"At least five out of every six births in Jamaica are to unmarried mothers." So says the lead article written in The Sunday Gleaner of July 12, 2009.

Combine this statistic with the comment in that same article that "Jamaican women seem to have rejected marriage as the path to motherhood", and we realise quite starkly that the concept of the traditional family structure is becoming quite obsolete in Jamaica. This, of course, has implications for the rearing and development of our children.

As I have written before, the state of our nation is linked directly to the state of family life in our country. There is urgent need for our people to understand the necessity of a stable family environment for the nurturing and wholesome upbringing of our children. A stable family structure consists of mother, father and children. The Sunday Gleaner article pointed out that many women were opting to be single mothers. They have divorced parenting from marriage. They simply see men as sperm donors.

Difficult to commit

We need to restore to our country the value of marriage as the base of strong families. Throwing out marriage because some do not work is the proverbial "throwing out the baby with the bath water". Marriage requires commitment; family requires commitment. Commitment is a concept that is becoming increasingly foreign to our society. We opt instead for "feel good." Whatever feels good, we think is the best thing to do. It does not matter if it means taking a life, abandoning a life, destroying the future of a child.

In a Time magazine article of July 13, 2009, Caitlin Flanagan addresses these issues in an article entitled, "Why Marriage Matters."

She points out that research shows that in the USA in May of this year, 39.7 per cent of mothers are now single women. This she finds to be astonishing. She asks the question, how much does this matter? Her response?

More than words can say. There is no other single force causing as much measurable hardship and human misery in this country as the collapse of marriage. It hurts children, it reduces mothers' financial security, and it has landed with particular devastation on those who can bear it least: the nation's underclass.

Flanagan continues to note that it is not only the poor who are separating parenthood from marriage, but also the well to do. The poor are doing it by uncoupling parenthood from marriage; and the financially secure are doing it by blasting apart their unions if the principals aren't having fun anymore. The growing tendency of the poor to have children before marriage - the vast majority of unmarried women having babies are undereducated and have low incomes - is a catastrophic approach to life.

Flanagan made it clear that the last three presidents of the USA, including Barack Obama, have put emphasis on the urgency of stabilising family life in their country. The reason being that on every single significant outcome related to short-term well-being and long-term success, children from intact, two-parent families outperform those from single-parent households. Longevity, drug abuse, school performance and dropout rates, teen pregnancy, criminal behaviour and incarceration - if you can measure it, a sociologist has - and in all cases, the kids living with both parents, drastically outperform the others.

The results of the lack of a stable family life are the same in our nation. So many Jamaicans are enamoured by the Obamas. Why? I think one of the reasons is that here is a leading public family that seems to have it together. They are obviously still in love with each other. In Jamaica, few such images exist. Rumours are rife in our nation about the affaires of our public leaders. We need our leaders to set a strong moral example for our people. We need to see strong marriages exemplified for us. We should not be having our public leaders consorting with ladyloves who are pregnant and who are not their wives. This sets a poor example for our people. We need to see before us examples of commitment to marriage and to family.

Caitlin Flanagan continues her article by highlighting that according to research, there are only a few things that set back a child as much as not having a father in the home. She refers to the work of a Princeton sociologist who, as a single mother, assumed that her research would show that if children were born into a single parent household where there is no financial need, that this would offset the negative impact that being in such a family structure would have. To her surprise, she found that children who grew up in a household with one biological parent were worse off than those who grew up with both biological parents, whether they were educated or not.

What I found to be even more poignant is this point: "Children have a primal need to know who they are, to love and be loved by the two people whose physical union brought them here. To lose that connection, that sense of identity, is to experience a wound that no child-support check or fancy school can ever heal."

It means, therefore, that to choose to be a single parent would be a selfish act, which gratifies the nurturing instinct, but does not consider what is best for the child being brought into this world who needs both parents to give them the best chance for success.

The implication of these findings for our nation is that with every five out of six births being to unwed mothers, we are a nation of wounded souls giving birth to wounded souls. Is it any wonder that our students are performing so dismally academically, or that our criminals are teenagers? We need to make a radical shift to realise that we must begin to promote good marriage and family life as the basis for a psychologically healthy nation.

Esther Tyson is principal of Ardenne High School, St. Andrew. Feedback may be sent to columns@gleanerjm.com.