"Those whom the gods would destroy," runs the ancient proverb, "they first drive insane." Surveying the sorry and deteriorating state of mental health in this country, we may well suppose that the gods are fully intent upon destroying us. For although not all Americans suffering from a mental illness should be considered insane, any degradation of mental health threatens that balance and rationality which buttress our sanity. And according to the nation’s mental health authorities, it is imbalance and irrationality that have grown increasingly prevalent in recent decades.

Analysis of the etiology of the national upsurge in mental illness soon isolates family disintegration as a prime cause. Under further scrutiny, however, the relationship between family disintegration and mental illness turns out to be far from a simple and one-directional cause-and-effect relationship. For a species of unacknowledged madness–a kind of ideological lunacy–has not only undermined family life in many ways, but it has also distorted our very conception of mental well-being. Consequently, some mental states subversive of the family–previously recognized as psychological disorders–have now been redefined as normal.

So our national epidemic of mental illness would actually appear worse if the mental-health professionals had not normalized some antifamily mental disorders. Therapists may, for instance, declare that a patient’s narcissism actually reflects a robust self-image. But the trick of redefining sickness as health goes only so far: no amount of sophisticated word play can hide the suicidal depression of children hurt by the divorce that the narcissist demands. And so the hidden, unacknowledged insanity of anti-family ideology fuels an undeniable rise in mental illness, a rise no amount of sophistry can define out of existence.

In his 1927 book The Outline of Sanity, the British journalist G.K. Chesterton argued that in a truly sane social order, "the normal man" would live with his wife and children on a small, largely self-sufficient family estate. Such a social order spelled sanity for Chesterton because under it, "ordinary men were clothed with powers and privileges and a kind of authority.... The ordinary man had a right [in such an order] to judge of his children’s health, and generally to bring up children to the best of his ability." Because ordinary men had largely been pushed into cities and denied this kind of life, Chesterton lamented that "modern civilization has lost unity"–and has lost sanity in the process. In calling for a social re-ordering which would again give typical men the privileges and authority of a small family estate, Chesterton stressed our need for "a social circle," based first of all on the family, in which men, women, and children "know the end and the beginning and the rounding of our little life."1

No reform in the foreseeable future will put the average American back on a small family farm. Yet many Americans still enjoy the sanity-protecting benefits of living within the social circle of the family, a circle that continues to foster good mental health by reminding us of the end, the beginning, and the rounding of our little life. Unfortunately, the number of Americans living within the family’s protective circle has declined sharply in recent decades as divorce and illegitimacy rates have soared, while marriage and marital fertility rates have plummeted. Chesterton would not be surprised by these trends and would–with considerable justice–attribute them to the economic pressures which have moved Americans off the family farm (where shared labors reinforced bonds between husband and wife, parents and children) and have pushed them into cities where few labors are shared by family members and where hundreds of economic and cultural forces work to separate parent from child, husband from wife.2 Still, millions of American city-dwellers have succeeded in keeping their marriages strong and in instilling strong moral convictions in their children, thereby providing convincing evidence that the sanity-reinforcing benefits of the family circle remain available to urban, as well as rural, Americans.

But sadly, as a growing number of Americans have repudiated the moral demands of marriage, of child-rearing, and of family life, the social circle most important to safeguarding our sanity has broken, and the mental health of millions has leaked away as a consequence.

That the mental health of Americans has suffered a general decline in recent decades scarcely requires asserting. Mental-health authorities speak frankly of "an epidemic of mental disorders." This epidemic has hit the young with particular force: psychiatrists report "an earlier onset of depression through the 20th century," causing "a sharp rise in rates of depression among adolescents and young adults."3 Worse, the problem extends even to pre-adolescents, with pediatricians limning a three-fold increase in psychosocial problems among patients between the ages of 4 and 15.4 Predictably, the epidemic of mental illness has caused an unprecedented reliance on psychotropic drugs (Prozac for the adults, Ritalin for the younger set), raising fears that America is fast becoming a "culture of pill-poppers."5

Though this upsurge in mental illness has been glossed with a variety of divergent commentaries, analysts increasingly acknowledge the importance of recent changes in family life. For again and again–whether their focus is on the elderly, on adults, on adolescents, or on children–epidemiologists are finding the same pattern: those outside of the family circle of sanity suffer from mental illness at much higher rates than those inside.

