Mike Benson
- Hide BioMike Benson's Archive
Oct 11, 2012
As a young lad in the early 1960s, I remember listening to my grandparents’ stories about growing up and raising large families through two world wars and the Great Depression. Considering the struggles of American families, I am astonished by how my grandparents were able not just to overcome but prosper through such adversity.
Oct 9, 2012
This new American Experiment symposium grows out of a book of mine published just about a year ago, From Family Collapse to America’s Decline: The Educational, Economic, and Social Costs of Family Fragmentation, which examined many of the problems and shortcomings resulting from very high rates of nonmarital births, very high rates of divorce, and routinely short-lived cohabiting relationships. One of the book’s central themes is how such family churning—more specifically, the extent to which it hurts great numbers of children—is leading, and can only lead, to stunted mobility and deeper class divisions in a nation that has never viewed itself in such splintered ways.