People from disadvantaged backgrounds gain financial security by attending college but paradoxically lower their odds of ever marrying, a U.S. researcher says.

Cornell University sociologist Kelly Musick says men and women from the least advantaged backgrounds who attend college can end up stranded between social worlds, reluctant to "marry down" to partners with less education and unable to "marry up" to those from more privileged upbringings, a university release reported Tuesday. ...

"College students are becoming more diverse in their social backgrounds, but they nonetheless remain a socio-economically select group," she said. "It may be difficult for students from less privileged backgrounds to navigate social relationships on campus, and these difficulties may affect what students ultimately gain from the college experience."

College attendance negatively affected marriage chances for the least advantaged individuals, lessening men's and women's odds by 38 percent and 22 percent respectively, while among those in the highest social stratum men who attend college increase their marrying chances by 31 percent and women by 8 percent.

Labels: class, culture, gender differences, Marriage, poverty, universities

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...But for Susan, it turned out, everything wasn’t fine. While Jesus and the church were pulling her in one direction, the judicial system had made an unwelcome appearance and was pulling her in another. The entire time Susan was in prison, the state of Pennsylvania was running a tab on all the welfare dollars her mother received in her children’s names. Consequently, per state law, Susan was held responsible for the total amount upon her release, and soon the welfare department came calling to get its money back.

In our sessions, Susan showed me a raft of increasingly threatening official letters with eye-popping dollar figures that had her practically hyperventilating. The state wanted in excess of $25,000, and wanted it now.

A hearing was scheduled at the Bucks County Courthouse, where Susan was asked to provide documents proving that she had a job and could start paying her child support debt or face returning to jail in contempt of a court order. Obviously, on her janitor’s survival wages Susan had absolutely no capacity to both pay the state and keep a roof over her head. This Sophie's choice is a common dilemma for tens of thousands of single mothers returning to the community from prison who owe the state for the dollars their children depended on in their mother’s absence. ...

Susan protested the high amount of the monthly support payment, explaining that if she paid the debt she couldn’t afford a place to live. I will never forget how painful it was, watching this woman, who had never in her life caught a single break, have to stand before the American justice system and nearly beg for mercy. But for this black woman in this white judge's courtroom there was no mercy to be had. Her criminal record of violent crime, her drug addiction, her prostitution—all of her vices outweighed the spiritual transformation and personal rehabilitation she had experienced in prison, not to mention her clean-as-a-whistle record in her new life.

The judge merely mocked her, saying, “You’ve got a place to live now: Bucks County Correctional Facility for 90 days.” The public defender tried to interject but the judge was already calling for the next case.

Labels: child support, children, class, culture, mental health, motherhood, parenting, poverty, race, religion

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OXNARD, Calif. — Sarah Comito rolls out of bed before dawn most days and slips quietly out of her house. Before her rambunctious toddler wakes up, she heads off to work as a waitress in an upscale weight-loss resort in Malibu.

The hour-long commute is exhausting, but the 33-year-old is thankful to make the trip when she remembers where she and her husband were four years ago: living in a tent in a nearby river bottom, strung out on methamphetamine.

Now Comito fears the progress they have made since then could be lost as California cuts her from a vital child care assistance program, more than doubling the cost of her son’s day care to $600 a month. On a $10 hourly wage, she said she’d be better off quitting her job and staying home with her son while her husband works as a professional tree cutter. But if she stops working, they can’t make rent.

“The only thing I can do is attempt to prepare for the worst,” Comito said, while watching 3-year-old Matthew dart across the yard at the couple’s working-class apartment complex in Oxnard.

For years, child care assistance programs offered low-income parents such as Comito a lifeline. But state legislatures dealing with multibillion dollar budget deficits during the recession have been targeting child care subsidies as one way to help balance their state budgets.

The cuts have come at just the time many parents need that help the most because full-time, well-paying jobs are in such short supply. ...

Some parents give up jobs and turn to the welfare system if they can’t find affordable child care, but that isn’t an option for those who have already used up their entitlements, said Danielle Ewen, a past director of child care and early education for the Center for Law and Social Policy.

