Poverty and marriage: the case against single parenthood
Photo by TiereScott on flickr
I don’t know how single mothers do it.
I don’t have a baby, but my best-friend had little Ida Jane in September. Ida’s a cutie, but she’s a huge amount of work. My friend and her husband basically pass the baby back and forth, each watching the baby while the other is working or sleeping.
Over the last nine weeks, she’s wondered – logistically, emotionally, financially – How do single mothers do it?
She’s not the only one.
The Heritage Foundation is encouraging Barack Obama to try and reduce poverty by revitalizing marriage.
Liberals usually shake with anger over this stuff. Marriage incentives? You’ve got to be kidding me. It’s so Leave it To Beaver, right? Marriage is about love, and the government, in a whole lotta ways, shouldn’t be in the business of regulating love.
But the argument for marriage isn’t one of family values. It’s simply economic.
Two heads are better than one. According to their stats, if poor single moms married the fathers of their kids, two-thirds would be lifted out of poverty immediately. That’s over 6 million kids.
Raising a kid is expensive. It’s also time consuming and frustrating. It’s a life changing event. And if we want to do it, if we want to build the next generation, it makes sense to do that in the most efficient way: in a two-parent family.
Can a mother raise a child on her own? Certainly. Are there thousands of heroic single moms who do it very well every day? Absolutely. But there are many who are struggling, good moms who want the best for their kids, who are fighting a losing battle.
Children living with single mothers are five times more likely to be poor than children in two-parent households. Children in single-parent homes are also more likely to drop out of school and become teen parents, even when income is factored out. And the evidence suggests that on average, children who live with their biological mother and father do better than those who live in stepfamilies or with cohabiting partners…. In light of these facts, policies that strengthen marriage for those who choose it and that discourage unintended births outside of marriage are sensible goals to pursue.
Where’s that quote from? Our president’s The Audacity of Hope.
Think about it. When you’re a poor college student living in a big city, you get a roommate. It makes sense to share expenses. My husband and I divide the household chores, which makes the dish-washing, laundering, dusting, cleaning and garbage-hauling go twice as fast. Add to that a very expensive little baby (or two!) and all the work they bring, and it’s not hard to understand why kids raise by a single parent fare worse. The odds are stacked against them.
And it’s really a problem of poverty. “Out-of-wedlock childbearing is concentrated among low-income, less educated men and women,” according to the Heritage Foundation. ” In general, the women most likely to have a child without being married are those who have the least ability to support a family by themselves.”
From study: The Effect of Marriage on Child Poverty
And most anti-poverty programs are structured to give less help to married folks, giving a real disincentive to marry. Tax laws are the same way. In fact, while we’ve made good progress in reducing marriage penalties for the middle and upper classes, the penalties for the poor have remained.
Some argue that marriage isn’t solution to poverty because being poor is often the reason people don’t get married. That being poor, poorly-educated, not working and with child doesn’t get you far in the “marriage market.” And others are concerned that encouraging women to marry would encourage them to stay in situations that are bad for kids – unstable homes, abuse, alcoholism, domestic violence.
Certainly, marriage is not a cure all. But the rise of single parent families is substantially related to the steady rate of child-poverty, despite increasing options for women and expanded anti-poverty programs.
We like to think of marriage as a love relationship. You should get married because you’re in love and that makes the best commitment. That may be one model for marriage, but here’s another: a partnership where two people agree and commit to serious long-term goals, including the raising of children, and commit to tackling those goals together.
Sound a little less sexy? It might be. It’s not Prince Charming riding in on a white horse. But a partnership that can save you from years of scrimping and saving, from the endless calls of bill collectors, from countless hours in the welfare office, from working two jobs to make ends meet and never actually seeing your kids? It may not be a fairytale ending, but it’s better than that nightmare.
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[...] This post was mentioned on Twitter by Megan Cottrell, Tweets Tube. Tweets Tube said: Poverty and marriage: the case against single parenthood http://bit.ly/3D29Ae [...]
