Introducing the Issue

Sara McLanahan is editor-in-chief of The Future of Children and director of the Center for Research on Child Wellbeing at Princeton University. Elisabeth Donahue is associate editor of The Future of Children and a lecturer at the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs at Princeton. Ron Haskins is a senior editor of The Future of Children and a senior fellow in the Economic Studies program at the Brookings Institution. Marriage has become a hot topic on the American domestic policy scene. The Bush administration is proposing to spend $1.5 billion over the next five years to increase “healthy” marriages.1 Gays and lesbians are demanding the right to marry.2 A few states are reconsidering no-fault divorce laws and experimenting with new types of “covenant marriage.”3 And legislators are scrutinizing tax and transfer policies for “marriage penalties.”4 These initiatives have been spurred by changes in marriage and childbearing during the latter part of the twentieth century and by mounting social science evidence that these changes are not in the best interests of children.