The Benefits of Wedlock  

"Married persons have significantly lower anxiety and depression scores than unmarried persons," reports health researcher Peggy A. Thoits, who reports that the mental-health advantage of wedlock persists even when married people have experienced more traumatic experiences than their unwed peers. Thoits also disputes the claims of feminists who have asserted that wedlock confers benefits on men, but not on women. The difference in mental health favoring the married over the unmarried turns out, according to Thoits, to be "relatively strong among women, weaker among men."6

And just as an intact marriage safeguards mental health, divorce damages it. Researchers at the University of Michigan have identified a strong "depressogenic effect of marital disruption," an effect accounting for "a significant positive association...between separation/divorce and depression." No artifact of "increased financial pressures or other secondary changes in roles," this depressogenic effect "shows clearly… that people grieve for lost marriages and that this grief can directly cause depression."7 And the mental-health advantage of wedlock proves particularly vital for women when there are children in the home. Authors of a 1996 study substantiate this point when they conclude that the married mothers in their sample were "much less likely to be depressed than single mothers," whether divorced or never-married.8

When the focus shifts from mental pathology to mental well-being, wedlock still comes out way ahead. A seventeen-nation study conducted in 1998 revealed that, in Peoria as in Paris, "married persons have significantly higher level of happiness than person who are not married." And once again the feminist nay-sayers are rebuffed: "Marriage," the authors of the 1998 study remark, "protects women just as much from unhappiness as it protects males." Proponents of the view that cohabitation serves as the functional equivalent of marriage likewise receive a comeuppance: compared to single persons, cohabitors enjoy an increase in happiness that measures "less than one quarter of [that] of married persons," clearly indicating that "marriage protects more against unhappiness than does cohabitation."9

No wonder, then, that Robert Coombs of the UCLA Medical School emphasizes the "therapeutic benefit of marriage." Coombs believes that rates for alcoholism, suicide, schizophrenia, and other psychiatric problems run lower among the married than unmarried peers because the married man or woman has a "continuous companionship with a spouse who provides interpersonal closeness, emotional gratification, and support in dealing with daily stress."10

But an intact marriage confers mental-health advantages not only on the husband and wife, but also on their children. Consequently, the national retreat from family life has exposed children, as well as adults, to the threat of mental illness. In a 2000 study of the national upsurge in psychological problems among children, researchers at the Pittsburgh School of Medicine highlighted the correlation between the growing incidence of such problems and the rising number of single-parent families. "Children from single-parent households," they pointed out, "were roughly twice as likely to be identified with psychosocial problems" as peers in intact families.11

Perils of the One-Parent Home  

One reason for the upsurge in psychological problems among children in single-parent homes was isolated in a 1993 study which fixed the blame on the "harsh, unresponsive parenting" of impoverished unmarried mothers–parenting which is decidedly lower in "emotional responsiveness" than that observed among married mothers. Such maternal harshness naturally fosters "poor mental health" and "high levels of [mental-illness] symptoms among children."12 And by putting children into homes without both biological parents, divorce and illegitimacy also exposes children to a markedly elevated risk of sexual abuse, with all of its long-lasting psychological trauma.13 Is it any wonder that the authors of a 1993 study characterized children in single-parent homes as "moody, sad, and nervous"?14

