So I was recently clued in to the fact that Australia is actually out in front of the U.S. in terms of family decay. They have crossed the threshold where 35% of children are born out of wedlock. We can learn some things from the land down under and also sow the seed for what I think is at the heart of a Catholic conservative movement and a renewal of America.
Most interesting has been the response in Australia. It has been partly religious, but it has also been a very pragmatic response on the part of a government trying to live within its means. As far back as 1998, the Australian Parliament actually published a report, called “Have and Hold” on marriage in Australia. And no, this was not a report promoting same sex marriage or apathetically describing the statistics around the “new” family as our government might put out here.
What it did was lay out the downside to a society not orientated around the traditional, nuclear family. A society that was still, albeit to a lesser degree due to plummeting fertility rates, bringing children into the world without the basic structure of a married mother and father. Most impressively, the study assigned hard costs to this abandonment of the family. These costs are just for a 2 year period:
· $3.1 billion in welfare payments to single parents – 70% of those payments going to single parents who had at one point been married. $2.2 billion directly tied to the breakdown of the family.
· Family court and legal aid expenditures of $152 million.
· $169 million in child support payments, something akin to what Social Security does here.
· $250 million in lost tax revenue due to tax credits to single parents (we have similar tax credits for the poor that would largely encompass single parents).
That totals $2.7 billion and does not include other expenditures like emergency funding for the homeless. They estimate the actual, annual cost is $3 billion if not as high as $6 billion. Keep in mind, the government budget in Australia in 1998 was only $130 billion, so $6 billion represents almost 5%.
But, keep in mind the population of Australia was only 18.5 million in 1998. That is a fraction of the United States, yet the costs could have been $6 billion due to family breakdown. Extrapolate those costs over the current U.S. population and you get to $100 billion annually due to the breakdown of the family.
There is more. Those are just annual costs. You have to keep in mind the toll exacted on future generations. What happens to children raised in homes where they cannot count on mom & dad always being together, or where they live with just one parent, or with a homosexual couple. We have decades of sociological research that shows any arrangement outside of the traditional, married, nuclear family for children is substandard and it frankly should not be acceptable.
Last year, a Professor at the University of Sydney put out a report called, “For Kid’s Sake”, detailing some of the sickening statistics around what is happening to kids as Australia sees family life essentially disappear.
· The Foster Care system is full, the number of children in foster care has doubled since 1997.
· 25% of young people 16-24 have been diagnosed with a mental disorder.
· Another 24%, not diagnosed with a mental disorder, are experiencing moderate to severe psychological stress.
· The number of children who do not reach age 15 as part of an intact family has doubled within a generation.
· Reports of child abuse have almost tripled since 1998.
What is the practical economic impact of all of this? Kids outside of intact families do not do as well in school, are less likely to go to college, and therefore, will earn less and pay less in taxes. They are also more prone to fall into a cycle of poverty if they are born out of wedlock, meaning multiple generations being supported by the government. So even by the cold math of someone trying to sustain a $3.5 trillion budget, the decline of the family is problematic.
But let’s go back to the children. It is funny in America, we like to make sure that our kids have every safety device known to man. Car seats until they are 24, padded corners on furniture, helmets for tricycles, hoodies without drawstrings, things previous generations never had. We also like to get our ire up, and rightly so, if anyone dare harm a child – just ask Penn State.
Yet when it comes to cohabitation, marriage, or divorce, the really big stuff when it comes to child welfare, we have completely taken children out of the decision. Those decisions are for the “adults” or parents to make based on what is best for them. How can I say that? It is almost never in the best interests of the child for the parents to separate, but what happens all too often in this country. The Australian report found that at best, 30% of divorces involved “serious marital conflicts” to where you could make a case the children were better off if the parents separated.
But the reality is marriage matters. Marriage between a man and a woman matters. Two people, who bring complimentary gifts to the table, committing to be together forever is the single most effective and cost efficient model for bringing up the next generation. There is a security there, a comfort, a stability, options for kids. They can talk to dad about certain things, they can talk to mom about certain things. Whether you are a girl or a boy, you have a parent in the house of the same gender. You also have one of the opposite gender for when you need that perspective. It is the perfect model. What you need to start a business is confidence instilled by mom and dad more than knowledge gained from a book.
Adults behave differently outside of marriage. They fight differently, they socialize differently, and they communicate differently. They are more likely to drink, use drugs, stay out late partying, or in short, behave like single people.
Children pick up on these things. This adds stress. When children get stressed out they react in any number of ways, because they are not equipped to handle it. They wet their bed, they act out, they have trouble in school, they eat more, they eat less, they shut down, they bully, etc. These are all psychological realities, not political rhetoric.
When children exhibit the above behaviors, it detracts from what they are supposed be learning, both formally and informally. It leaves them less than fully equipped to succeed in the world. In many cases, it means they will not do as well or better than their parents economically. Maybe the best analogy is to the farmer sowing seeds. If he sows too many on rocky soil or in places where they will not grow, his yield will diminish. He will then have less harvest for which to feed his family and the village. Relationships built on same sex attraction, cohabitation, or any kind of arrangement outside of a traditional marriage between a man and a woman are rocky soil.
So for a society that is built on an economy built on population growth, entrepreneurship, job creation to be overlooking this is catastrophic. It is frankly a way to end society as we know it. We need smart, motivated, stable, well-adjusted adults to keep this country moving forward and we are producing less and less of them.
So what’s the answer how does this link into the cause of Catholic conservatism? What it means is that instead of needing to argue for the support and defense of the traditional family strictly from a moral standpoint, we can round out the argument. We now have a growing body of evidence showing that other arrangements are detrimental to the health and welfare of children.
Even more than that, we can demonstrate how those costs get shifted to the government, a government with a citizenry increasingly comprised of these non-traditional family arrangements. Fast forward a few years and it is not hard to see how the U.S. could start to look like Australia, unable to effectively spend enough as a nation or society to support a large population of individuals from broken families.
It means the argument that Rick Santorum is making is not just one for the future of the family, but one for the future of America. That has wide reaching policy and cultural implications. I don’t yet know if Rick Santorum is going to be able to articulate this case well enough to be elected President of the United States. But I do know that this is the argument that needs to be advanced if we are to start to embolden the many individuals in this country, who believe the family is the way forward, but today lack the courage to stand against a culture that seeks to redefine the family as irrelevant.
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