The new merry-go-round

摘要

Last week the Pew Research Centre, a think-tank, predicted that one in four young Americans will never marry. Among the advantages of this are that you "will get to have sex with a different attractive person every night for the rest of your life" and can live "unfettered by [an] oppressive institution that represents undying love," suggests the Onion, a spoof newspaper. Isabel Sawhill takes a more serious view. A former budget aide for Bill Clinton who now works at the Brookings Institution in Washington, dc, she has been pondering the state of the family for decades. "Generation Unbound" is clear, concise and admirably fair-minded. It describes the vast changes that have occurred since the sexual revolution of the 1960s. No-fault divorce has been good for many adults, she writes. Because they can walk away, unhappy partners have more power to demand change. Spousal suicide, domestic violence and the murder of husbands by wives have all fallen as a result. But "children have rights, too," and the instability of a growing number of American families harms them in all sorts of ways.