Megan – Very interesting post on an important topic. One thing I would add is that before policymakers create policy, they need to understand why many low-income women have children before marriage. To learn more about this, I recommend a video from the University of Michigan’s National Poverty Center (NPC) Web site, entitled “Why Poor Women Put Motherhood before Marriage” (3rd bullet from the bottom at http://npc.umich.edu/publications/multimedia). The full video is 86 minutes, but the presentation by Professor Kathryn Edin (author of the book Promises I Can Keep: Why Poor Women Put Motherhood before Marriage) is about 50 minutes long. It’s absolutely fascinating and introduced me to perspectives on motherhood and marriage that I had not (and I’ll bet most policymakers have not) considered before.
Great comment, Michael. I will definitely watch the video. This is a topic that really interests me. Perhaps there will be another post about what I learned from it! Thank you so much for sharing your expertise.
In response to another comment. See in context »Ms. Cottrell,
As is often the problem, people frequently confuse “association” with “causation”.
My personal favorite is between tooth color and lung cancer. For many years the tobacco industry was trotted out several studies that found no association between how much people smoked and their risk of lung cancer (the technical term is no “dose-response” which is a necessary but not sufficient condition for establishing a causal connection between two variables). Some people could smoke six packs a day and die at 88 without any lung cancer while others might die at 50 after hardly smoking three sticks per day.
Along came this smart-ass epidemiologist who measured the color of smokers four front teeth and their risk of lung cancer. He developed a color scale to quantify the degree of discoloration and he measured it in a number of people in a hospital being treated for lung cancer. Lo and behold, there was a statistically significant correlation, the more discolored a smokers teeth were, the greater the risk of lung cancer. It was not only accurate but it was reproducible, other epidemiologists could get the same results in other hospitals.
So what does that mean, that brown teeth cause lung cancer? Of course not, the trade term for this is a “surrogate”. The degree of yellowing of the front teeth was a surrogate for some other variable. In this case, it stood in for how hard a smoker sucked on his or her cancer stick. Someone who only smoked three cigs a day but sucked them dry was more likely to get lung cancer than some one who just dangled 300 sticks out of the lips but never took a drag.
Marriage and poverty are really just that, a surrogate. One could just as easily show that people who have dirty bathrooms are more likely to be poor than people with clean ones. One could even develop a “Bathroom Cleanliness Index” to quantify just how dirty a bathroom was and develop a statistically significant correlation between the BCI and SES (Socio-Economic Status). Would that mean that moving poor people into building with clean bathrooms would end poverty, not hardly.
Poor people are different from you and me, they have a lot less money. Solve that problem, and poverty will be a thing of the past.
Hi David.
First, feel free to call me Megan if you like. I don’t really like being called Ms. Cottrell.
I think you make some good points about people confusing correlation with causation.
But I respectfully have to disagree with you. You say poverty is about having less money, right? And it is. But it’s also about having less access to the resources that can help you get and keep money. This isn’t yellow teeth and lung cancer.
Single parents have it harder. For one thing, there’s just one possible income. One person to do everything a kids needs. One person to provide health insurance. One person to read to the kid a night (the same one person that may be working two jobs to pay the rent).
The poor may have less money, but there’s also a very well documented epidemic of young women in their twenties having children without marrying the father of that child. And those children growing up to do the same thing. I’m not saying this is wrong and proposing a moral solution. I’m saying it’s inefficient and it’s a practical solution.
In response to another comment. See in context »Hello Megan,
Now of course it is possible for single mother to marry her way out of poverty but only if she marries a wealthy man. That is called being a gold digger. The problem most poor single mothers face is that their most likely mate is a poor single man. If marrying a poor single man was the ticket out of poverty, or even a just a leg up, poor single mothers would have figured that out by now.
In response to another comment. See in context »Actually, David, if you read the heritage foundation study, they say that a shortage of marriageable men is not a reason that marriage is on the decline in poor families.