Labels: child care, children, economics, motherhood, poverty, single parenting, welfare, work/family policy

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AT Christmastime, we like to tell stories about resilient families. The Cratchits of “A Christmas Carol,” for instance, who subsist on love, hope and 15 shillings a week. The Baileys of Bedford Falls, who survive wars, bank runs and bankruptcies because they have friends, one another, and a guardian angel watching out for them. The first couple of the New Testament, who manage to cope with a supernatural pregnancy, a murderous king and the necessity of delivering a child in the bleak midwinter, half-out-of-doors and far from home.

These stories resonate in part because of how easily they could turn out differently. Not every Tiny Tim has Bob Cratchit as his father and a reformed Scrooge as his benefactor. Not every George Bailey realizes that he shouldn’t jump off the bridge when things look bleakest. And not every unexpectedly expectant mother has a St. Joseph standing by her.

Millions of Americans know this all too well, because the darker possibilities the Christmas stories hint at — divorce, abandonment, childhood suffering — are realities they have to live with every day. But that unhappy knowledge isn’t evenly distributed. In 21st-century America, the well-off and well-educated have the best odds of enjoying the domestic stability that the Yuletide stories celebrate, while the very people who most need resilient families — the Cratchits and Baileys, the working poor and the hard-pressed middle class — are less and less likely to have them. ...

To some extent, the nervous politicians are right. There is no government program that can guarantee a happy childhood or a devoted spouse. (If you replaced Clarence from “It’s a Wonderful Life” or the Angel Gabriel of the Gospels with a Health and Human Services bureaucrat, those stories would probably have a much grimmer ending.)

But public policy can still make a difference in the way we organize our private lives, and public institutions should be designed with existing patterns of social life in mind. Where mating and marrying are concerned, both our policies and our institutions are increasingly out of date: they’re built for a world in which two-parent, single-breadwinner families were a near-universal norm, and they don’t take enough account of the mass entrance of women into the work force, or the mounting economic pressures on the American family.

Labels: children, economics, family policy, parental leave, parenting, poverty, Ross Douthat, tax policy, work/family policy

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If current trends hold, within a few years, less than half the U.S. adult population will be married. This precipitous decline isn’t just a social problem. It’s also an economic problem.

Specifically, it’s an income-inequality and economic-mobility problem. The steadily dropping marriage rate both contributes to income inequality and further entrenches it. ...

It’s not only that those at higher education levels are far more likely to marry — they’re far more likely to marry each other. “Men used to marry their secretaries,” Sawhill observed. “Now they marry the woman they met in med school.”

As a result, Sawhill said, “These two-earner couples at the top are just making out like bandits and these single parents at the bottom have miserable lives. If the single parents were married, their life wouldn’t be so miserable. And at the top, if these high-earning professionals weren’t getting together and forming little collaboratives, they’d be worse off.” ...

Nor does the marriage gap seem destined to lessen. Pew found that 27 percent of those with college degrees say they consider marriage “obsolete.” But 45 percent of those with a high school diploma or less took that view.

A different arm of Pew, its Economic Mobility Project, found that among children who started in the bottom third of income, only one-fourth of those with divorced parents moved up to the middle or top third as adults. By comparison, half of children with continuously married parents — and, somewhat surprisingly, 42 percent of those born to unmarried mothers — moved up the income ladder as adults.

Labels: class, cohabitation, culture, divorce, economics, Marriage, poverty

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Labels: adultery, childhood, children, culture, custody, divorce, economics, Marriage, men, poverty, women

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The younger the parent and the younger the child, the more likely a family is to be poor, according to a new Child Trends report, Two Generations in Poverty: Status and Trends among Parents and Children in the United States, commissioned by Ascend: The Family Economic Security Program at the Aspen Institute. As policy makers ponder the merits of alternative measures of poverty, the Child Trends report outlines the disproportionate effects of poverty on young children, young parents, and children and parents in single-mother families.

Among the report's highlights:

The younger the parent, the more likely a family is to be poor. Households headed by young parents (18-24) are more likely to be poor than households headed by older parents, regardless of marital status.
The younger the child, the more likely a family is to be poor. Families with young children (0-6) are more likely to be poor than families with older children.
Overall poverty rates mask much higher rates for some sub-groups, such as single-mother families, whose poverty rate was 40.7 percent in 2010, compared to 8.8 percent for married-couple families.

