Family Come Home

The July 13 Time magazine featured a forceful down-with-divorce cover story: “Why Marriage Matters.” Its author, essayist Caitlin Flanagan, deplores the current cultural assault on the intact, two-parent family and says America needs to get over its commitment issues — not for romantic notions of love, but for the sake of this country’s children. “On every single significant outcome related to short-term well-being and long-term success, children from intact, two-parent families outperform those from single-parent households,” she points out. “Longevity, drug abuse, school performance and dropout rates, teen pregnancy, criminal behavior and incarceration — if you can measure it, a sociologist has; and in all cases, the kids living with both parents drastically outperform the others.” There’s nothing we can add to that. Except maybe “Amen.”