Personal Lives Not Worthy
When it comes to our personal lives, why do Americans say one thing and do another?
Particularly when it comes to the most intimate centers of our lives – marriage and children.
In some remarkable research into personal lives by the Pew Research Center earlier this year, people displayed a tolerance for others that goes far beyond the latitude they allow themselves.
And it’s not just a reaction to such recent traumas as 9/11 or the ‘war on terror’ – this goes back a generation.
Here’s the story: If your marriage sucks, get a divorce. A vast majority of Americans – particularly Hispanics – believe divorce is the best option when parents become unhappy with one another. In fact, they say, the children of such a fractured union will be better off.
The opinion is reinforced, by a margin of 58% to 38%, by the view that divorce is painful, but preferable to maintaining an unhappy marriage.
Yet divorce rates – after more than doubling from 1960 to 1980 – have declined by about a third.
And then, 71% say the growth in births to unwed mothers is a “big problem.” About the same proportion – 69% – says that a child needs both a mother and a father to grow up happily.
In contrast, the rates of births to unwed mothers have continued to rise – 37% of all births in the US in 2005 were to an unwed mother, up from just 5% in 1960.
Let me hasten to add that this rapid growth is not confined to the US. Rates of births to unwed mothers also have risen sharply in the United Kingdom and Canada, where they are at about the same levels as they are in the US. And in Western and Northern European countries such as France, Denmark and Sweden they’ve reached even higher levels.
In the US, Pew found that the dominating influences on opinion about [tag]personal lives[/tag] are age, religion, race and ethnicity, as well as the choices that people made in their own marital and parenting lives.
Interestingly, within those groups, men and women tend to agree with one another! Now we know there is a tectonic shift occuring in personal relationships!
Results of the survey are available for download from [tag]marriage survey[/tag]
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