Labels: children, Marriage, out-of-wedlock births, poverty, single parenting, unmarried parents

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Robert Rector was just wrapping-up his speech to a room of 250 people. That's when about a dozen protestors, who stood with their backs to him, started shouting.

Rector is from the conservative-minded "Heritage Foundation." SRS invited him to speak about childhood poverty.

"The data shows very convincingly that the strongest factor producing long term poverty in the state of Kansas and every other state is the decline in marriage,” Rector said.

Rector wants the state to educate and encourage marriage. It would be an effort to stop single mom households.

“He has raised some good ideas. It's work, it's family structure. And it's not like we're endorsing that idea per see, it's about getting the discussion started to frame it,” SRS Secretary Rob Siedlecki said.

Siedlecki called for a break when the protestors wouldn't stop.

The protesters had papers like this one. It says in part, this was an "orchestrated attempt to promote {a} $6.6 million 'marriage initiative,' a Cinderella/fairy tale solution in the face of increasing poverty." On the back, you can see it's from Occupy Wichita. ...

Response from Joan Wagnon of the Kansas Democratic Party:

I just celebrated my 47th wedding anniversary. I’m the child of parents who were married for 37 years, and the only thing that broke up that union was the death of my father. I believe that children thrive in families with two married, fully participating and emotionally healthy parents. Such a family is able to withstand what life throws at it, from the trials of a bad economy to the frustrations of everyday living. But not everybody has that kind of marriage.

To argue – as the Brownback Administration appears to be doing – that marriage alone will end poverty is simplistic, at the very least, and potentially dangerous. I am particularly concerned that the governor opened his child poverty town hall meetings this week with a speaker who declared that encouraging marriage is the most effective tool policymakers can use to fight poverty.

Marriage can be wonderful, but it can also be horrific.

Before I ever thought about entering politics, I ran the YWCA in Topeka. A year after I started as executive director in 1977, I helped create the city’s Battered Women’s Task Force. I counseled hundreds of women who were facing domestic violence. I found them shelter and helped them put their lives back together.

Labels: domestic violence, government interest in marriage, Kansas, Marriage, poverty

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Two months ago, I posed the question, Who's Had the Worst Recession: Millennials, Gen-Xers, or Boomers? A Pew analysis of Census data released yesterday makes a strong case that it's the youngest generation that faced the worst of the economy -- and that's even before the recession started. ...

Pew's study this week adds an interesting wrinkle to the story. Even before the Great Recession, young families were already falling behind. The big loud statistic from the study is that household wealth for young families has fallen by 70 percent since 1984, while net worth for families with older heads-of-household is up 48 percent. As a result, the wealth gap between young and old families has quadrupled from 10X to 47X in the last 30 years.

Some of this yawning gap between old and young is demographic. The rise in single family households means that more young, poor households have one breadwinner instead of two. As more young people go to college and accumulate debt, they're putting off marriage to work and pay down college loans. Partly as a result of these changes, under-35 poverty levels nearly doubled in the last four decades (see graph to right). Meanwhile, politics came to the aid of the old. The creation of Medicare helped to cut senior poverty levels in half. Social Security is still growing faster than low-income wages.

But much of this change has nothing to do with counting breadwinners per household. Something in the economy dragged down income for new entrants. In households headed by adults younger than 35, Pew reported, the typical adjusted annual income has grown by 27% -- four times slower than for older households. ...

For much of the 20th century, unemployment rates for women and men moved in tandem. But in the Great Recession, unemployment among men surged. Although guys have made up some of the gains in the slow recovery (job growth has been most brisk among low-wage positions) the fact that women now make up a majority of college grads suggests that they will hold on to and extend the gains they made over the last few decades.

But it's terribly misleading to look at graphs like these and conclude that women are somehow winning anything. We're all losing. For a while, women were just losing less dramatically. Still, female unemployment has been over 8% for two years, and if men came out worse in the sharp downturn, women are recovering more slowly in the aftermath. The local government recession has struck at industries like teaching that are female-dominant, while men have made some gains in industries like mining.

