The Wall Street Journal ran a story earlier this week about a new book from Johns Hopkins University sociologist Andrew Cherlin. This new book, entitled The Marriage-Go-Round,  focuses on the culture surrounding marriage in the United States.

University of Virginia sociologist Bradford Wilcox writes (for WSJ):

Last week, Vermont became the fourth state to legalize same-sex marriage, setting off yet another round of celebration and hand-wringing in different quarters of American life. The debate over same-sex marriage — showing so much intensity on both sides — is but one sign that Americans take marriage very seriously indeed. From television specials featuring over-the-top Bridezilla weddings to the federal Healthy Marriage Initiative, which spends $150 million annually marriage-related programs, no other Western nation devotes as much cultural energy, public policy or religious attention to matrimony as the U.S. And with approximately 90% of Americans marrying over the course of their lifetimes, the U.S. has the highest marriage rate of any Western country.

On Cherlin’s new book…

But there is a darker side to this exceptionalism, as Andrew J. Cherlin notes in “The Marriage-Go-Round,” his incisive portrait of marriage in America. Virtually no other nation in the West compares with the U.S. when it comes to divorce, short-term co-habitation and single parenthood. As Mr. Cherlin documents, Americans marry and co-habit at younger ages, divorce more quickly and enter into second marriages or co-habiting unions faster than their counterparts elsewhere. In other words, Americans “step on and off the carousel of intimate relationships.”

The biggest problem with this aspect of American family life is that children often do not do well when parents and partners are whirling in and out of their lives. Children have difficulty adapting to changes in their routines or to step- parents who are not comfortable acting as authority figures or to nonresidential parents who see children only intermittently. The live-in boyfriend, who may well not have a child’s best interests at heart, is an even greater problem. Such a mix of hybrid forms, according to Mr. Cherlin, is part of the reason that family instability is linked to higher rates of teen sex, teen pregnancy, teen drunkenness, truancy and behavioral problems in school.

By contrast, Mr. Cherlin writes, “stable, low-conflict families with two biological or adoptive parents provide better environments for children, on average, than do other living arrangements.” Unfortunately, the family changes of the past half-century have left millions of American children vulnerable to one or more dizzying spins on the family merry-go-round.

What is so bad about the marriage-go-round?

Family instability, Mr. Cherlin shows, has been increasingly concentrated in poor and working-class households in recent years. Divorce is much more common in less-educated circles: 23% of women with only a high-school degree will divorce or separate within five years of marriage, compared with 13% of women who hold a college degree. Thus children at the lower end of the socioeconomic ladder are now much more likely to be doubly disadvantaged by poverty and family instability.

And Cherlin’s advice…

Because Mr. Cherlin is reluctant to challenge the individualistic ethos of our day, the strongest advice he can muster — when he steps back to consider the marriage portrait he has drawn so brilliantly — is that Americans who aspire to be parents should “slow down” when they are entering or exiting a marriage or a co-habiting relationship, bearing in mind that children do best in a stable home. It is not bad advice, certainly. But some of us may wish to do more than put a yellow light in the path of parents who are tempted to hop onto (and off of) America’s family merry-go-round. For the sake of the children, a red light may be better.

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