Ottawa-based think tank the MacDonald Laurier Institute asserts the importance of two-parent families, and that lawmakers should be encouraging family cohesiveness rather than deconstruction. Children who are raised with two, biological or adoptive parents do better in school and integrating into society, says the institute, calling this well-supported fact a “blind spot” to Western countries in recent decades. With marriage rates down and divorce rates increasing, the impact on children demands more discussion than has been granted. Family structure is greatly impactful on a child’s wellbeing, wrote the institute. Less than 60% of Canadian children live with their two biological or adoptive parents, and of those, many will see their family break up before they reach adulthood. According to the institute and other think tanks, there is a certain “fear” in discussing the impacts of divorce and broken families due to it being perceived as “hurtful.” “Hurtful to the families being talked about and hurtful to our culture,” said Vanier Institute for the Family. Economist Tyler Cowen in 2022 told the Hub, “for many people, [family structure] is a subject you’re not even really allowed to bring up.”Two notable American authors have brought the matter to light. Economics professor at the University of Maryland Melissa Kearney, wrote a book entitled, How Americans Stopped Getting Married and Started Falling Behind. Based on data and research, the book explored how brokenness in the family structure is partly responsible for mounting income inequality in the US. “The most highly educated, high-income segments of society are still getting married at high rates, raising their kids in two-parent families at high rates. Others in society who are struggling economically, their economic struggles are made worse by the fact that now they’re more likely to have just one adult, one parent in the household. Their kids fall further behind and that cements the inequality and perpetuates it across generations,” said Kearney during a Hub podcast in March. University of Virginia sociologist Brad Wilcox, author of Get Married: Why Americans Must Defy the Elites, Forge Strong Families, and Save Civilization, talks at length about how children benefit from marriage. He argues that even in a society where the majority of children belong to two-parent homes, those children who do not still do better than those in a society where broken families are more common. Citing these two authors, the MacDonald Laurier Institute illustrates that “children who grow up in intact families” with their original parents, either biological or adoptive, “have higher educational attainment, are less likely to engage in risky or delinquent behaviour, and have lower incarceration rates and teen pregnancy rates.”Further, that’s not to mention the greater financial resources of being in an intact family relative to single-parent families, especially in the case of an absent father. Stepfamilies are less beneficial to children too, as they are “much more likely to be abused or neglected in a stepfamily than they are in an intact family,” wrote the institute, adding evidence shows outcomes for children with married parents are better than children whose parents are cohabitating in a common-law partnership. “Partly because those relationships are less stable, and this instability has a negative effect on children,” wrote the institute.
