This collaboration includes academics from the fields of law, history, sociology, social welfare, psychology and public policy. The authors call for new ways to support children born into the diverse families of the 1990s. More than half of the children born this year, for instance, will lose one or both parents to divorce, abandonment or neglect before they reach adulthood.
Evidence shows that such children risk developing emotional, social or academic problems.
But the researchers emphasize that marriage by itself is no solution because middle class, two-parent families are in trouble too. In provocative new findings on mainstream marriages, two members of the forum reveal that up to a third of the couples they studied begin having significant difficulties upon the birth of a child. Depression and marital conflict are common. Between a fourth and a third of some 200 families studied by the Cowans, from pregnancy through a child's transition into elementary school, scored high on depression and low on a marriage satisfaction scale, indicating that their marriages could benefit from professional intervention. Now in its 10th year, the Cowan study provided some of the 200 families with psychological intervention and found not only that marriages improved, but the children's performance in school did also, compared to families receiving no outside help.