Labels: economics, men, poverty, single parenting, women

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What then are the appropriate policy responses to the unsustainable state of family life in many advanced societies? Here are ten proposals that might be helpful:

1. PROMOTE FAMILY ENTERPRISE.
The last generation has seen a rapid increase in corporate consolidation. Whereas rigorous enforcement of antitrust and other policies preserved an important role for small-scale family farms and businesses until the 1980s, today there is almost no check on the growth of giant retailers, agribusinesses, and industrial concerns. As British social theorist Philip Blond has written, “Our fishmongers, butchers, and bakers are driven out—converting a whole class of owner occupiers into low wage earners, employed by supermarkets.” Though it is not possible, or even desirable, to entirely reverse these trends toward monopolization, it is possible to moderate them and thereby carve out more space for family enterprise and entrepreneurship, which will in turn help to rebuild the economic foundation of the family. A good start would be to offer payroll tax breaks to small businesses and to more rigorously enforce existing antitrust laws.

2. INCREASE INCOME SECURITY FOR YOUNG COUPLES.
Young couples contemplating starting a family now face far greater risk than their parents typically did that they will face repeated spells of un- and underemployment. As political scientist Jacob Hacker has demonstrated, even before the Great Recession of 2008, the size of swings in pretax family income from year to year had doubled in the United States since the early 1970s. In Europe, many young adults typically find themselves maneuvering from contract to contract, rather than being able to settle into a secure career that will support a family. In the developing world, young adults often find themselves trying to get ahead amid the swirl of hypercompetitive megacities that seem to have literally no room for children.

There is no single policy lever to pull that will put the family back into a healthy and sustainable balance with global market forces. We must grapple with issues like foreign trade, offshore employment, and downsizing. Yet it is essential that measures of efficiency not be so narrowly defined that they discount the vital role that secure, functioning families play in sustaining economic progress. To soften the blows young adults face from income and employment instability associated with globalization, countries should ensure access to affordable health care and lifetime learning to keep job skills from becoming obsolete. ...

8. ADJUST THE FINANCING OF THE WELFARE STATE TO MEET THE NEEDS OF AN AGING SOCIETY.
All pension and health-care benefits, including those conveyed through the private sector, are ultimately financed by babies and those who raise and educate them. Yet in modern societies, the “nurturing sector” of the economy is starved for resources. Parents in particular rarely receive any material compensation for the sacrifices they make on behalf of their children.

Here is a suggestive policy idea for allowing the nurturing sector to keep a greater share of the value it creates for society: Say to the next generation of young adults, have one child, and your payroll taxes, which support the elderly, will drop by one-third. A second child would be worth a two-thirds reduction in payroll taxes. Have three or more children, and pay no payroll taxes until your youngest child turns 18. When it comes time to retire, your benefits (and your spouse’s) will be calculated just as if you had both been contributing the maximum tax during the period in which you were raising children, provided that all your children have graduated from high school.

Labels: children, culture, demographics, economics, family policy, government interest in marriage, Marriage, parenting, poverty, religion, tax policy, universities, work/family policy

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A few months ago, I was late. You know what I mean: My usual period day came and went without a spot, and suddenly every wave of exhaustion, every twinge of anxious nausea, became a harbinger of a very unintended pregnancy, a sign that my NuvaRing had failed me. I’m married, happily at that. And I’m a mother, happily as well. But our family feels “complete,” as demographers put it, at one child. And so my husband and I had to make a choice—or so we thought, for a very tense week before my body made the choice for me. As we lay awake at night whispering pros and cons for continuing the pregnancy, stopping only when our daughter padded in to snuggle under our covers in the predawn hours, I wondered if our mere deliberating might call into question my soundness as a mother. If I, already happily immersed in parenting, chose to terminate, wouldn’t I be unusual for doing so, maybe even stigmatized as a sort of prenatal Medea?

I was wrong. Women who are already mothers have more abortions than anyone else, and by an increasingly wide margin. When Guttmacher Institute researchers last ran the numbers in 2008 [pdf] they found that 61 percent of women who terminate a pregnancy in this country already have at least one child. That was before the recession, though—before the poverty rate rose to swallow 40.7 percent of women who head families, many of whom know they can’t afford another child.* So I asked the National Abortion Federation, a professional association of abortion providers, to run the numbers on the women visiting their clinics and calling their hotlines in the past few years. The resulting figures shocked NAF President Vicki Saporta, who called to tell me that every year since 2008, a whopping 72 percent of NAF clients looking to terminate a pregnancy were already mothers, up at least 10 percent from the years before the economy crashed.

