D.I.V.O.R.C.E.
I was reading Jeff Jacoby this morning and was prompted to look up the divorce rates in Japan, and found the following list:
Divorce rate per 1000 couples
Japan: 2.2
USA:4.0
Germany: 2.4
France: 1.9
Italy: 0.7
UK: 2.6
Sweden: 2.4
It’s interesting how in this respect, as in so many others, the US is an outlier. More secular countries like the UK, Sweden, and France have much lower divorce rates, and Japan (a Shinto country) has a divorce rate about half of that in the US.
Jacoby frequently appears to inhabit a parallel universe, in which the oil companies making record profits as we pay record prices for gas is a good thing, and where price-gouging in the wake of a catastrophe is also a good thing (“Higher prices make it possible for victims to get the help they need to ride out the crisis and for the devastated region to recover as quickly as possible”). Yes, he’s a conservative, and opposed to the “reality-based community.”
So when I read the following in an analysis of why birthrates are declining — “Skyrocketing rates of divorce have made women less likely to have as many children as in generations past” I was surprised. If this is true it’s slipped by me. It seems to me that people get married and have kids on the assumption that they’re going to be sticking together. Then they (sometimes) get divorced, marry again, and have more kids on the assumption that they’re going to be sticking together. I’ve not been aware of people planning the arrival of their offspring on the assumption that they’re going to get divorced at some point. And in fact the birthrate in the US is much the same now as it was in 1957, well before divorce started to dramatically increase (around 1970).
And since Jacoby had mentioned that the birthrate in Japan had started to decline earlier than in other countries I thought it would be interesting to check out the divorce rate there. Anyway, the divorce rate in Italy (the country whose birthrate decline Jacoby highlights) is the lowest of the lot, suggesting there’s not much in his analysis. As usual.
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Published: Jun 22 2008
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Category: Apropos of nothing
I’ve heard some interesting statistics surrounding divorce and religion. Supposedly, evangelical Christians have the same divorce rate that other people have, but a friend of mine going through a marriage counciling class told me that there was a statistic that supported the old proverb, “the family that prays together stays together.” According to this statistic, when a couple has a habit of praying together, they have a divorce rate around only 1 or 10 percent. (it’s been awhile since I was told this, so I don’t remember specifically).
Those numbers, by the way, are divorces per 1000 couples per year.
“It is a surprise to many that divorce rates are highest in the “Bible Belt”, and among conservative Christians and Jews. They are lowest in the Northeast, and among mainline/liberal Christians, Atheists and Agnostics.” That info is from Religioustolerance.org.
I’ve no idea, frankly, why this should be the case, unless it’s to do with people with liberal values being more on the whole more tolerant (if indeed that’s the case).
I haven’t seen any figures for families that pray together. That would be an interesting subset to examine. I wonder about families that meditate together?
If you’re interested in divorce rates you should check out this article that analyzes the divorce era and the reasons behind it as well as its negative outcomes http://www.freemychild.com/pdf/fm_disposabledivorce.pdf