There are all kinds of indexes in place to monitor the health of our economy such as the Consumer Price Index, the Gross National Product and the Housing Market, but researchers have noted that there is nothing in place to monitor the health of marriage. 

    The National Center on African American Marriages and Parenting and the Institute for American Values recently released, The Marriage Index: A Proposal to Establish Leading Marriage Indicators authored by a bi-partisan group of scholars and leaders. 

Authors of the report note that much time is spent carefully measuring and widely publicizing the nation’s leading economic indicators and mighty efforts to improve them, but there is little effort to measure our leading marriage indicators or attempts at improving them. This seems troublesome since there is a large body of research that suggests that the status of our marriages influence our well-being at least as much as the status of our finances.  

The index examines five leading indicators of the nation’s marriages that researchers found fundamental measurements that accurately reveal the direction and overall health of marriage as a US social institution. 

 “Americans who are concerned about marriage have some reason to be confused,” said Elizabeth Marquardt, Vice President for Family Studies and Director of the Center for Marriage and Families at the Institute for American Values.  “We hear and read about a lot of new findings – divorce is up, divorce is down, people are marrying later or not at all, more people are living together, but plenty of kids are still being raised by their own married parents – and it can be hard to know which end is up. One thing we hope to do with the U.S. Marriage Index is to suggest one clear way of measuring the health of marriage as an institution – so that we can track its up and downs over time, and so that, in the future, we have a way of measuring whether our efforts are working, or not.”

So what are the leading indicators?  The first indicator is the percentage of married adults.  Knowing the percentage of adults who are married sheds light on the strength of the institution of marriage.  The percentage of married persons “very happy” with their marriage is the second suggested indicator.  Marital quality affects the health of marriage in two main ways: first, happily married people probably have stronger marriages and second, it affects the link  - for good or ill – between adults and children that marriage is supposed to secure.  Tracking marital quality also provides other clues about the state of marriage as an institution. 

The third indicator is the percentage of intact first marriages.  One way to help gauge the health of marriage is to measure the proportion of US adults who practice a lifelong commitment to marriage.  In 1970, 77.4 percent of first time marriages were intact, whereas only 61.2 percent were intact in 2007.  The percent of births to married parents is the fourth indicator.   In 1970, 89.3 percent of children were born to married parents.  Today it is 60.3 percent.  What are the implications of this for children’s well-being?  The last indicator is the percentage of children living with their own married parents.  Marriage not only ensures that children are born into a stable family – it also intends that children are raised with their own biological or adoptive mother and father.  Summing up the scholarly evidence:  Few propositions have more empirical support in the social sciences than this one:  Compared to all other family forms, families headed by married, biological parents are best for children. 

“If we can make a US Marriage Index just another important piece of data about the health of our nation – one that journalists, scholars, and social leaders refer to as easily as they refer to any other measure of the well-being of US society – it will be a sign that America recognizes that marriage matters, for our kids, for our communities and for the future of our nation, said Ms. Marquardt.”