Transcript
RON HASKINS: Let me put three ideas, I think we might even call facts, on the table, just to set the basic background. The first thing is that every measure of family dissolution, as probably everybody in this room knows, has dissoluted remarkably in the last 30 years. So we have high divorce rates, we have extremely high non-marital birth rates, and the marriage rates have been falling. And all of these have affected low-income families and minority families more than majority families.
Fact number two is that since publication of McLanahan and Sandefur's book on single parents in 1994, there seems to be almost but universal agreement in the academic world that being reared in a single-parent family is bad for children. And the publication of this journal today, the Future of Children, entirely devoted to marriage, which we'll talk about more in a few moments when we have a little more leisure time, I think, just puts a stamp of findings that the academic world does in fact agree that the best circumstance for rearing children is the married, two-parent family.
And then the third issue is much more up in the air, and that is, all right, if we have high rates of family dissolution and if marriage would be good for children, could we increase rates of marriage? Because if we could, children would benefit, adults would benefit, society would benefit, and disproportionately low-income minority children would benefit.
So that is where we are as a nation. Can we increase marriage rates and create healthy marriages that are positive environments for children? And, very fortunately, we have today with us two people who have ideas about how to do this. So without further introduction, I'm going to let Senator Brownback describe his ideas and then, after he leaves, we'll do the same thing with Mrs. Norton and have a time for questions from the audience.
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