Stable Families (Fanny och Alexander)

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"Without doubt, then, there are more breakups of married and cohabitating couples in the United States than in any other Western country...

Americans start and end partnerships with a speed that is virtually unmatched.

In the United States, 10 percent of women had three or more husbands or live-in partners by age thirty-five, more than twice the percentage in Sweden and New Zealand and several times the percentage elsewhere." - Carousel

I will absolutely breakdown the "breakdown" above in coming posts, but as promised, we must first consider how our children are impacted, and then consider the impact of the impact. :)

"...The percentage of children who experienced three or more (of) mother’s partners by age fifteen in the mid-1990s was less than 2 percent in every other country except for Sweden, where it was 3 percent. But in the United States, it was 8 percent. So about one out of twelve American children saw at least this many transitions in their living arrangements. The number of children who experienced exactly two parental partnerships (but not three) is considerably higher, and again the United States led with 21 percent, compared to 16 percent in Sweden, 11 percent in Canada, and 8 percent in France. Nowhere else did children see so many adults come and go.

Children who experience a series of transitions appear to have more difficulties than children raised in stable two parent families and perhaps even more than children raised in stable lone-parent (divorced, single parent) families. For instance, they tend to have sexual intercourse at an earlier age and are more likely to have a first child outside of marriage, even after taking into account how much time they have spent in lone-parent families.

Studies in other countries have produced similar results. In Australia, children whose mothers changed partners had more behavior problems than both children whose mothers remained married and children whose mothers remained single. In Britain, children who had experienced more than one divorce reported lower levels of happiness. In New Zealand, the more parental separations, divorces, remarriages, deaths, or reconciliations a girl had experienced, the more likely she was to become pregnant by age twenty.

A group of American researchers followed more than a thousand children from nine states from birth until first grade. They found that the more family transitions the children experienced, the more likely they were to show behavior problems in first grade. For instance, they were more likely to be disruptive with teachers and not to comply with teachers’ requests, whether they had been born to married parents or not.

You might expect that children born to single parents would be doing better in first grade if their mothers had found new partners. But just the opposite occured: children who had been born to single parents showed fewer problems in first grade if their parents had remained single than if their parents had started (and sometimes ended) new partnerships." - Carousel

Italics, mine.

While I believe that the research speaks for itself, the author still makes an effort to express that we are considering correlations here, not causes. That said, the most important ideas among the two "stable families" posts are the ideas of consistency, stability, commitment, and environment (and maybe others?).

So, let's make eye contact with each idea, what do you say???

Maybe I will leave the comment section open for additional ideas or questions to explore?

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