Once a reliable thread in our social fabric,
marriage is now a convenient promise easily made and just as easily broken.
Long taken for granted, it is now under attack, and the result is devastating. This book exposes the patterns that have allowed us to degrade
marriage and shows how we can reclaim it.
James Q. Wilson is the chairman of AEI's Council of Academic Advisers and was formerly a professor at Harvard University and the University of California at Los Angeles. His books include On Character (AEI Press, expanded edition 1995) and, with Leon R. Kass, The Ethics of Human Cloning (AEI Press, 1996). A summary of The Marriage Problem: How Our Culture Has Weakened
Families follows.
Everyone knows and almost everyone regrets the difficulties into which marriage has fallen in the United States. Single-parent families hurt children, even after the effect of low income is taken into account. Divorces hurt many children, even after the predivorce family conflict is considered. Children born to a cohabiting couple are generally worse off than those born to a married couple.