But the psychological effects of growing up in a broken home are much more than a passing mood. The heightened vulnerability to mental illness among children from broken homes persists well into adolescence and beyond. Mental-health authorities, in fact, report that adolescents from broken homes are "overrepresented among patients at mental-health centers," accounting for between 50 and 80 percent of the patients in some institutions.15 And in a 2000 study, scholars from the University of Southern California established that, even after adolescence, adults reared in broken homes suffer from a "significantly lower level of general psychological well-being" than peers reared in intact families.16 In another study done just five years earlier, British and American child psychologists documented a highly significant link (p < .0001) between having experienced parental divorce between the ages of 7 and 16 and having an elevated score at age 23 on the Malaise Inventory used to assess overall mental health. The British and American researchers interpret these findings as evidence that parental divorce often puts children into "negative life trajectories through adolescence into adulthood."17 It is with such grim findings in view that sociologist John Mirowsky of Ohio State University expresses fears that "the children [of divorced parents] may never recover."18

All hopes for recovery disappear for the now-too-numerous adolescents whose lives are so darkened by parental divorce that they commit suicide. Social workers John Woderski and Pamela Harris identify "turmoil in American families" as a prime reason that the suicide rate skyrocketed among teens and young adults during the latter decades of the 20th century.19 Their view has been corroborated by officials from the California Department of Mental Health, who discovered that over half (52%) of adolescent suicides investigated for 1986 involved children from homes in which the decedent’s parents were divorced or separated.20 Lamentably, the suicide risk among the children of divorced parents actually grows when those parents remarry. A 1998 study found adolescents in stepfamilies "particularly vulnerable" to suicidal behavior, with an alarming 38 percent exhibiting suicidal characteristics, compared to 20 percent in single-parent homes and just 9 percent in intact families.21

But then the teenage children of divorced parents are not the only ones pushed over the brink by divorce. In his studies of suicide in America, statistician Bijou Yang has isolated the divorce rate as "the only variable that had a consistent impact on the suicide rates of all social groups," male and female, old and young, wealthy and poor.22

And unfortunately, divorce counts as only one of many manifestations of a national retreat from family life, and all of them carry harmful consequences for mental health. For instance, in the movement of mothers into paid employment in recent decades, we see a development which has impaired the mental health of husbands, children, and the mothers themselves. "Women’s employment," according to Rutgers sociologist Sarah Rosenfield, "is negative for husbands’ mental health," with relatively high income for wives predicting symptoms of "demoralization, sadness, anxiety, and hopelessness-helplessness" for their husbands.23 Maternal employment also harms the mental health of young children, in large part because it typically translates into non-parental child care. Psychiatrist Jack C. Westman warns of the "adverse consequences" resulting from turning parenting over to "impersonal institutions" such as day-care centers.24 Even some day-care center operators have acknowledged seeing "how children in day-care suffer from separation, anxiety, and depression despite competent staff."25 These disturbing day-care patterns have been documented at the University of Minnesota by psychologists who report "anxious and withdrawn behavior" and elevated blood cortisol levels among day-care children.26 Child-development experts at Penn State and the University of Michigan warn that day-care threatens healthy psychological development in another way, too: by incubating chronic otitis media, a type of ear infection which often causes "mild hearing loss," day care produces "hard of hearing children [who] exhibit social problems characterized by less acceptance by their peers, a tendency to be more aggressive in their behavior, and serious difficulty in making friends. The result is a high degree of social isolation."27

Maternal employment can even hurt the mental health and emotional well-being of children because of behavior patterns which develop when an overworked mother is home with her children. UCLA psychologists have found that "job stressors" for employed mothers often translate into "parental withdrawal" and "negative emotion spillover effects" for their children. The UCLA scholars fear that when employment stress degrades the quality of mother-child relationships day after day, "the cumulative effects of repeated failure to contain negative affect may be quite detrimental" for children’s psychological development.28

From Marriage to Depression  

But concerns about what maternal employment does to children should not obscure the risk that such employment poses for the employed women themselves. For women’s employment puts their mental health at risk in at least two ways. First, as wives’ employment levels rise, marriages grow more fragile and more women find themselves without the mental-health support of an intact marriage. For as sociologist Kingsley Davis has argued, a wife’s employment undermines the gender "complementarity" which has traditionally reinforced marriage.29 Looking at the same reality, economist Gary Becker has remarked that "the gain from marriage is reduced by a rise in the earnings and labor force participation of women and by a fall in fertility, because a sexual division of labor becomes less advantageous."30 Predictably enough, then, sociologists regard women’s increased participation in the labor force in recent years as a prime reason for the decline in the marriage rate and the rise in the divorce rate. And inevitably, fewer women in intact marriages means more women in psychologists’ offices. Nor can it be assumed that remarriage will fix a woman’s mental-health problems if her employment has caused a divorce: recent research indicates that "the stepparenting role has negative mental health connotations for women."31

