Robert
Emery
For the book
symposium on Clare Huntington, Failure to Flourish: How Family Law Undermines Family Relationships
(Oxford University Press, 2014)
I am
awed by Clare Huntington’s sweeping and impressively detailed analysis of how the
legal ecosystem, especially “negative family law,” pollutes contemporary family
life. Huntington argues that the law shapes family forms and family
relationships in ways far beyond the obvious. Of course, she highlights
essential influences like education, childcare, marriage, and divorce policy. But
Huntington argues that families also are affected by a myriad of other factors
such as job opportunities and demands, neighborhoods, health care, and taxes.
In one
sense, Huntington’s systemic perspective is not new. Sociologists, economists,
and historians often argue that families are shaped by the broad forces of
society, making a living, and history. Yet, no one has focused a lens more
sharply than Huntington in identifying how the contemporary network of laws not
only shapes but undermines stable, loving relationships across a diversity of
family forms.
I am convinced
by Huntington’s arguments, which she buffers with careful, detailed analysis of
evidence from at least a dozen fields of study. Like her, I have been
captivated by the positive psychology movement, and I want to join Huntington
in her quest to promote a new, positive family law.
And yet,
I am daunted in my awe. As I sometimes feel when reading about global warming –
or the myriad of peer and media influences on my children, I wonder: What can I
do? It’s all so much. Where do I begin?
Systemic
perspectives like Huntington’s remind us that everything matters. But we cannot
change everything. I wish she could offer a clear, simple call to action for
promoting positive family law, perhaps a slogan equivalent to “think globally,
act locally.” I do not know how to stop global warming, but I can learn to
recycle, turn down the thermostat, and drive less.
I would
love it if Huntington used this forum to offer the guidance that I seek.
In
making this request, it seems only fair to try to answer my own question. Like
many others, when I “think locally” about promoting healthy families, I focus
on marriage. Empirical evidence, and lived experience, convinces me that
long-term, happy marriage – in a diversity of forms including same-sex marriage
– benefits the partners, their children, and society.
As
same-sex marriage advocates have wisely reminded us, many legal policies do
promote marriage, ranging from health insurance to (at least some) tax benefits
to parenthood presumptions. Yet marriage is eroding in the United States and
many industrialized countries. So we need to think globally about marriage and
ask questions like: What are hidden costs of marriage?
Perhaps
some of the hidden costs of marriage circle back to Huntington’s negative
family law. I suspect that many young people avoid marriage as a way of
avoiding the painful costs of a potential divorce. If so, we might actually
promote happy marriage by making divorce easier,
not harder.
I am not
sure of my own argument, but this possibility is a reminder of the benefits of
thinking globally even as we act locally. Huntington offers masterful global
thinking in Failure to Flourish. I am
eager for more direction about how she wants us to act locally.
Robert
Emery is Professor of Psychology at University of Virginia. He may be contacted
at reeatvirginia.edu