Marital Relationships and Self-Esteem: How Jewish Families Are Different

The author investigates whether US Jewish families differ from other American families by valuing more the nurturant and supportive aspects of family relationships. On a normative level Judaism assigns a major role to the family especially its nurturance and stability; the issue becomes whether this is still true of the contemporary Jewish family. 1 way to examine the centrality of the family is to examine behavior: are Jewish marriages less likely to end in divorce? Another way is to look at the social-psychological dimensions of the family--to look not at levels of marital satisfaction per se but the social-psychological consequences of marital satisfaction. The author argues that family and family relations form an important part of Jewish self-esteem. Using a sample of 2300 individuals from Chicago collected by the National Institute of Mental Health to study the social origins of personal stress the study finds after controlling for education age and sex that the self-esteem of Jewish respondents was affected more than that of Protestants and Catholics by measures of marital support marital stress concern about the future of the marriage seeking professional help for marital problems being married and the duration of marriage. As expected levels of marital support and stress did not differ; the significant difference was the effect on self-esteem. What is especially interesting about this finding is that it is directly opposite to contemporary trends such as urbanization mobility education and female employment that tend to devalue the importance of the family. Persons who place a high value on family stabililty in their self-concept structure may be more likely to act in ways that maximize family viability; they may also be more tolerant of unsatisfying marriages. Jews tend to marry to marry other Jews to have children and to not divorce.