The Vulnerable Child: What Really Hurts America's Children and What We Can Do About It.

Richard Weissbourd, a family policy expert at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government, sets out to dispel the pervasive gloom and cynicism about public programs for children with some good news: there are successful programs that make a difference in children's lives, and they do not require vast sums of money or huge armies of government workers. In the second and more useful half of this book, he chronicles these successes, from community policing to neighborhood health clinics to revitalized schools. Weissbourd also offers a compelling portrait of child-serving professionals on the front lines whose daily work is to "befriend families the community wants to forget." Indeed, this book is at its best when it describes the lives of "vulnerable providers//--the public shcool teachers, police officers, social workers, and the foot soldiers in the ranks of child-protective services--who are called upon to make wrenching and impossible decisions, often with too little information, too little time, and too little support.

The first and more polemical half of The Vulnerable Child is an attack on the "ideological" debate over families which, in Weissbourd's view, simplistically attributes children's problems to single causes such as racial discrimination, poverty, unemployment, or family break-down. All of this is beside the point, says Weissbourd; the point is that children's lives are shaped by a set of changing forces and institutions, and the task of improving children's welfare involves understanding and responding to these environmental complexities.

Yet although Weissbourd professes to offer a more complex view of children's environment, his map of the world is nonetheless highly selective and skewed toward the professional-service provider. The friendly neighborhood clinic and loving school loom large on the social landscape, while parents (especially fathers), friends, and church are faint and weak presences. For example, he describes religious conviction as a "flexible coping mechanism" and places fathers among "the various men who might be important to a child." To be sure, some children's worlds are bereft of families, fathers, and faith, and providers of professional services can play an important and helpful role. But they cannot replace the "close-in" institutions of family life, nor can they function as more than inferior substitutes. Weissbourd's argument would have been stronger if he had acknowledged this additional complexity, particularly since his own evidence suggests that professional child-serving institutions, however innovative and responsive, cannot reliably provide secure and enduring attachments for children. He notes, for example, that mentoring programs, which tie children to a "community" adult, often fail because" adults lose interest."

For Maggie Gallagher, the way to improve children's life prospects is to restore marriage as the primary social institution for bearing and raising children. Citing now-familiar statistics on high divorce rates, rising levels of unwed childbearing and cohabitation with children, and declining rates of marriage and remarriage, Gallagher sees marriage withering away, burdening children and communities with a host of problems, including increased poverty and economic insecurity, higher levels of juvenile crime and violence against women and children, and a growing loss of trust in the permanence of primary social bonds. Indeed, it is this loss of faith in marriage as a lasting union that fuels the cultural disposition to abandon married parenthood. As Gallagher explains, the reasoning is: If marriage doesn't last, why bother to get married in the first place and thus risk divorce? Why not live together or have a child "on one's own"? If Americans continue to follow this logic, she warns, marriage and child well-being will continue their down-ward spiral.

Gallagher is breaking new ground by introducing the subject of marriage into the debate. In the more than two decades of fierce debate over changes in the American family, attention has focused on the consequences of the break-down of the marital institution, such as fatherlessness, divorce, and illegitimacy, while marriage itself has been almost entirely neglected. She also breaks with the established political categories in the family debate. Many people see support for marriage as a conservative position. Yet Gallagher, a researcher at the Institute for American Values, is harshly critical of conservatives, taking aim at their celebration of rugged individualists when it has been rugged married couples who have built communities and raised children. And she is unbashed in looking to an activist government for help in rehabilitating marriage, calling for preferences in public housing, job training programs, tax credits, and a "marriage bonus" for low-income married couples with children.

But Gallagher is not only making an argument about the social usefulness of marriage in accomplishing the task of raising and sponsoring children into successful adulthood. Her book is also about marriage as a "good" and an end in itself, a way of reconciling the separate natures of men and women and of making possible the human aspiration toward enduring love. Indeed, without the ideal and aspiration toward marriage as a permanent bond, Gallagher explains, there can not be lasting love between men and women, but only short-term, nonbinding, and ultimately disappointing "love connections."

It is the larger moral argument that lifts The Abolition of Marriage above the dreary, dead-end debate over whether it is better for unhappily married couples to stick it out in grim and loveless marriages "for the sake of the children" or to put children through the trauma of divorce. This is a classic case of false choices, suggests Gallagher, and a telling sign of how impoverished our understanding of the purposes of marriage has become. Over the past thirty years, Americans have tried to turn marriage into an institution with all the virtues of free love, and, in so doing, have lost the institution itslef. As Gallagher sees it, the restoration of marriage as the primary social institution for bearing and raising children will require recapturing a vision of the undertaking as worthy for its own sake.

Yet this vision may be shaped, in part, by the rediscovery of marriage as an economic necessity. Presidential pollster Stan Greenberg recently asked the members of one of the core constituencies of the Democratic party, noncollege married men and women fifty years or younger, what they saw as the most helpful resources in uncertain economic times. Family, friends, and church ranked high on their list. Government was hardly mentioned; the same for professional service providers.