But while the typical abortion patient is a mother, very few people seem to realize it. ...

For her part, Rachel Jones, a senior research associate at the Guttmacher Institute, thinks that public perceptions of who aborts and why are skewed mostly as a result of all the political heat around late-term abortions and adolescent abortions (minors have only 7 percent of all abortions). In other words, she argues, mothers who abort are invisible not because anyone is conspiring to keep them that way, but because so much attention is focused on other women.

But why do mothers have so many abortions in the first place? Jones co-authored a qualitative study titled "I Would Want To Give My Child, Like, Everything in the World: How Issues of Motherhood Influence Women Who Have Abortions," which found that most mothers who abort say they are doing so to protect the kids they already have. As Jones points out, that rationale is tough to demonize politically, especially when you consider that most women making this choice are contending with some combination of low income, unemployment, and a lack of health insurance, or are struggling to raise kids on their own.

Labels: abortion, culture, economics, motherhood, poverty, single parenting

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...South Korea has been grappling with shifting demographics that have left many middle-aged men cut adrift in a country that prizes marriage. As Korean women leave their hometowns for careers in the big cities, the men left behind are increasingly looking for brides from poorer Asian nations such as Vietnam, the Philippines, Cambodia, and Mongolia.

More than 100,000 women among South Korea’s 1.2-million foreign population are estimated to be foreign brides. This influx of foreigners has accelerated multiculturalism in Korea. But many of those marriages don’t turn out well. Part of the problem, say experts, is a lack of government oversight of agencies that locate foreign brides for Korean men. The result, say critics, is hundreds of unhappy marriages between middle-aged Korean men and young foreign women trying to escape poverty.

Korean men seeking to wed foreign brides are now required to take courses to prepare them for international unions.

Labels: Asia, economics, Marriage, marriage counseling, men, poverty, South Korea, women

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The federal government this week announced a new round of funding -- nearly $120 million -- for programs across the country that promote marriage or fatherhood, an initiative that began under President Bush and has now been continued by President Obama.

The Administration for Children and Families, (ACF), which is part of the Department of Health and Human Services, announced Monday that it was awarding $119.4 million in grants to 120 organizations -- $59.9 million for 60 marriage programs and $59.3 million for 60 fatherhood programs.

Among the recipients are religious organizations, state departments of family services and nonprofit groups. The maximum grant was $2.5 million, which several organizations received, and the lowest was $338,000 for Youth and Family Services in El Reno,Okla. ...

The programs have garnered support on both ends of the political spectrum -- some conservatives support the marriage initiative while some liberals favor the fatherhood programs -- but critics are still skeptical about their effectiveness and question whether they're worth the cost.

"I think there are some things government does well. This is not one of them," said Shawn Fremstard, a senior research associate with the Center for Economic and Policy Research. "The problem with both is they're very soft in terms of what they try to do. It's mostly subsidizing very general services that don't have much of a connection to the labor market."

Labels: children, Fathers, government interest in marriage, Marriage, marriage promotion, poverty

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Whilst perusing the fine content on display at our sister blog in New York over the weekend, this editor couldn't help but notice this post, boasting about The City That Never Sleeps' booming population of people who aren't sporting wedding bands....

Labels: cohabitation, culture, dating, DC, Marriage, poverty, unmarried parents

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It probably comes as no surprise that money troubles often lead to marital strife. But could receiving government assistance such as food stamps, Medicaid or welfare do further harm to your marriage?

The answer is yes--and in a big way, according to Dr. David Schramm, a researcher and professor at the University of Missouri.

In a study released earlier this month, Dr. Schramm found that, among couples in the same income bracket, those receiving government assistance experience lower rates of positive bonding, commitment to their spouses and overall satisfaction in their marriages. They are also more prone to divorce, negative interaction and feeling trapped in their marriages.

Dr. Schramm, a relationship and marriage education expert, surveyed 295 couples, 64 of whom were receiving some form of government assistance. He found that couples earning $20,000 or less--and receiving some form of government assistance above and beyond that--reported significantly lower rates of marital satisfaction than those earning the same amount but receiving no state support.

With jobless rates high, more families are relying on state aid. What does that mean for their marriages? We spoke with Dr. Schramm to find out.

