Nudged toward the alter
Alaska Highway News [Ft St John]
June 8 2009

Family breakdown is costly, emotionally and financially. Few who have experienced it, or witnessed it from afar, would deny that.

The cost of fractured families is not limited to those directly affected. In a provocative new report, Choices, Public Costs: How Failing Families Cost Us All, the Institute of Marriage and Family Canada puts the cost at $7 billion a year, much of it spent on social programs to support poor single-parent families. The institute proposes that the government promote and support marriage, through education, research and tax policy. ….

Reducing poverty is in everyone's interest, as is the proliferation of healthy, stable environments for the raising of children. But the assumption that marriage is the only real alternative to family breakdown ignores the complexities of modern families.

It is often preferable not to be married than to be unhappily married. And the reality is that families can exist and thrive in a variety of constellations….

Consider Quebec, where there is a culture of choosing common law arrangements over traditional marriage, yet where the proportion of program spending for single families is lower than in the rest of the country. Quebec also has universal day care. Could it be that access to child care is as good a way to fight poverty as pushing couples to the altar?

Dislocated families are the result of a variety of social ills. Promoting marriage is a romantic solution, but ultimately an incomplete one.