Couples counseling for all?
Now more than ever we need to explore ways to give kids the supportive family enviroments we know are essential to their future.
Kevin Frazier grew up in Washington County, attended the UO, and worked in state government before launching this blog.
The power of two
Family structure is one of the strongest, if not the strongest, predictor[s] of variations in urban violence across cities in the United States.
Robert Sampson, Harvard sociologist.
[F]or poor children of all races, [Harvard economist Raj] Chetty and his team have found that the fraction of children with single parents in a given community is the strongest and most robust predictor of economic mobility—or its absence.
Children raised in communities with high percentages of single mothers are less likely to move up. In other words, it takes a village—but of married people—to raise the odds that a poor child will have a shot at the American dream.
W. Bradford Wilcox and Hal Boyd, in The Atlantic.
What does it mean to be pro-family
Being “pro-family” has oddly become an ideological trigger. The tired stereotypes can be boiled down to two sentences: Liberals charge Conservatives as opponents to any family structure that doesn’t involve a man married to a woman; and, Conservatives guess that Liberals actively want to destroy the institution of marriage by removing its religious, legal, and cultural importance.
Like most assumptions, I think these are, at best, only sometimes true and, more likely, patently false.
I think we’re all pro-family. We’re all in favor of providing young Oregonians with the stability and support they need to thrive, regardless of the dynamic between their parents or their parent and the community.
Where there’s a two-parent household involved in raising a child, that means supporting that relationship.
Where there’s a single parent and others loving a child in a “forged family,” that means ensuring that parent and their community network can be as involved as possible in the child’s life.
Where there’s a child in search of a loving home, that means looking for sources of stability and resources that we know are essential to propelling that child into the future.
All this makes one thing clear—the most important thing about being “pro-family” is being “pro-kid.” Whatever a child’s family looks like, our collective and shared goal is to reinforce that family in order to realize that child’s potential.
Where a family is strong, we ought to bolster those strengths. Where a family is in need, we ought to meet those needs. Where a kid is falling through the cracks, then a village must respond to fill the gap.
The research from Sampson and Chetty isn’t partisan and it isn’t radical—it simply states that, on the whole, a two-parent household is a particularly strong family system. They are far from the only researchers who have detected a substantial positive impact on a child’s health and economic well-being, present and future, by growing up in a two-parent household.
That’s precisely why Oregon should subsidize couples, pre-marital, and marital counseling. Just as the state strives to provide a stable education, it should strive to provide a stable home setting and expanded access to counseling can help do that.
There’s clearly a need for such counseling in our state. Oregon's divorce rate is 5th highest in the nation. In 2018, there were 7.7 divorces per 1,000 women aged fifteen and over in the United States. In Oregon, that number jumped to 10.1. Of course, some of these divorces were surely more than justified and no one should stay in an emotional or physically abusive relationship; a home with that sort of abuse is not stable nor strong.
The aim of counseling is not to brush aside and overlook objective reasons for a pair to split, but rather to help the right pairs take the next step in their relationship and identify solutions to problems before those problems become anything worse.
According to the author of How Marriages Succeed and Fail, John Gottman, the average couple that seeks marriage counseling experiences difficulties for six years prior to getting help. We can and should shorten that delay by making it easier for Oregonians to strengthen their relationships and homes.
We’re slowly but surely emerging from one of the most trying experiences our society has ever experienced. Now more than ever we need to explore ways to give kids the supportive family environments we know are essential to their future. One way to do that is to subsidize couples therapy.
Personal bias
As the picture above makes clear, I grew up in a two-parent home (along with my twin sister (pictured) and brother). I admittedly find the thorough research on the benefits of such a household compelling — the financial and emotional stability afforded by one parent being the sole breadwinner, permitting the other parent to do the incredibly hard job of raising twins and another kiddo left an indelible mark on me and allowed me to get to wherever it is I am today. I was very lucky to grow up in such an environment.
In my case, two parents at home made logisitical nightmares that were essential to my upbringing possible. My dad could drive me to my outpatient appointments in NE Portland when I was combatting anoerxia, while my mom took my sister to school. My dad could handle driving me out to Camas for basketball tournaments, while my mom ventured off with my sister to lacrosse games.
Of course, these “logistical” matters are far more than just getting from A to B. These hours together—in traffic, at games, around pancakes at Tom’s—all contributed to the strength and resilience of my family when facing tough times.
The moments discussed above are not impossible in a “forged family” environment—one where parents, extended family members, and community members—all contribute to the upbringing of a child. However, the research again shows that, on average, such family setups could result in less beneficial outcomes for the kiddos, including but not limited higher chances of being abused by an adult within that forged family.
Family matters are intensely personal and, therefore, easy to make overly political. We can spurn the urge to say that there’s a best way to raise a kid and instead simply look for solutions—like subsidized couples therapy—that are proven to help out young Oregonians. Of course, this is just one of the tens, dozens, and hundreds of steps we can and must take to make Oregon the best place to be a kid.
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