Anthropologists who have studied the issue cross-culturally tell us that, around the world, effective, hands-on fatherhood requires two basic foundations.  The first is that the father co-resides with children. The second is that the father is in a working partnership with the mother.  We humans have a name for just such an arrangement. We call it “marriage.”

But on Fathers Day 2008, marriage in the U.S. is a troubled institution. More than one of every three children born in the U.S. today is born to a never-married mother. About 40 percent of all first-time births are to unmarried mothers. The United States probably has the highest divorce rate in the world.  More than 40 percent of all first marriages in the U.S. are likely to end in divorce, and the divorce rates for second and third marriages are higher than for first marriages. As a result, more than half of all U.S. children will spend at least a significant part of their childhoods living apart from their fathers.

Consider this detail. In 1965, in a famous speech at Howard University, U.S. President Lyndon Johnson called for a “War on Poverty.” While the underlying sources of U.S. poverty are multiple and overlapping, the president said, “perhaps the most important” is “the breakdown of the Negro family structure.” Today in the United States, the breakdown of white family structure – the disintegration of marriage among whites – almost exactly matches the level of marriage breakdown among African Americans in 1965, a level that was viewed at the time by the federal government as a national emergency and the main reason for a significant anti-poverty mobilization!

Was President Johnson right to link marriage trends to poverty trends and to trends in overall child well-being? We can now definitively answer yes to that question. Here's why.

In the 1970s and well into the 1980s, most U.S. family scholars insisted that child well-being is not substantially or causally related to marriage and family structure. A few dissidents argued that it is. The disagreements were intense and passionately felt, and the stakes were high. The Institute for American Values, the think tank that I founded with some colleagues in 1988 and currently direct, was created primarily as a place for scholarly dissidents on this issue to meet and collaborate.

Today, scholarly opinion on this question has shifted dramatically. One of the main intellectual struggles of the past generation is now largely over. It is over because one side won. Especially during the late 1980s and the 1990s, as new research findings poured in, and as the weight of evidence became for most people increasingly clear and one-sided, yesterday’s fighting words gradually became the new scholarly conventional wisdom. Marriage matters. Marriage significantly influences individual and societal well-being. Most importantly, the health of our children is strongly linked to the health of marriage, primarily because marriage is what makes effective fatherhood possible.

Today some scholars, especially those who dislike marriage, mourn and criticize this shift. (They have become the new dissidents, many of whom cut their teeth by accusing others of being nostalgic for the 1950s, but who today are more than a little nostalgic for the 1970s.) Marriage enthusiasts like me welcome the shift. But almost no one denies that the shift has occurred and that it has important consequences, not only for scholars, but also for policy makers and the larger public debate.

The scholarly turn-around is not the only trend to warm the hearts of today’s marriage enthusiasts. For the first time in decades, there is some encouraging demographic news. Divorce rates are modestly declining. Rates of unwed childbearing, after increasingly sharply year after year for decades, leveled off considerably from about 1995 to 2003, although a troubling rise was reported for 2004 and 2005. Teen pregnancy rates have declined dramatically. Rates of reported marital happiness, after declining steadily from the early 1970s through the early 1990s, have stabilized and may be increasing. By far the gladdest tiding is that, from 1995 to 2000, the proportion of African American children living in married-couple homes rose by about four percent. Among all U.S. children, the proportion living in married-couple homes has apparently stabilized and may have increased slightly in the late 1990s.

For three decades, marriage advocates have been grumbling that everything is getting worse. Some of us can’t break the habit. But we need to. Some things have stopped getting worse. A few things are even getting better. As if on autopilot, most of us still say: “We have to turn the marriage trend around.” But the trend may already be turning around! For the time being, at least, we may have the wind at our backs.

There is more. In the mid to late 1990s, what many of us call a “marriage movement” emerged in the United States. Today that movement is led by a growing and diverse group of educators, counselors, service providers, public officials, researchers, community organizers, religious and civic leaders, and others. It cuts across political, racial, gender, and class lines. The movement’s core shared goal, as more than 100 of its leaders wrote in a joint statement in 2000, and reaffirmed in 2004, is “to turn the tide on marriage and reduce divorce and unwed child bearing, so that each year more children will grow up protected by their own two happily married parents, and so that each year more adults’ marriage dreams will come true.”  If there is a more important challenge facing our society on this Fathers Day, I do not know what it is.