Reply #3: Snippets from other Wilcox books: [View All]

Brad Wilcox argues that houses of worship "need to show men and women how marriage is a lifelong vocation of service to God, to spouse, and to the children that usually follow." This message needs to be made attractive to a culture which worships the individual. How? 

     "Programs run by lay couples with good marriages are particularly valuable, insofar as they are able to impart knowledge won in the school of ordinary life." He also notes that "More than 150 cities and towns in 39 states have established Community Marriage Policies that strengthen marriage norms by setting common standards for premarital preparation and marriage enrichment." His research of inner city congregations reveal that 60 percent of urban couples who have had a child out of wedlock "would be willing to attend a church-sponsored relationship class."
http://www.marriagesavers.org/Columns/C1068.htm Study Finds that Conservative
Protestant Parents are Not Abusive

Princeton, NJ - A new study reported in Social Forces (Vol. 79(1) September:265-290.) finds that conservative Protestant parents are less likely to report yelling at their children. The study, authored by W. Bradford Wilcox of the Center for Research on Child Wellbeing at Princeton University and John P. Bartkowski of the Sociology Department at Mississippi State University, casts doubts on previous assertions that conservative Protestant parents are abusive and authoritarian.

"We know that conservative Protestant parents value obedience from their children more than most parents and that they are more likely to spank their children," said Wilcox. "In the 1990s, a number of scholars took this pattern to mean that these parents were abusive and authoritarian. This study, however, adds to a growing body of evidence that suggests that conservative Protestant parents have a distinctive neotraditional style of parenting that combines a strict but controlled approach to discipline with a warm and expressive approach to everyday parent-child interaction."
http://people.biola.edu/faculty/paulp/wilcox.html

Finding: While the link between good fatherhood and religion was evident in all denominations, "conservative Protestant affiliation" exerted an "independent effect" on some aspects of fatherhood. "Conservative fathers are more likely to be involved with their children in personal activities such as personal talks than unaffiliated and mainline Protestant men." And they are more likely "to have dinner with their children and to participate in youth-related ...
W. Bradford Wilcox
Journal of Marriage and the Family
2002
Full Details
Finding: Church attendance made men better fathers. "Religion is related to paternal involvement in all three areas that we examined: one-on-one engagement, dinner with one's family, and volunteering for youth-related activities." In fact, "religion appears to make a unique contribution to paternal involvement above and beyond its status as a conventional activity. . . . The specific attention that religious institutions dedicate to family life ...
http://www.heritage.org/research/features/familydatabase/results.cfm?Key=228