Even when a wife’s employment does not destroy her marriage, it can hurt her mental health by overwhelming her with stress. Researchers Beth Rushing and Annette Schwabe report that women in full-time employment frequently suffer from "role overload" and consequent mental "distress," not found among women employed part-time or not at all.32

But the third way that a wife’s employment may impair her mental health is by keeping her from having children, so denying her the psychologically beneficial "role enhancement" which comes with motherhood, especially for women with large families.33 No one should be surprised that depression rates among women have climbed as fertility rates have dropped.

The sharp drop in fertility signals more than a threat to the mental health of individual women. The "birth dearth" evident in the United States and other industrialized countries looks increasingly like a collective form of despair, an insane impulse to commit intergenerational suicide. And just as a depressed, suicidal individual lacks mental energy and creativity, so too does a sterile, demographically suicidal nation. As the number of young people drops, intellectual vitality, imagination, and energy disappear from the country, while despair and depression spread among the childless geriatrics. "The Birth Dearth," in the opinion of social commentator Ben Wattenberg, "hurts us in every conceivable geopolitical way: militarily, economically, politically, and culturally."34 Even a strong advocate of population control such as Colin Tudge concedes that a population with fewer children and a rising average age faces "problems in the short run."35 The mental-health difficulties caused by depressed fertility may in fact not be so shortrun. Psychologist Deborah Gold has established that men and women over age 65 rely heavily on siblings in "reconstructing a chaotic lifetime into a coherent and meaningful whole in late life."36 Putting together this meaningful whole may prove impossible for members of the Baby Bust generation, who have few or no siblings.

Betrayal of the Professionals  

And if aging Baby Busters–lacking the psychological support of a brother or sister–turn to a therapist or psychologist for assistance, they are likely to find only frustration and disappointment. For a kind of psychological imbalance now pervades the very community of professionals proffering cures for mental illness. This illness evinces itself in the way these experts have, as a group, betrayed marriage and family life, despite their critical importance as props to mental health. Even worse, mental-health experts have in recent decades collaborated in the redefining of mental illness in ways that have hidden the extent and the causes of our national epidemic of mental disorders.

That many modern psychologists have lost the ability to draw the line between mental health and mental illness, between sanity and insanity, would not have surprised Chesterton. For he would have anticipated the natural consequence of their collective decision to break the only social circle which might have given them an understanding of "the end and the beginning and the rounding of our little life." They have turned against the family. Psychiatrist Paul Pearsall of Sinai Hospital in Detroit thus complains:

Many of our current psychotherapists were trained in the times of the ‘me’ generation. Their teachers, the theorists they read about, themselves did not maintain strong family ties. A check of the heroes of psychiatry and psychology reveals that almost every one of them failed in their relationships. Many therapists themselves are divorced or have abdicated family responsibility....Psychology thinks that health is individualistic, perhaps because so many psychotherapists themselves have been so individualistic in their approach to life. The philosophy seems to be ‘if your marriage is broken, get a new part’ rather than ‘if your marriage is broken, fix it.’37

Clinical psychologist Diane Medved goes so far as to indict "a troublesome number of [her] colleagues," who have lent their services to "the divorce industry," their labors actually "keeping the wheels of divorce spinning."38

As a result of their treason against the family, many mental-health professionals now know less about mental health than their patients. The dubiousness of the care offered by such professionals came to light in a 1989 presentation before the American Orthopsychiatric Association in which researchers reported survey data showing that many therapists now regard the strong emotional ties of mentally healthy families with suspicion, while viewing families with relatively low "cohesion" as normal. Such findings, the researchers reasoned, raise "concerns about inherent tension between the values and expectations that therapists may have and those of families."39

