nanandjim said:
Dr. Joy Brown (and I) disagree with you. Marriage offers stability to a child.
nanandjim said:
In an ideal world, I'd agree. But in reality, sometimes it does and sometimes it doesn't.
But don't you think that people make their own "reality" quite often these days???
In this day and age we have multiple forms of birth control.........and we STILL have an extremely high rate of however you want to term them....out-of-wedlock, unwanted, etc. pregnancies. How many of these pregnancies are really "accidental"?? c'mon. I just don't buy that. Too often it's just about the fact that the woman wants to have a child or is trying to hang on to a guy that deep down she know's isn't committed to her.
Marriage certainly does do something for the child.....it's called stability. How will our children learn about committment, giving of your self freely to another, working out problems, working and building a life together, etc. when all they ever see is mom or dad "shacking up" with whoever the flavor of the month is??
Statistics overwhelmingly show that kids that are raised in two parent , married, loving, financially and emotionally stable homes make much more positive decisions for their own lives. Not to mention the fact that the poorest families are led by single parents - marriage builds financial wealth too - another positive.
This is the ideal situation for kids....and for heaven's sake, why wouldn't we want to give our kids that ideal.
Just because some marriages can be awful doesn't mean we should then scrap the whole idea for just living together without any commitment and real sense of stability for our kids. We should work at correcting the problems.
I am quite certain that the statistics from all of these awful cases I read about in this forum in large part point to a common denominator. No mom and dad together in a loving stable marriage.
Obviously every woman who has a child without marriage isn't going to do these awful things. But I'm tired of people who just label people with traditional values as "judgemental".
The "If it feels good - then do it" mentality has really made a mess of this world. Need Proof....keep reading these stories.....more and more ( and sicker ones) every day. :sick: Sorry, this is just how I feel.