Marrying a poor single man may not solve poverty on it’s own. But I think you’ve missed the point. Poverty is a lot easier to try and tackle if you’ve got a two person team rather than on your own. Marriage is a social construction for raising children. It may be an old-fashioned one, but it works really well. It’s a solid social structure – good for families, good for parents, good for children. It might be something more useful than welfare programs or admonishments to work harder.
In response to another comment. See in context »Megan, you forget about fathers. Fathers that don’t marry when a girl gets pregnant, or fathers that have no interest helping raise a child. Some men see a window to leave, and they take it.
“We need fathers to realize that responsibility does not end at conception”
full text of Obama’s “fatherhood” speech:
http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0608/11094.html
That’s very true. There are probably a lot of moms who would like to marry if possible, but the dads aren’t interested or aren’t around. Good point.
In response to another comment. See in context »The dangers of the passive tone. I don’t know of a girl who “gets pregnant” so much as a man who impregnates a girl. Let’s strike that term from the language altogether. The man who impregnates a woman and who does not take responsibility for the baby is a man who is responsible for the inter-generational poverty that follows and should be held responsible. Period.
In response to another comment. See in context »The man doesn’t get to the choice to be “interested” in the consequence of his actions. The man gets to be a dad when he is accountable to the baby he helped create.
Another good point, Steve.
I wish this was the way we thought of things. I wish this was the way things were. Maybe we need to start changing our language to reflect what we’d like to see in the world.
It would be great if a man didn’t get a choice to be interested or not, but I think they are given that choice – whether society gives it to them or they just take it. Should he be held responsible? Yes. Is he? Often, no.
In response to another comment. See in context »So does life begin at conception, assuming the point that father responsibility does?
In response to another comment. See in context »I know a woman who lives in the situation you describe: she’s single, in a NYC housing project and worked three jobs while pregnant at 25 with her first and only child.
Here’s one choice people need to consider — the father was a jerk! They were engaged and he insisted she move to another city where he had no job, she had no job and she would be far away from her mother (who babysits, allowing her to even work at low wage jobs which is all she can get right now.) Rationally and intelligently, she stayed put and broke their engagement.
She’s a really smart, tough, highly disciplined woman whom I admire; she made, to me, a feminist’s choice of (much more difficult) costly independence away from a toxic man rather than settling for a guy she quickly realized was absolutely not husband material.
She is a terrific person in a tough world — people in it keep telling her (!) to have another child. It has given me a glimpse into a way of thinking I can barely comprehend. But, in my retail job, I see this pattern among many young women I work with.
I plan to watch that video and read her book as these choices don’t make a lot of sense to me. I think we more privileged women live in a parallel universe.
If every man who fathered a child knew his pay would be garnished or his bank accounts accessed – as tax cheats know can happen — maybe things would change. So, where’s the single mom lobby? Where’s the political pressure to make that happen?
Absolutely, Caitlin. It sounds like your friend made the right choice. Certainly, there are a lot of people out there – from a range of income levels – who are lousy people and not someone you would want to invite into your life or the life of a child.
I think we sometimes do live in a parallel universe. I volunteered for a nonprofit awhile back, working with at-risk teenage girls. One of the things they told us was that, if we were married, we shouldn’t talk about our husbands or our wedding or our marriages at all, because they felt it would come off as preachy and make the girls uncomfortable.
I certainly don’t want to preach. This article isn’t about morality. I didn’t want to preach to the girls. But I felt it was a little wrong to not be able to talk about a different life choice.
The single mom lobby is busy making dinner, working nights, helping with homework, finding a babysitter – too busy to lobby anyone but their own kids. We need to lobby for them.
In response to another comment. See in context »Caitlin,
In New York City, the Black male unemployment rate exceeds 50%.
How would wage garnishment and bank account seizure encourage the parental involvement of these young men?
Further, I can point to numerous examples near and dear to me, where young men learned their concepts of relationship from their mothers, not their fathers (who were not in the household). Watching a mother have 4 kids by three different fathers, impacts both girls’ and boys’ future choices alike.
