TAMMY WYNETTE WAS RIGHT

In a 1993 Atlantic essay called “Dan Quayle Was Right,” Barbara Dafoe Whitehead, then a research associate at the Institute for American Values, made the case against single parenthood that academic writers had long refused to make. That is, in blunt, accessible language and using widely available evidence, Whitehead argued into the teeth of elite opinion that single parenthood is bad for children. The Divorce Culture expands on that argument. In eight brief chapters Whitehead insists that the unraveling of family ties is a society-wide moral problem that spells disaster for America’s future.

The “divorce culture” of which Whitehead speaks took less than a decade to emerge. Prior to the mid-1960s, when divorce was viewed as a legal, familial, and social issue with multiple shareholders, marital dissolution was rare and deplored. Guided by the self-actualization claptrap of “liberation therapy,” the 1960s counterculture changed that. Its emphasis on the primacy of ” emotional needs” not only devalued marriage; it actually severed the needs of fathers and mothers from the needs of their children.

Proponents of “expressive divorce” made extravagant promises for personal growth and happiness, promises that were occasionally delivered on — but always at the expense of children. As legions of therapists and feminists entered the debate, declaring marriage unjust and unhealthy, divorce soon came to be seen as “the defining achievement of women’s lives, the great article of their freedom.” By 1979, the American divorce rate had peaked at 22 per 1,000 marriages. (It appears to have stabilized at a 1994 rate of 20 per 1,000.)

Whitehead is at her most convincing when she spells out what the divorce revolution has wrought on children. Post-nuclear-family life — i.e. the family life of never-married single mothers, divorced mothers who remain single, and reconstituted step-families — has “dramatically eroded the economic, psychological, and geographic bases” for the upbringing children need.

On the psychological level, Whitehead argues, parental bonds have weakened, as marriage has become a more provisional thing. On the economic level, the inevitable decline in the father’s economic sponsorship has worked to the detriment of children.

On the political level, the family has become less free, able, and willing to govern itself. Parents’ search for greater individual freedom has inevitably brought the state into the inner life of the family to take up the slack — to regulate child custody and visitation rights. The evidence, which Whitehead summarizes skillfully, shows divorce sends children into a downward spiral. Regardless of economic or social status, divorce “is an important risk factor for school dropout, problem behaviors, lower educational and job achievement, and likelihood of teenage parenthood.”

Some feeble attempts to appear to be politically even-handed aside, The Divorce Culture is a ringing endorsement of the conventional nuclear family of father, mother, and their children, and an unmitigated indictment of its enemies. It is the old, familiar nuclear family that remains the best guarantor of a child’s well-being, and of its success in schools and life beyond. Whitehead even goes as far as to suggest that America is in the process of sorting itself out into two distinct sub-societies, with children who enjoy the benefits of a traditional nuclear family likely to be better prepared for life in the post-industrial world.

Unfortunately, Whitehead’s account of the nuclear family is historically thin and far too psychologistic for my taste. She fails to appreciate the nuclear family’s close connection to the market economy and civil society, which anyone concerned with America’s future must attempt to bring out. Whitehead’s psychologistic focus prevents her from drawing these links. By the same token, her determination to stay away from the most contested issues of contemporary family life — abortion, gay marriage, etc. — gives her otherwise admirable effort what Virginia Woolf would call a “cotton-wool quality.” Most unfortunately, Whitehead tells us nothing about modern marriage, which is the real problem.

What’s more, Whitehead’s use of the term “culture” for the revolution she observes is loose and misleading, implying that divorce is the root cause of our current cultural difficulties. The anti-institutional animus of liberation ideology has permeated all of society’s institutions, not just marriage. Whitehead’s disregard of this central fact of “post-modern” life and her inability to place the divorce revolution into a wider cultural context robs her otherwise powerful message of theoretical depth and seriousness.

Nonetheless, Whitehead succeeds in showing us how an ideology designed to liberate women from the strictures of conventional marriage has left their choices even more constricted. The chimeras of self-actualization aside, divorced mothers are not much better off today than their “trapped” counterparts of thirty years ago. On the other hand, the vast majority of children of divorce have been unambiguously and irredeemably harmed by their parents’ self-serving choices.

Rather than taking refuge in farfetched arguments that “it takes a village” to secure the well-being of the nation’s children, it has become clear that the interests of the child are still best served by the steadfast commitment of parents to each other.

Brigitte Berger, who teaches sociology at Boston University, has written widely on issues of family and social change.