Written by Derek Miedema

Gang shootings in Vancouver during the first few months of this year have caught the attention of the nation. The problems on Vancouver’s Downtown East Side make us aware of the cracks in the fabric of our society. The more cracks we see, the more we wonder how our society can be healed.

While there is no simple solution to these complex issues, the message at the Institute of Marriage and Family Canada Annual Policy Conference on March 12 was loud and clear: family breakdown is related to social breakdown.

Single parents – usually mothers – are more likely to be poor and their children are affected not only financially, but also emotionally. When individuals are separated from their families and find themselves without work, they may end up on the street. Canada had 70,828 divorces in 2003 and has increasing rates of cohabiting couples, a relationship form that breaks up more readily even than marriage. Divorce rates in the Church are similar to those in the mainstream culture. In the U.S., George Barna found that in 2008, 34 per cent of Protestant marriages and 28 per cent of Roman Catholic marriages end in divorce compared to 33 per cent for the population as a whole. We do not have comparable Canadian statistics, but we can be confident that Canada – and Canadian churches – are not immune from the impact of family breakdown.

The Right Honourable Iain Duncan Smith, founder of Britain’s Centre for Social Justice and the keynote speaker at the IMFC conference, recognizes five common ways that social breakdown shows up in the lives of individuals. In an interview with the IMFC, he described the second of five characteristics of social breakdown in this way: “They are highly likely to have grown up in a broken family, that is to say, a family where one of the two parents has been away either for periods of time or permanently.”

He adds: “You’re also likely to find a small but significant proportion live in families which are simply abnormal. That is to say that the parents – or parent, as is often the case – simply can’t cope with day-to-day life.”

In an interview before the IMFC conference, Kay Hymowitz, author of Marriage and Caste in America: Separate and Unequal Families in a Post-Marital Age, said:

“What I notice is that marriage does a lot more than provide two incomes, as it so often does these days. That it helps kids avoid poverty and all kinds of needs isn’t the whole story. And in fact, there is enough research showing that if you compare low income kids with lone parents to low income kids with married parents, the kids with married parents are going to do better. All of those variables help us understand that there’s something about marriage that changes outcomes for children.”

Since family breakdown is at the root of some social breakdown, one of the keys to the long-term healing of our society is strengthening the family. Healing our culture begins with increasing family stability by decreasing levels of divorce and single parenthood. Both experience in Britain and social science research is showing that these problems will only begin to be solved when families become stable, healthy places in which to live and grow up. The healing will address a broad range of social ills. Writing about the issue of gangs in Britain, Duncan Smith said that “[s]tabilizing family life is critical, for then we stand a chance of keeping the children in full-time education long enough for them to garner knowledge and skills to keep them in the mainstream of society.”

Social justice and the family are linked. Supporting strong, healthy families does justice to all the mothers, fathers and children involved. The sooner society understands this connection, the better off we’ll all be.

Presentations from the Institute of Marriage and Family Canada conference can be found online at www.imfcanada.org.

Derek Miedema is a researcher at the Institute of Marriage and Family Canada.