What are the implications of your study?

We have to take a closer look at what the effect of government assistance is, and how it may affect people’s attitudes and make them feel inferior: “Now I can’t provide. I can’t be the provider because I’m out of work, or looking for work, and now we have to rely on government assistance.” There may be a stigma associated with receiving welfare assistance, so I think we need to do a better job of looking at what government assistance does to individuals’ sense of self and well-being. ...


What surprised you most about your findings?

[What surprised me most] was that people could be making the same amount, $20,000 or less, and yet one group happened to differ. There was such a big difference [in terms of marital quality] between those who are receiving government assistance and those who are not.


What are some possible explanations for your findings?

I have some plausible explanations: One, I think, and the research supports this, is that work brings satisfaction and accomplishment. And perhaps government assistance, for some men, may make them feel inferior, which may influence their level of stress.

There’s some research that shows that welfare participation compromises family values, it somehow biases the values and attitudes of those receiving it against marriage. Another explanation may be that there’s some other factors that we haven’t tapped into: There may be some mental health factors, the person may be disabled in some way, or there’s drug abuse. So there may be some other possible explanations ... This is not causal, this is simply correlation and not causation.

Labels: class, culture, divorce, Marriage, poverty

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...RAY SUAREZ: Among the newly-released studies is a first-of-its-kind Census Bureau analysis of marriage and divorce rates by region. The report, published last week, found that the South and West had the highest rates of divorce, while the Northeast ranked the lowest of the four regions.

At the same time, the number of unmarried Americans has reached a historic high, as the census also found that 30 percent of Americans have never been married, the largest percentage in the past 60 years. And yet another census snapshot released by the Williams Institute at the University of California, Los Angeles, found that same-sex couples have dispersed from urban enclaves to other parts of the country.

Joining us now to look at what all this may mean for the institution of marriage and its role in American life are David Blankenhorn, founder of the Institute for American Values, and Elaine Tyler May, professor of American studies and history at the University of Minnesota.

David Blankenhorn, are we in the midst of a redefinition of American marriage, why people get married, when they do it in their lives, even where they do it and what they think it's for?

DAVID BLANKENHORN, Institute for American Values: Yes.

I think the shift in broad terms is toward -- for marriage as an institution to marriage as a private relationship, an option for a private relationship. You know, in our parents and grandparents' generation, when you got married you were joining an institution that had authority, told you the rules. You were supposed to act in accord with its procedures.

Now the shift is toward private ordering. Each individual couple defines the relationship for themselves. One way to think about it is, in an earlier day, the marriage vow defined the couple. And now it's really the couple defining the marriage vow.

Labels: class, culture, David Blankenhorn, divorce, economics, gay couples, Marriage, out-of-wedlock births, poverty

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...It's not, in fact, in question whether we produced a permanent change; we did. There was a substantial structural decline in the percentage of families in poverty which persisted into the aughts. I could have included the percentage of female headed families in poverty, or children in poverty, and they would have shown the same trend: all of them clearly inflected downwards around welfare reform. All ticked up during the 2001 recession, but clearly settled at a level much lower than their pre-reform average. I find this hard--actually, impossible--to square with Klein's assertion that if you think the purpose of reform was to help needy families, then no, it hasn't worked.

So yesterday I discussed whether welfare reform "worked". It certainly caused a lot of people to move into work, where they were eligible for the Earned Income Tax Credit and for advancement to better positions. It caused the structural poverty rate to fall.

But few program changes are entirely win-win, and this was no exception. Even as many families have climbed out of poverty, some families have plunged deeper into it; as I understand it, mostly those headed by women with severe mental illness, drug and alcohol problems, or personality disorders. Before, if your mother was smoking crack, she could at least still collect her welfare check. Cutting off the check after five years, or cutting benefits as some states did, didn't mean she stopped smoking crack. It just meant there was less money around the house.

Those people are unambiguously worse off since welfare reform. ...