In response to another comment. See in context »The idea isn’t that we should encourage single, childless people to marry (as we once did…). The point is that children are better off when their biological mother and father are together in a healthy marriage.
Moreover, children experience much more stability and nurturing in communities where the majority of the families are headed by married, two-parent families.
The experiment, for instance, of attempting to raise African-American boys in single mother, female-dominated neighborhoods (where males are marginalized…) has been a nightmare.
“I don’t know of a girl who “gets pregnant” so much as a man who impregnates a girl.”
I’m pretty sure it’s a 50/50 effort between the two.
Megan, are you advocating for more or less government involvement in marriage?
I think a better solution might be to prevent the problem from ever happening in the first place. The best way to do that in my view would be to educate teens about birth control, and advocate things like using a condom. However, if these single parents are having babies because they want to, then there is probably not a whole lot you can do other than educate them about how their future and the future of their baby will be affected by that choice. As usual, I don’t think government should be involved in this at all.
As far as advocating for more or less government, I really don’t know. I tried to figure that out (I knew you would ask!) but I came up a little dry.
A few states have marriage incentive programs with their welfare systems. I can’t currently find any research on how effective this is, or research on how the advertising dollars going into marriage promotion affect marriage.
I would advocate for getting rid of the marriage penalties in taxes and welfare programs, particularly for low-income people.
Something that I did read and find was that having access to marriage classes and seminars – like relationship building workshops or counseling – encouraged people to marry by informing them of the healthy benefits of marriage and helping them gain relationship skills for their marriage. But I think this is something that would be better done by universities and colleges, or by faith-based orgs, rather than the government.
I don’t think the government should be involved in regulating marriage. But I think it can recognize that healthy marriages are good for society and try to do everything we can to not prevent people from getting married for logistical reasons like taxes or benefits for their kids.
In response to another comment. See in context »“I would advocate for getting rid of the marriage penalties in taxes and welfare programs, particularly for low-income people.”
“I don’t think the government should be involved in regulating marriage.”
Good answers.
Unfortunately even our extremely liberal president doesn’t agree with you on this one.
In response to another comment. See in context »Bill, I take your point. I guess the point that eludes me, then, if these young men are indeed so broke is why they create babies they know they cannot or will not take financial responsibility for, and the women who bear these kids let them do so.
I know the role models of parenthood in poor neighborhoods can be really lousy, but surely not everyone gets to keep using that as an excuse forever?
Young men create babies? In a post Roe v. Wade society of a “woman’s right to choose”?
And in many of the areas we’re talking about, mothers are no longer raising these children, either. Many times, it’s a grandmother, or foster care.
We are now well beyond role modeling in these neighborhoods. We are now at a point where the basic concepts of family and community structure has disappeared. We read the stories of Derrion Albert and Shaniya Wilson every day, and we’ve become numb to them. It is a continuing national tragedy.
In response to another comment. See in context »[...] This post was mentioned on Twitter by Megan Cottrell, Geek To Me. Geek To Me said: bastards RT@ mmcottrell has the family structure broken down with the poor, or are men just irresponsible bastards? http://bit.ly/4PIV5C [...]
Megan- Another thoughtful piece. Where I get concerned about the role of marriage in poverty is that folks like our friends at the Heritage Foundation use that data to justify their underlying belief poverty is about personal decisions and not about systemic barriers.
Our data at Heartland definitely shows just what Heritage’s data shows – if you are married you are much less likely to live in poverty. Our interpretation of that data point, however, is that we as a society need to remove barriers and put in place supports that give men and women real opportunity. If you have a decent education from day one, you have a much greater chance of being economically secure down the road, regardless of whether you are in a single parent home.
The other thing we need to keep in mind when looking at this data point are the issues of gender and race. Women earn less than men. Black women earn a lot less. African American female headed households have a much higher poverty rate than Caucasian female headed households. We cannot isolate the issue of marriage from the reality of overt and covert discrimination.