The past, present, and future of parenting | Richard Reeves

What matters is parenting. What matters is how we raise our kids. I do think that there, it's quite possible to imagine a renewed future for marriage based around egalitarianism between men and women, but a shared commitment to kids.

Now, I think we've created models of the family that are much more equal and much fairer, but maybe not quite as stable in many cases, too. And so we've gone from a situation where we had quite stable but deeply unfair family structures to much fairer but quite unstable family structures.

The challenge we all face is to find ways to create more stability in our family life, but without sacrificing the goal of equality, which has animated the movement of the last 50 years. How do we have strong relationships within which people can raise kids well?

If marriage has a part to play in that, then great, but there are alternative models around civil partnerships and so on, too. But I think that's for us to create, and I think we should be careful not to assume that the way to restore marriage as an institution is to bring it back to the old model. If marriage is to survive, it will be a new model, not a restoration of the old model.