Public Opinion Trends Towards Nuclear Family

famil

According to Pew Research, a growing number of Americans are realizing the importance of the nuclear family.   

Just three years ago, 40% of Americans agreed with the statement “single women raising children on their own is bad for society.” That number has now jumped to 47%. The same is true of cohabitation, which nearly a quarter of U.S. adults say is “generally bad for society.” That’s up 5% from three years ago.  

It’s an encouraging swing for public opinion, especially with both trends still on the rise. Kids do best with both a mom and a dad in the picture. They do better still when mom and dad stay married to each other.  

Of course, there are a plenty of heroic single parents raising kids on their own, who will do everything they can to help their kids succeed. Data isn’t destiny for all individuals, but it is destiny for a society. The loss of marriage is unsustainable. As the world leader in single-parent households, Americans will either have to reckon with that basic truth, or the next generations will continue to pay the price.

Copyright 2024 by the Colson Center for Christian Worldview. Reprinted from BreakPoint.org with permission.

Dads on Duty

Security guards and local police were at a loss about how to deal with the rampant violence plaguing a Shreveport school. Detention and even arrests weren’t enough to curb fights on campus. So, a group of dads stepped up, and have committed to being present at the school every day. There hasn’t been a fight in over a month, and now kids say they love going to school. 

They call themselves “Dads on Duty,” replete with sweatpants, gas station coffee, and dad jokes worthy of eye rolls. They fist bump students in hallways, providing a fathering gauntlet that is deterring fights and decreasing gang activity. “Not everybody has a father figure at home – or a male, period, in their life,” one of the dads told CBS News.

The crisis in Shreveport required more than good intentions. It required fathers. After all, God created dads for just this kind of thing. I love how these dads stepped up and stepped in. Their actions offer a real-life example of the difference it makes when we find ways to answer four simple questions: What good can we celebrate? What’s missing that we can offer? What’s broken that we can fix? What evil must we oppose?

Copyright 2021 by the Colson Center for Christian Worldview. Reprinted from BreakPoint.org with permission.