November 7, 2017 (LifeSiteNews) – The one big factor separating poor families from comfortable and wealthy families is marriage, say sociologists.
Writing in The Federalist, Glenn T. Stanton of Focus on the Family reviewed the current literature indicating that marriage has replaced employment and education as the central factor in the financial well-being of families. His findings are startling.
The marriage rate is “sinking” among lower and middle-class American adults; it’s now down to 48%. It has, however, remained stable among the wealthy. And it’s “the proliferation of single-parent households” that “accounts for virtually all of the increase in child poverty since the early 1970s,” as Stanton quotes Jonathan Rauch.
In the early 1990s, sociologist Bill Galston said that to stay out, or climb out, of poverty, Americans needed to do only three things: graduate from high school, marry before having a child, and have that first child after the age of 20. Only 8% of Americans who follow these rules will be poor, Galston claimed, whereas 79% who fail in all three respects will certainly live in poverty.
This “success sequence”–high school, marriage, and only then baby carriage–still holds true today, and “working-class” women are
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