Will Indiana lawmakers create Office of Marriage Promotion?

Would Hoosier children be better off if every parent were married?

That’s the premise behind one state lawmaker’s proposal to create a government Office of Marriage Promotion.

“Look at the example of what’s happening in this city and the number of shootings,” said Rep. Jeff Thompson, R-Lizton. “It doesn’t occur in my community. I don’t like what’s happening. But there are regions and pockets where marriage is not the norm where children are born to.”

As Republican Gov. Mike Pence’s office has put it, “one of the greatest causes of poverty and inequality is the number of children born to unmarried parents.”

The Office of Marriage Promotion would be a state agency aimed at informing young people about research showing that children of married couples are healthier in many ways, Thompson said, while those born to single-parent households are more likely to live in poverty, commit crimes and drop out of school.

Just how, when and where that information would be delivered isn’t clear. Details at this point are unspecified.

But the simplicity that underscores the premise of Thompson’s bill — that merely being married produces good outcomes for children — is not something all experts agree with. The reason why children from two-parent homes are more likely to attend college, snag good jobs and stay away from drugs, they say, is likely much more complicated.

“We’re starting to mix up correlation and causation there,” said Derek Thomas, senior policy analyst for the Indiana Institute for Working Families.

Indiana University sociology chair Brian Powell also questions the supposed cause-and-effect of marriage.

“Is marriage the cause of something, or is it a result of a type of people? Is it that marriage leads to all these benefits? Or is it that people who get to get married would be getting those benefits anyway?” he said.

Marriage, Powell said, is more common among white, wealthy and well-educated people.

And certain perks come with marriage but aren’t necessarily unique to marriage — like having two incomes under one roof. That can happen, too, said Thomas of the Indiana Institute for Working Families, when people move in with their mothers or roommates.

Beyond that, might there be circumstances where children are better off with unmarried parents? What if a spouse is in an abusive relationship? Are the children still better off if the parents stay married? And are the children of two married but struggling parents in their teens better off than two financially stable and loving, but unmarried, parents in their 30s?

Indianapolis mother Amanda Louden, 46, has seen parenthood from both married and unmarried standpoints.

She had three sons with her former husband, deciding to marry to be traditional about it and for the convenience of everyone having the same last name. Louden later divorced her husband and had another son with her then-boyfriend.

And she says she doesn’t think marriage made that much of a difference in raising her children.

“It’s really an oversimplification to say that single parenting is bad,” Louden said. “Intact families where both parents are involved in their children’s lives, that’s good. I’m in favor of that. But let’s not demonize families that don’t have that. It’s demonizing people who are doing whatever they can.”

By the end of her marriage, as she said her husband struggled with alcohol problems, “it just wasn’t a healthy environment for me or the kids, and he didn’t want to be healthy with us.”

The father of her youngest son didn’t seem ready or interested in a live-in family role, she said. He became less involved and eventually stopped visiting.

Louden is now raising four sons on her own as a single mother. She disagrees that children with married parents are somehow automatically “better” than hers.

She says even if she “didn’t make the best choice with fathers,” her children still have family supports in less traditional ways.

Her friends help pick up her sons from school sometimes. Her mother kept working long past retirement age to help pay for daycare. Her father chipped in to help with expenses, too.

Still, money is always an issue.

“We don’t go on vacations, we don’t go out, we don’t do a lot of things that take a lot of money,” she said. “We go through 8 to 10 gallons of milk a week at my house.”

Louden works full-time as an office manager but adds, “I have no savings. I totally live practically paycheck to paycheck in some ways. I’m one big catastrophe away from complete financial ruin.”

Perhaps even more stressful, she said, is being the sole decision-maker for her family of five.

“I look at my friends who are married,” she said. “Even ones who don’t make a lot of money, they still have a basic comfort level because there is always somebody else there.

“I don’t have another partner who is as interested in my children and their lives as I am. I don’t have anyone else who cares as much as I do about, what should I do here?”

But it’s not just the outcome of children that spurred Thompson to push for the new state agency. Married parents, he and others argue, also are in the best interest of taxpayers.

Lawmakers such as Thompson say the rise in single parenting costs the public money, through funding free or reduced lunches at school, public housing, jails and unemployment support.

“Taxpayers aren’t getting their money back,” he said, “because they’re paying for other people’s decisions and choices in reality.”

He said traditional marriage promotion would be like anti-smoking campaigns, warning of the risks of single parenthood.

“I’m not trying to say anything bad about those people,” he said, “but people should be aware of what the facts say.”

Some other states such as Oklahoma have similar types of programs to promote marriage.

The future of the Office for Marriage Promotion proposal, known as House Bill 1482, hinges on whether the governor would back it, said Rep. David Frizzell, R-Indianapolis, who heads the House’s committee on Family, Children and Human Affairs.

Kara Brooks, a spokeswoman for Pence, said the bill is not on the governor’s agenda.

But there are indications he would be supportive of the idea, and it’s likely marriage promotion will stay prominent in conversations around the state. Pence has said he wants to prioritize focusing on the family and promoting “strong families.” He started last year a Summit on the Family and the Economy to examine and evaluate how family structures affect social and economic issues.

“Family is a key indicator of success,” he said in a press release statement about the conference, “and looking for ways that we can encourage more young people to get married, to stay married, to wait to have children until they’re married is very important.”

Call Star reporter Stephanie Wang at (317) 444-6184. Follow her on Twitter: @stephaniewang.