Life Without Father.

• Author: Galston, William A.

David Popenoe The Free Press, $25 For years, many traditional liberals considered the phrase "family values" little more than code for right-wing intolerance. When Dan Quayle attacked Murphy Brown, they inferred that he was less interested in promoting stable homes for children than in inflaming the prejudices of conservative voters.

There are signs, however, that the issue of family stability is becoming less partisan and more national. President Clinton devoted portions of his last two State of the Union addresses to the issues of teen pregnancy and out-of-wedlock birth. Both the President and the First Lady have expressed doubts about the ready availability of divorce, especially when young children are involved. As this review goes to press, legislators in Michigan and Iowa are pressing for significant changes in the no-fault divorce laws they enacted two decades ago--having rightly concluded that too-easy divorce hurts children and is unfair to many long-married women. Other states may well follow suit.

These are encouraging trends, because the family should be at the epicenter of public concern. These two books help explain why.

David Popenoe's thesis is that "life without father" is on the rise and that this hurts not just children, but adult women and men as well. First, he documents a trend of increasing fatherlessness. Thirty percent of all births are out-of-wedlock, six times the rate in 1960. And between 1960 and 1980, the rate of divorce rose nearly 250 percent before stabilizing at slightly below its peak. Today, about half of all marriages end in divorce (the rate for remarriages is even higher), and close to 40 percent of all children do not live with their biological fathers,

Popenoe links these trends to changes in public attitudes. Only 18 percent of Americans believe unhappy couples should stay together for the sake of their children, compared to about half of Americans in 1960.

Many parents who get divorced sincerely believe that they are doing the right thing for their children. In some cases they are right--specially in marriages involving high-intensity conflict (physical abuse or extreme emotional cruelty). For the most part, however, recent research suggests that they are mistaken. Following divorce, the economic well-being of children (and custodial parents) declines on average by 20 to 30 percent and remains depressed for years afterwards. Even after correcting for income and pre-divorce conflict, the children of...