Can the Bush administration persuade America's unwed parents to say "I do"?

Maybe, says a Princeton sociology professor who has studied 3,700 of those parents for the past five years. But "beware of overselling the program," warned Sara McLanahan, in town Monday to present the seventh annual Rocco C. and Marion S. Siciliano Forum at the University of Utah.

One-third of all births in the United States now are to parents who are unmarried. Getting them to buy into President Bush's marriage agenda may depend, McLanahan said, on reaching those parents at the potentially transforming "magic moment" of birth. The power of that moment may also motivate fathers to become involved in other programs as well, she said, including job training and mental health.

The marriage agenda — focused in large part on unwed parents, most of whom live below the poverty level — has raised scorn from libertarians (who don't think the government should get mixed up in private matters), feminists (who worry that women may be encouraged to marry men who might be abusive) and some liberals (who argue that poverty should be tackled, not marital status).

But McLanahan takes the middle ground, focusing on demographics, bar graphs and follow-up interviews.

The Bush administration plans to spend $1.5 billion in the next five years to promote healthy marriage, awarding the money to individual states, which will design their own programs. In general, these programs will work on building the relationship skills of the parents.

According to McLanahan, the agenda is based on three assumptions: that unwed parents will participate; that improving relationship skills will increase the marriage rate; and that increasing the marriage rate will increase the well-being of the children involved.

McLanahan and her "Fragile Families and Child Wellbeing Study" has followed 4,900 new births in 20 cities, including 1,200 married couples. She has done follow-up studies when the children reached 1 year old and is reinterviewing the couples when the children are 3.

At the birth of their child, 51 percent of the parents were cohabitating, 32 percent were living separately but were in "romantic" relationships with each other, 8 percent were "friends" and 9 percent had little or no contact. Although more than half of all these unmarried parents said they would be interested in marrying each other, after one year only 15 percent actually had.

McLanahan said her data show that even if unmarried parents' attitudes about marriage, quality of relationships and fathers' income levels matched those of married parents, their marriage rate would increase only about 2 percent.

Although there are many studies showing that children in two-parent families fare better, her data is so far inconclusive. Mothering skills were essentially the same for the married and unmarried mothers. The significant difference, she said, was the increased warmth shown by married fathers compared to unmarried ones.

Some existing social policies may in fact keep people from marrying, according to McLanahan and several other professors participating in a panel after her talk. These policies include those that lead to lost health care, child care and housing benefits.

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