“Do Your Kids Care If You’re Married?”

Leslie Morgan Steiner has a piece up at Modern Mom and Mommy Tracked asking, “Do Your Kids Care If You’re Married?” Good question.

Steiner observes that the latest Census figures show that unmarried adults almost outnumber married couples for the first time in recorded U.S. history, and that “More than ever, children today are growing up without two married parents.” Is that a good thing or a bad thing?

I commend Steiner for avoiding a simple answer, and noting that much depends on the quality of the parents’ relationship to each other and to the kids rather than their actual legal status. That’s all true. While she includes same-sex couples in her discussion, however, she doesn’t really plumb the depths of how the question might apply to our families.

Fact is, we same-sex couples have been raising kids whom studies show to be as well adjusted as any others, even when we don’t have access to marriage. To that extent, we prove Steiner’s point, that legal marriage alone is not the determining factor in raising kids successfully.

At the same time, marriage does confer certain legal and financial benefits that can be good for our children. And as the Civil Union Review Commission in New Jersey found, children are often aware when their family has a second-class status, even when it is one such as a civil union, which confers some of those legal and financial benefits. The stigma associated with that second-class status can negatively impact children.

As Meredith Fenton, the then-national program director of COLAGE, told the Commission, “We also find youth in COLAGE who report that hearing that their family can’t have the same rights as other families leads them to feeling scared or confused when they hear that folks are against their families being married. They say that they think somebody is going to come and break up their family.”

There’s a big difference between parents’ personal choice not to marry and a government telling them they cannot.

For same-sex parents, then, perhaps we should first ask, “Do your kids care if you could get married?” before asking “Do Your Kids Care If You’re Married?” While the answer to the latter may vary, the answer to the former, I believe, is almost always “yes.”

Thanks to Steiner for an inclusive and thought-provoking piece on the changing shape of families today.