Panel: Marriage's Best Days Have Gone By

WASHINGTON -- The institution of marriage in the United States has steadily declined in strength over the past four decades, according to a report released last month by a panel of scholars and advocates.

The U.S. Marriage Index, the brainchild of David Blankenhorn, president of the Institute for American Values, seeks to quantify the health of marriage in the United States in the same way economists use leading indicators to parse the state of the country's economy.

"We're just proposing a way of numerically capturing these trends so that people can see them," he says.

The index combined five statistics -- the percentage of adults between the ages of 20 and 54 who are married, the percentage of adults who reported being a "very happy" with their marriages, the percentage of first marriages intact, the percentage of births to married parents and the percentage of children living with their own married parents -- to reach a composite score illustrating the state of America's nuptial unions. In 1970, that score totaled 76.2; by 2008, it had dropped to 60.3.

Almost 90 percent of children were born to married parents in 1970; last year, it was 60 percent. Of adults between ages 20 and 54, 78.6 percent were married in 1970, compared with 57.2 percent in 2008. The portion of first marriages that remained intact dropped from 77.4 percent in 1970 to 61.2 percent last year.

Blankenhorn says the index was born partly out of his frustration with the difficulty of talking publicly about the subject of marriage.

"There's a lot of genuine opinion out there that really marriage is something that we ought to leave to people's private decision- making and it's not society's business to get into," he concedes. "You're going into their bedroom. You're going into their private lifestyle choices. You're going into situations you can't possibly understand."