom from responsibility for people one has helped bring into existence is a rather different ambition. We should be capable of defending the former without providing flattering language for the latter.

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Children do not participate in the negotiations over personal fulfillment. They nevertheless receive the cost the settlement.

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None of this licenses contempt for single parents. A mother doing the work of two adults deserves practical assistance and understanding. To lecture her about the sanctity of the family while leaving the absent father comfortably beyond the reach of criticism is a peculiar interpretation of moral courage. It is easier to rebuke the person who stayed. She is available to hear the sermon.

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Nor should anyone be asked to preserve a violent or degrading household for the convenience of a statistic. A marriage certificate confers neither kindness nor immunity from scrutiny. The argument for marriage is an argument for dependable care and reciprocal obligation. A household that systematically destroys those goods cannot be defended merely because it retains the paperwork.

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But exceptions do not relieve us of the duty to consider what institutions are for. An unhappy marriage does not demonstrate that commitment is dispensable any more than a corrupt school demonstrates that education is unnecessary.

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The opposite evasion is economic. We cannot preach permanence while treating the conditions under which people must build a permanent life as somebody else’s department. Anyone proposing a serious response should ask whether prospective parents can afford housing, find dependable employment, obtain childcare, and manage an illness without financial catastrophe. These are questions for investigation and policy, rather than an explanation this particular map has proved.

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A society ought to make it easier to undertake obligations it claims to admire.

This applies to the political right as much as to the left. The conservative who celebrates family life should explain how his economic preferences help sustain it. The progressive who celebrates every exercise of adult autonomy should explain where, in that celebration, the dependent child acquires a claim that cannot be negotiated away.

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Neither side should be permitted to substitute a slogan for an answer.

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The practical agenda need not involve a government marriage inspector. It should involve enforceable parental obligations, help for the parent carrying the load, attention to the material barriers to family formation, and a public vocabulary willing to commend fidelity. We can support families already struggling while encouraging adults to build relationships capable of enduring. There is no logical contradiction between those tasks.

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We should also distinguish praise from compulsory optimism. To commend marriage is to commend a demanding undertaking, not to promise uninterrupted happiness. The undertaking matters precisely because happiness fluctuates. Someone must still collect the child, pay the bill, listen to the fear, and return the next morning.

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The most revealing question raised by these maps concerns what adults believe they owe. A culture may congratulate itself on dismantling expectations, only to discover that the people least able to protect themselves depended upon some of them.

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Children have no obligation to applaud our emancipation. They have a claim upon our constancy.

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If we wish to call ourselves civilized, we might begin by honoring that claim even when it interferes with our plans.

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There are people reading these words for whom the failures of family life are already an accusation they can sometimes scarcely bear. I know that burden. They know the empty chair, the promise they broke, the conversation they would give anything to have again. And those whose families remain together have no reason to imagine that they have loved without selfishness or stayed without sometimes withdrawing their hearts. 

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Here Christ meets us, in the household as it actually is, with its unfinished duties and its grief. He has carried our sin into his death and risen to speak forgiveness to the very people who cannot repair their own history. This promise is for you: your failures have not exhausted his mercy, and another person’s departure has not made you unwanted in your Father’s house. There may still be a difficult telephone call tomorrow, and wounds that require a long tending.

 

But know this, friend in Christ, you need not earn your place at the table. Christ has made it yours, and his promise will hold when your own strength cannot.