Soulmates & Deficits by David Mills

Soulmates & Deficits

The State of Our Unions Report Looks at Marital Economics

by David Mills

Dan Quayle Was Right,” declared the cover of (of all places) The Atlantic, after the then-vice president had chided a popular television show for glorifying single motherhood, and been roundly abused for his unenlightened views by nearly every major publication in America and every network news show. In the article, published in 1993, a freelance scholar named Barbara Dafoe Whitehead showed with copious evidence from social scientists that divorce and out-of-wedlock births were demonstrably bad for children, countering the convenient myths that the children were happier when their parents pleased themselves and that they easily “bounced back” from divorce.