The therapist’s role in undermining marriage and family life also attracted the attention of the prominent sociologist Robert Bellah and his colleagues in their 1985 study Habits of the Heart. "In its pure form," the Bellah team observes, "the therapeutic attitude denies all forms of obligation and commitment in relationships, replacing them only with the ideal of full, open, honest communication among self-actualized individuals." The "therapeutic view" thus "not only refuses to take a moral stand, it actively distrusts ‘morality’" and so fosters "a purely contractual ethic [which] leaves every commitment unstable." "The egalitarian love between therapeutically self-actualized persons," in the view of the Bellah researchers, "is...incompatible with self-sacrifice."40 The effects of this therapeutic war against commitment, moral integrity, and self-sacrifice may be seen in any divorce court or welfare office.

Radical individualism and its concomitant rejection of family constraints show through again and again in the practice of modern psychology. We may glimpse them, for instance, in many psychologists’ heavy dependence upon a diagnosis of "co-dependency," defined as "the psychological disease of loving too much," a suspicious excess of love found among people "in tune with the C[o]D[ependent] person instead of themselves."41 People divorcing their spouses in order to protect their personal space never need to worry about suffering from an "excess of love," nor about being in tune with someone other than themselves.

But the modern psychologists’ inability to distinguish between mental health and mental sickness evinces itself perhaps even more clearly in the way that their profession has in recent decades reversed its attitude toward two open assaults on the family: feminism and homosexuality.

Just a half-century ago, psychiatrists generally viewed feminism as a symptom of mental unbalance. Though psychology has no doubt harbored a few closet feminists since its beginnings as a science, Marynia Farnham, M.D. and her co-writer Ferdinand Lundberg had no reason to fear serious professional opposition when they wrote in 1947 that "a female who attempts to achieve masculinity is psychically ill in the same way as a male who attempts to achieve femininity." They knew that their colleagues generally shared their fear of the "vast individual suffering for men, as well as women, and much public disorder," sure to follow from feminism’s "negation of femaleness."42 Similarly, any psychiatrist who spoke out against homosexuality could count on the support of his colleagues; until 1973, when the American Psychiatric Association officially removed homosexuality from its list of recognized "psychiatric disorders."43

Now, mental-health professionals not only regard feminism and homosexuality as normal they aggressively call into question the mental balance of anyone who disapproves of either. Psychologist Annette Baisden of the U.S. Naval Operational Medicine Institute, for instance, decries the "sexism" inherent in the "social traditions that limited [women’s] potential" in the past, even as she denounces the continuing sexism which prevents the realization of "a truly pluralistic society."44

In the same spirit, psychiatrist Katherine A. O’Hanlan calls for the extirpation of all "homophobia," defined as "a health hazard" born of "unreasoning fear of or antipathy toward homosexuals and homosexuality." O’Hanlan claims the warrant of psychological science in waging her campaign against all negative responses to homosexuality, "from social avoidance to legal and religious proscription to violence."

And she dismisses her own profession’s previous analysis of homosexuality as a mental disorder (an analysis which held sway for more than a century) as mere prejudice, "reflective only of the social mores at the time."45 Yet we may rightly wonder what principle of psychological science legitimates a war against homophobia at a time when the more candid homosexual activists frankly acknowledge that in their effort to win acceptance for homosexuality, they are trying to effect "a transformation in sexuality" in which sex is torn away form "family reproduction" and "increasingly serves to pleasure individualized men and women."46

True Mental Imbalance  

No doubt, earlier psychological strictures against feminism and homosexuality did reflect prevailing social mores. But that hardly invalidates their psychological validity. For those mores reinforced marital and family ties which epidemiologists are increasingly forced to recognize as vital to shielding men, women, and children from psychological illnesses, including suicidal depression, illnesses which no amount of psychological ingenuity or redefinition can turn into normality or mental health. Indeed, the epidemic in indisputable mental illness may be traced in part to the relatively recent decision by mental-health professionals to promulgate radically individualistic theories and practices which betray rather than support the family. By weakening families, these theories and practices actually conduce to mental illnesses that might be prevented by reinforcing wedlock and family life.

