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1 1 (April 17, 2023)

handle is hein.amenin/aeiaeot0001 and id is 1 raw text is: Data Tools 6. The Geography of Traditional Families in America Charles Murray American Enterprise Institute April 2023 Every generation, civilization is invaded by barbarians-we call them 'children.' These words, often attributed to Hannah Arendt, express a truth that societies have known since societies began: Children must be socialized. Two other truths that societies have instinctively known for millennia are that the birth parents must be the primary actors and that marriage is the best framework. Modern social science has accumulated a half century of evidence corroborating this ancient wisdom, comparing how children from various family structures fare as adults. The unvarying finding, whether measured by arrest records, substance abuse, educational attainment, employment, income, or emotional well-being, is that, on average, children growing up with married birth parents fare better than children growing up in any alternative arrangement. This does not imply that all children raised by married birth parents turn out well nor that all children in other family structures turn out poorly. The question is which family structure works best. No serious scholar disputes the answer. The rankings of the alternative arrangements that involve only one birth parent are less clear. The next-best alternative would seem to be a remarried birth parent, on grounds that two parents are better than one. But the data are equivocal, and understandably so. Stepparents and stepchildren sometimes resent each other, and stepparents often don't have the same authority as a birth parent in the child's eyes. Moreover, child abuse by males is perpetrated overwhelmingly by a stepfather or cohabiting boyfriend who is not the birth father. The comparison between a single divorced parent and a single never-married parent is also complicated. On average, children growing up with a divorced parent do better than children

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