Consider the following information taken from The President's Marriage Agenda in 2012.
"Marriage is a complex social institution. Marriage helps unite the needs and desires of couples and the children their union produce. Because marriage fosters small cooperative unions--otherwise known as stable families--it not only enables children to thrive, but also shores up communities, helping family members to succeed during good times and to weather the bad times."
To those considering marriage, consider this statement from a team of family scholars:
"On many social, educational, and psychological outcomes, children in cohabiting households do significantly worse than children in intact, married families, and about as poorly as children living in single-parent families" (The President's Marriage Agenda pg. 8).
Our children will be the leaders of the world for the next generations. We want those children to be socially competent, psychologically healthy, and prepared by gaining the best knowledge through education and experience.
Spencer W. Kimball, President of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints said, "Many of the social restraints which in the past have helped to reinforce and to shore up the family are dissolving and disappearing. The time will come when only those who believe deeply and actively in the family will be able to preserve their families in the midst of the gathering evil around us" (Ensign, Nov. 1980, 4).
There are some who might be concerned about their ability to create and maintain a successful marriage and family. Maybe they have been raised in a less-than-ideal home with parents who did not have a healthy relationship. It might be helpful to understand the importance of "transitional characters". The following is a quote from Carlfred Broderick:
"A transitional character is one, who, in a single generation changes the entire course of a lineage. The changes might be for good or ill, but the most noteworthy examples are those individuals who grow up in an abusive, emotionally destructive environment and who somehow find a way to metabolize the poison and refuse to pass it on to their children. They break the mold. They refute the observation that abused children become abusive parents, that the children of alcoholics become alcoholic adults, that "the sins of the fathers are visited upon the heads of the children to the third and fourth generation." Their contribution to humanity is to filter the destructiveness out of their own lineage so that the generations downstream will have a supportive foundation upon which to build productive lives" (Marriage and the Family, pg. 18).