Because they foster mental imbalance, anyone applying the scriptural test "By their fruits, ye shall know them" (Matt. 7:20) can only conclude that these psychological theories and practices have themselves sprung from a kind of mental imbalance, a kind of ideological insanity. Far from having a cure for the epidemic of mental illness spreading across the nation, the proponents of such theories and practices are carriers of disease.

The nation will have begun the recovery of its mental health only when we as Americans turn away from the spreaders of contagion and again entrust the care of our mental well-being to professionals who (with Chesterton) understand that it is the family which teaches us our ends and our beginnings; the family which, first and last, puts us in our right mind.

Endnotes

1 G.K. Chesterton, The Outline of Sanity (New York: Dodd, Mead & Company, 1927), 155, 256-257.

2 See Allan C. Carlson, From Cottage to Work Station: The Family’s Search for Social Harmony in the Industrial Age (San Francisco: Ignatius, 1993).

3 Gerald L. Klerman, "The Age of Youthful Melancholia: Depression and the Baby Boomers," USA Today (Magazine), July 1988, pp. 69-71.

4 See Kelly J. Kelleher et al., "Increasing Identification of Psychosocial Problems: 1979-1996," Pediatrics 105[2000]:1313-1321.

5 See Sharon Begley, "One Pill Makes You Larger, and One Pill Makes You Small..." Newsweek, 7 Feb. 1994, pp. 36-42.

6 Peggy A. Thoits, "Gender and Marital Status Differences in Control and Distress: Common Stress versus Unique Stress Explanations," Journal of Health and Social Behavior 28[1987]: 7-22.

7 Robert H. Aseltine , Jr. and Ronald Kessler, "Mental Disruption and Depression in a Community Sample," Journal of Health and Social Behavior 34[1993]: 237-251.

8 David H. Demo and Alan C. Acock, "Family Structure, Family Process, and Adolescent Well-Being," Journal of Research on Adolescence 6[1996]: 457-488.

9 Steven Stack and Ross Eshleman, "Marital Status and Happiness: A 17-Nation Study," Journal of Marriage and the Family 60[1998]: 527-536.

10 Robert H. Coombs, "Marital Status and Personal Well-Being: A Literature Review," Family Relations 40[1991]: 97-102.

11 Kelleher et al., "Increasing Identification of Psychosocial Problems," 1313-1321.

12 Jane D. McLeod and Michael J. Shanahan, "Poverty, Parenting, and Children’s Mental Health," American Sociological Review 58[1993]: 351-366.

13 David Finkelhor et al., "Sexually Abused Children in a National Survey of Parents: Methodological Issues," Child Abuse and Neglect 21[1997]: 1-9.

14 Gong-Soong Hong and Shelley I. White-Means, "Do Working Mothers Have Healthy Children?" Journal of Family and Economic Issues 14[1993]: 163-181.

15 Helen S. Merskey and G.T. Swart, "Family Background and Physical Health of Adolescents Admitted to an Inpatient Psychiatric Unit: I, Principal Caregivers," Canadian Journal of Psychiatry 34[1989]: 79-83.

16 Timothy J. Biblarz and Greg Gottainer, "Family Structure and Children’s Success: A Comparison of Widowed and Divorced Single-Mother Families," Journal of Marriage and the Family 62[2000]: 533-548.

17 P. Lindsay Chase-Lansdale, Andrew J. Cherlin, and Kathleen E. Kiernan, "The Long-Term Effects of Parental Divorce on the Mental Health of Young Adults: A Developmental Perspective," Child Development 66[1995]: 1614-1634.

18 John Mirowsky, "An Informative Sociology of Health and Well-Being," Journal of Health and Social Behavior 39[1998]: 1-3.

