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SPEAKER 1: What we're going to take a look at here is
problems related to the family.
And obviously one of the major problems is divorce.
Tends to be much more of an issue today than
it was years ago.
Many reasons for this, lot of it has to do with the social
acceptance of divorce today, people are much more apt to
take that option.
Whereas years ago it was kind of shunned upon.
The other thing is the opportunity for serial
monogamy, the idea that nowadays a lot of people who
get divorced are ending up re-marrying--
we'll talk about that here in just a minute.
And a lot more growing worldwide acceptance--
this is not, the trend that's going on in the United States
is not just in the US.
It's throughout the world.
Divorce laws have also made it a lot easier, anyway, for
people to get divorces.
And females, the whole idea that years ago females kind of
felt entrapped in marriages, even if it was a bad marriage,
they didn't want to get a divorce because they were
afraid, not knowing what was going to
happen to them afterward.
They didn't have an educational background.
They didn't know what to do in the workforce.
And so a lot of women felt trapped and ended up staying
in marriages that were really not good marriages.
Nowadays females are much more independent and don't really
worry as much about the option of divorce.
Now, statistics, who tends to get divorced?
What are the dos and don'ts, in terms of getting married,
to try and ward off a possible divorce in the future?
Well, teenagers who get married are obviously much
more likely to end in divorce.
Now, it's not a guarantee by any stretch.
But the percentages are much higher for teenagers who get
married to end up in divorce at some point in time.
People who are college educated tend to be less
likely to end in divorce.
Again, I mentioned a second ago that
we'd talk about this--
of the people who do get divorced, you would think
that, OK, got burnt on one episode.
Don't want to try that again.
But in reality 63% of all divorcees end up remarrying.
And men are more likely to remarry than women are.
So it may be different than what you might have expected.
60% of those remarriages, actually it's a little over
60%, will actually end in divorce as well.
You would think that maybe a second marriage or a third
marriage might end up-- the people might be more inclined
to stay together.
Actually, that's not true.
Second divorces are more likely to end....errr
Second marriages are more likely to end in divorce then
first marriages, and third marriages are more likely than
second marriages.
Let's talk about adjustments after divorce.
There is a big difference in the first thing that men and
women think about when they think about the
potential of a divorce.
When a divorce first gets mentioned, and the couple is
initially considering the option, women--
the first thing women tend to think about are the
relationships.
How is this going to impact the relationship between her
and her husband, between her and her children, between the
children and the husband?
How is all that going to take place?
So that's the first thing that females tend to think about.
Men, on the other hand, I hate to admit this, but the first
thing that men tend to think about is how much is this
going to cost me.
They think about the money.
How expensive is it going to be to go through a divorce?
What kind of payments are going to take place, and
things of that nature.
So in that regard, is it any wonder that after a divorce
both women and men's income fall but men tend not to be
hurt economically as bad as women?
In fact, we'll talk about this again later, single parent
households with women are much more likely to result in
poverty and things like that.
But women's income decreases much more so than men's.
Now, kind of interesting, again going back to the first
thing you think about--
females tend to think about the emotional attachments and
so forth, and the relationships.
Women tend to make better emotional
adjustments after a divorce.
They seem to be immune to a lot of the issues, the
emotional issues, that occur after a divorce.
And statistics pan this out.
Men, divorced men, actually are four times more likely
than divorced women to attempt a suicide.
Men struggle making the emotional adjustment.
Now, single parent families, when we talk about divorce
obviously that results in a lot of single parent families,
much more so than we've ever had before in our history,
throughout our history.
For the first time ever in United States history, just a
year or two ago, married couple households actually
made up less than half of the households in America
according to the Census Bureau.
So that is the first time that has ever happened that married
couple households made up less than 50%.
As I mentioned a while ago, the stigma of divorce has been
reduced and the stigma of being a single
parent has been reduced.
Now how does this impact different races or
ethnicities?
You can see the statistics, 17% of Asian families, 28%
white families are single parent families.
38% of Hispanics and a whopping 63% of black families
are single parent families, either situations where the
parents have gotten a divorce or a situation where, in many
of these cases that we've talked about, the parents
never got married to begin with.
So approximately 80% of single parent families are headed by
women and over a fourth of those women live in poverty
with their children.
Single parent fathers, not nearly as frequent, as you see
single parent females.
But single parent fathers also suffer again, kind of from an
emotional isolation.
There's not as many single parent dads.
So in terms of opportunities within society to get out, to
get involved, to have like a get together of all kinds of
single parent people, they tend to be much more isolated
emotionally and relationship-wise.
Divorce does tend to be a cyclical problem.
Kids of divorce are much more likely, when they get older,
to actually divorce in their own marriages, especially in
situations where the marriage takes place and both spouses
come from divorced families in the past.
There's a number of possible reasons for this.
Maybe it's due in part to the idea that these kids never
learned how make adjustments within a marriage.
If a fight took place, or what have
you, they never realized--
they never saw their own parents being able to fix
things, being able to resolve issues.
And so maybe that's part of it.
And then it might be due in part to simply the idea that
in the back of their mind, even though marriage has that
part this says till death do us part, they realize that
marriages can end in divorce and it's a
realistic option for them.
So maybe they're more likely to, I guess go quicker to that
action of taking a divorce than kids who grow up in two
parent households.
All right, let's stop at that point.