Now a senior public policy scholar at the Washington-based Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, the New York Democrat finds marriage rates are dropping among parents throughout the industrialized world. This alarms politicians. I favor programs that help parents get married and stay married, if the programs will help reduce poverty. In poor communities here or abroad, people turn to each other for survival because they have to. As economies and government support to the needy become stronger, Moynihan has observed, the consequences of irresponsible behavior decline.
Families become more mobile.
Communities break apart. So do many homes. So, instead of teaching the industrialized world about the virtue of marriage, new immigrants may find marriages breaking down in the next generation as their children become more Americanized. To reverse that trend will require a social sea change. Marriage will have to become chic again, according to my friend Iris Krasnow, a former UPI reporter who left journalism to raise four children.