A the same time I've been busy writing the portrayal of out-of-wedlock births as the scourge of all humanity and the misguided notion that marriage is a cure-all for poverty, the New York Times reported that "The United States crossed an important marital threshold in 2009, with the number of young adults who have never married surpassing, for the first time in more than a century, the number who were married." Why was this long-term trend accelerated last year? The economy. Mark Mather, from a private research group that analyzed census figures, told the Times that, when people feel economically unstable, they tend to postpone marriage. That's one of the critical points people often miss when discussing poverty and marriage -- it might not be marriage that makes homes more stable, but, instead, it might be that more stable people get married. As I quoted an expert in the piece above, stability is the important thing to promote if we care about children's outcomes, and stability involves giving single parents financial support and as many options for work and housing as possible. A study last year from Ohio State University last year found that, by many measures, many children do just as well in homes that are led by single mothers who remain single -- a measure of stability -- as those in homes where parents are stably married -- that is, there's no divorce. While black children still tested lower if they were in single-parent homes, the only measures on which married parents provided a better environment were on cognitive stimulation and emotional support. That makes perfect sense, and is something I often argued: it probably serves children extremely well to have two adults always around talking to them, playing with them and developing relationships with them. But, of course, marriages that are bad for the parents are just as bad for the children. The idea that single mothers might be deciding what's best for their children by choosing to stay single completely eludes conservatives who argue otherwise, because, often, the outcome of children is not their true concern. -- Monica Potts