19 John S. Wodarski and Pamela Harris, "Adolescent Suicide: A Review of Influences and the Means for Prevention," Social Work 32[1989]: 477-484.

20 Franklyn L. Nelson, "Youth Suicide in California: A Study of Perceived Causes and Interventions," Community Mental Health 24[1988]: 31-42.

21 Judith L. Rubenstein et al., "Suicidal Behavior in Adolescents: Stress and Protection in Different Family Contexts," American Journal of Orthopsychiatry 68[1998]: 274-284.

22 Bijou Yang, "The Economy and Suicide: A Time-Series Study of the U.S.A.," American Journal of Economics and Society 51[1992]: 87-99, emphasis added.

23 Sarah Rosenfield, "The Costs of Sharing: Wives’ Employment and Husbands’ Mental Health," Journal of Health and Social Behavior 33[1992]: 213-225.

24 Jack C. Westman, "Juvenile Ageism: Unrecognized Prejudice and Discrimination Against the Young," Child Psychiatry and Human Development 21[1991]: 237-246.

25 See Edward M. Levine, "Day Care: Cons, Costs, Kids," Chicago Tribune, 18 September 1984, Sec. 1, p. 15.

26 Kathryn Tout et al., "Social Behavior Correlates of Cortisol Activity in Child Care: Gender Differences and Time-of-Day Effects," Child Development 69[1998]: 1247-1262.

27 Lynne Vernon-Feagans, Elizabeth E. Manlove, and Brenda L. Volling, "Otitis Media and the Social Behavior of Day-Care Attending Children," Child Development 67[1996]: 1528-1539.

28 Rena L Repetti and Jennifer Wood, "Effects of Daily Stress at Work on Mothers’ Interactions With Preschoolers," Journal of Family Psychology 11[1997]: 90-108.

29 Kingsley Davis, "Contemporary Marriage," in Contemporary Marriage: Comparative Perspectives on a Changing Institution, ed. Kingsley Davis (New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 1985), 47.

30 Gary Becker, A Treatise on the Family (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1981), 248.

31 Beth Rushing and Annette Schwabe, "The Health Effects of Work and Family Characteristics: Gender and Race Comparisons," Sex Roles 33[1995]: 159-205.

32 Ibid.

33 Ibid.

34 Ben J. Wattenberg, The Birth Dearth (New York: Pharos Books, 1987), 99.

35 Colin Tudge, The Variety of Life (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000), 613.

36 Deborah T. Gold, "Generational Solidarity: Conceptual Antecedents and Consequences," American Behavioral Scientist 33[1989]: 19-32.

37 Paul Pearsall, The Power of Family: Strength, Comfort, and Healing (New York: Doubleday, 1990), 18, 117-120.

38 Diane Medved, The Case Against Divorce (New York: Donald I. Fine, 1989), 93-100.

39 Anne E. Kazak et al., "Perception of Normality in Families: Four Samples," Journal of Family Psychology 2(1989): 277-291.

40 Robert N. Bellah et al., Habits of the Heart: Individualism and Commitment in American Life (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985), 100-101, 129.

41 See Mickie C. Walker, "Co-Dependency and Probation," Federal Probation, June 1992, pp. 16-18.

42 Ferdinand Lundberg and Marynia F. Farnham, Modern Woman: The Lost Sex; quoted in Allan C. Carlson, Family Questions: Reflections on the American Social Crisis (New Brunswick: Transaction, 1988), 31.

43 See Richard L. Worsnop, "Gay Rights," C.Q. Researcher, 5 March 1993, pp. 195+.

44 Annette Baisden, "Women’s History Month 1999–Women: Putting Our Stamp on America," Defense Department, Air Force Department (USAF), 1999.

45 Katherine A. O’Hanlan, "Homophobia is a Health Hazard," USA Today (magazine), November 1996, pp. 26-29.

46 David John Frank and Elizabeth H. McEneaney, "The Individualization of Society and the Liberalization of State Policies on Same-Sex Relations, 1984-1995," Social Forces 77[1999]: 911-944.