When, we might ask, will we stop obsessing about what marriage means for us adults – about what we can get out of it or why we should be allowed to get out of it – and start coming to grips with what marriage as an institution – and our marriages in particular – mean for children.

There is a story that plays  itself out over and over in American culture. Progressive activists proclaim that a particular element of traditional wisdom about the family and parenting is the residue of old-fashioned religious convictions, with little relation to reality or to human flourishing. Invariably, social scientists lend their voices and expertise to the cause, insisting that there is no scientific evidence for the legitimacy of the older norms; surely, it is assumed, research will show that liberty and tolerance is the appropriate way forward. Eventually the activists and the academics find the support of the media and other cultural elites, who call for an end to the stigmatization of those who violate the old norms and mores.

As the decades pass however, a host of new problems arise, problems that society has never had to face. The abandonment of older assumptions about the family, it turns out, has a tremendous social cost after all. Research in the social sciences begins to suggest that even if the older ideals were rooted in religion and tradition, they make a whole lot of sense scientifically as well. We’re not sure why, but it turns out that our grandmothers really did have some wisdom.

Of course, there are enough counter-examples, instances in which society appropriately rejects the wisdom and mores of the past, such that it is not safe simply to trust our grandmothers either. Widespread cultural assumptions about race and gender rooted in the 19th Century have been thoroughly discredited – scientifically, morally, and theologically. Neither conservatism nor liberalism turns out to be an absolute guide in these matters. What we could use, however, is a solid dose of common sense, a measure of caution that might enable us to avoid the most destructive missteps.

Take, for instance, marriage and parenting. In the 1920s the first modern cultural revolution questioning longstanding sexual and marital norms swept across the United States. Research quickly followed that implied that most of what matters when it comes to parenting revolves around mothers. In the early 1930s the President’s Research Committee on Social Trendsbarely mentioned fathers in its chapter on the family. The section on parents and children declared, “The influence of the mother, who has repeated and frequent contacts with her offspring, is probably greater than that of any other member of the family, with the child’s brothers and sisters, if there are any, coming next.”

As Rutgers University sociologist David Popenoe shows, it took decades for the consequences of the new assumptions to work themselves out, but these consequences have been nothing less than catastrophic. In his classic Life Without Father: Compelling New Evidence that Fatherhood and Marriage Are Indispensable For the Good of Children and Society, published in 1996, Popenoe showed just how important fathers are for the development in children of a whole range of basic human capacities, skills, and virtues. Although some of this, he admitted, is cultural, much of it is rooted in basic human biology and evolution.

The need for fathers, Popenoe made clear, does not amount simply to a need for two parents. To be sure, it can help mothers to have a second adult around, sharing responsibilities, watching the kids, and providing support and encouragement. But what is really necessary for kids is the presence and responsible, loving involvement of their biological mothers andfathers. Indeed, by most measurements children who grow up with stepfathers do significantly worse than those who grow up in intact families with their biological parents. In a surprising number of areas children of stepparents fare even worse on average than do children of single parents.

A similar cycle played itself out with reference to divorce. Divorce laws were liberalized across the country beginning with Ronald Reagan’s California in 1969. As the stigma first of divorce, then even of the divorce of parents, fell away, there was no shortage of scholars and family experts willing to assure parents that divorce was not hurting their children. What matters is not so much whether or not a marriage holds together, these experts argued, but whether or not the parents stay involved in the lives of their kids, maintaining a conflict-free relationship. In an article entitled “Happy Divorce” Newsweek went so far as to claim that researchers “have known for years that how parents divorce matters even more than the divorce itself.”

In her 2005 Between Two Worlds: The Inner Lives of Children of Divorce, Elizabeth Marquardt showed just how destructive this attitude has been for a whole generation of children raised by antagonized parents who were told that their children were “just fine.” Never mind the universally embraced consensus that divorce makes children far more likely to fail in school, be sexually promiscuous, act violently, commit a crime, or struggle with a host of psychological and relational problems. Marquardt studied the successful children of “good” divorces, showing just how much they suffered – and still suffer – from their parents’ inability to work things out. There is a small proportion of divorces that do actually help children, Marquardt admits (the one third of divorces that end dangerous, high-conflict marriages), but the vast majority only harm them.

Like Popenoe, Marquardt emphasized that what children need is not simply two parents, or the careful attention by multiple responsible adults. What they need more than anything else is the loving care and commitment of their married biological father and mother in an intact family home. Marquardt notes that “happy talk” about “good divorce” and “blended families” merely seeks to make parents feel better at the expense of their own children. “Divorce happy talk is our culture’s attempt to reconcile two competing desires: the desire to accept widespread divorce and the desire to raise happy, healthy children.” (Marquardt, 178)

It’s one thing to encourage those parents for whom divorce has been a necessary evil. It’s a whole other thing when the fragmentation of the family is embraced as simply another form of diversity. As Marquardt puts it, “when divorce happy talk minimizes, distorts, or ignores the pain felt by children of divorce, it crosses over in to the realm of harm… Can our culture get honest about children of divorce?” (Marquardt, 171)

When, we might ask, will we stop obsessing about what marriage means for us adults – about what we can get out of it or why we should be allowed to get out of it – and start coming to grips with what marriage as an institution – and our marriages in particular – mean for children.

Today we’re experiencing the same cycle with reference to same-sex parenting, although it has not yet fully played itself out. The gay rights movement has spawned a host of scholarly assurances that there is no evidence that children who are raised by same-sex parents flourish any less than do other children. Indeed, as a recent cover story of The Atlantic argues, in so many ways gay couples actually do better! Despite the fact that all of the data we do have shows that children raised by their married, biological parents do better on average than children raised in any other family structure, it is now conventional wisdom that somehow a biological father with a step-father – or a biological mother with a step mother, or merely two adoptive fathers or mothers – is somehow an exception to the ordinary rule.

These arguments are no more rooted in cool-headed research than were the old arguments about fatherhood and divorce. Mark Regnerus’s study in Social Science Research, published last year, caused a storm of controversy precisely because it drew attention to what the data on gay and lesbian parenting – limited as it is – actually shows:

The tenor of the last 10 years of academic discourse about gay and lesbian parents suggests that  there is little to nothing about them that might be negatively associated with child development, and  a variety of things that might be uniquely positive.

But the NFSS [the focus of Regnerus’s study] clearly reveals that children appear most apt to succeed well as adults—on multiple counts and across a variety of domains—when they spend their  entire childhood with their married mother and father, and especially when the  parents remain married to the present day. Insofar as the share of intact, biological  mother/father families continues to shrink in the United States, as it has, this  portends growing challenges within families, but also heightened dependence on  public health organizations, federal and state public assistance, psychotherapeutic  resources, substance use programs, and the criminal justice system.

None of this, as Regnerus points out, suggests that gays and lesbians, or step parents, or divorcees are worse people than are other parents. In fact, none of it means that they are any less capable, in their persons, of serving as loving, responsible parents. The issue has nothing to do with the particular adults in view, or with the dignity, affirmation, and tolerance that they assuredly deserve; it has everything to do with the marital and familial relationships that children need. We must, as a society, work through these issues not from the primary perspective  of religious morality, as is so often demanded from the right, nor from that of the dignity and equality of adults, as is demanded from the left, but from the perspective of what is just for children.

Matthew J. Tuininga is a doctoral candidate in Ethics and Society at Emory University, holds an MDiv from Westminster Seminary California and is licensed to preach in the United Reformed Churches in North America. He blogs at Christian in America, where this article first appeared; it is used with permission. [Editor’s note: the original URL (link) referenced in this article is no longer valid, so the link has been removed.]