But I think that progressives ignore the possibility (indeed, what I take to be the near-certainty) that this is an inevitable tradeoff. If we provide benefits sufficiently generous to support people who are too screwed up to provide themselves with a very minimal living standard, we will also encourage people who aren't that screwed up to stay home rather than going to their tedious, low wage job. (Especially young people, who are not known for their patience or foresight). Despite a broader trend of more people having babies without first getting married, the rate of childbirth among unmarried mothers between the ages of 15-19--those whose children who are most at risk of poor life outcomes--declines noticeably post 1995. Though of course correlation is not causation, this at least suggests that welfare reform may have helped both mothers and children by encouraging young women to make better long-term choices about when to have babies.

Labels: children, culture, motherhood, out-of-wedlock births, poverty, single parenting

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This policy brief reviews the deepening marginalization of marriage and the growing instability of family life among moderately-educated Americans: those who hold high school degrees but not four-year college degrees and who constitute 51 percent of the young adult population (aged twenty-five to thirty-four). Written jointly by two family scholars, one of them a conservative (W. Bradford Wilcox, director of the National Marriage Project) and the other a liberal (Andrew J. Cherlin, professor at Johns Hopkins University), it is an attempt to find common ground in the often bitter and counterproductive debates about family policy. We come to this brief with somewhat different perspectives. Wilcox would emphasize the primacy of promoting and supporting marriage. Cherlin argued in a recent book, The Marriage-Go-Round, that stable care arrangements for children, whether achieved through marriage or not, are what matter most. But both of us agree that children are more likely to thrive when they reside in stable, two-parent homes. We also agree that in America today cohabitation is still largely a short-term arrangement, while marriage remains the setting in which adults seek to maintain long-term bonds. Thus, we conclude by offering six policy ideas, some economic, some cultural, and some legal, designed to strengthen marriage and family life among moderately-educated Americans. Finally, unless otherwise noted, the findings detailed in this policy brief come from a new report by Wilcox, When Marriage Disappears: The New Middle America.

Labels: class, cohabitation, culture, divorce, economics, government interest in marriage, Marriage, out-of-wedlock births, poverty

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...Audrey belongs to the most unmarried group of people in the U.S.: black women. Nearly 70% of black women are unmarried, and the racial gap in marriage spans the socioeconomic spectrum, from the urban poor to well-off suburban professionals. Three in 10 college-educated black women haven't married by age 40; their white peers are less than half as likely to have remained unwed.

What explains this marriage gap? As a black man, my interest in the issue is more than academic. I've looked at all the studies—the history, the social science, the government data—and I've spent a year traveling the country interviewing scores of professional black women. In exchange for my promise to conceal their identities (in part by using pseudonyms, as I've done here), they shared with me their most personal experiences and desires in relation to marriage and family.

I came away convinced of two facts: Black women confront the worst relationship market of any group because of economic and cultural forces that are not of their own making; and they have needlessly worsened their situation by limiting themselves to black men. I also arrived at a startling conclusion: Black women can best promote black marriage by opening themselves to relationships with men of other races.

Audrey and other black women confront a social scene in which desirable black men are scarce.

Part of the problem is incarceration. More than two million men are now imprisoned in the U.S., and roughly 40% of them are African-American. At any given time, more than 10% of black men in their 20s or 30s—prime marrying ages—are in jail or prison.

Educationally, black men also lag. There are roughly 1.4 million black women now in college, compared to just 900,000 black men. By graduation, black women outnumber men 2-to-1. Among graduate-school students, in 2008 there were 125,000 African-American women but only 58,000 African-American men. That same year, black women received more than three out of every five law or medical degrees awarded to African-Americans.

These problems translate into dimmer economic prospects for black men, and the less a man earns, the less likely he is to marry. That's how the relationship market operates. Marriage is a matter of love and commitment, but it is also an exchange. A black man without a job or the likelihood of landing one cannot offer a woman enough to make that exchange worthwhile.

But poor black men are not the only ones who don't marry. At every income level, black men are less likely to marry than are their white counterparts. And the marriage gap is wider among men who earn more than $100,000 a year than among men who earn, say, $50,000 or $60,000 a year.

The dynamics of the relationship market offer one explanation for this pattern. Because black men are in short supply, their options are better than those of black women. A desirable black man who ends a relationship with one woman will find many others waiting; that's not so for black women.

Labels: class, culture, divorce, Marriage, men, poverty, race, women

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Shortly after Candace Keshwar immigrated from Trinidad to Boston in 2002, her life took a difficult turn. Her dream had been to go to college and have a career where she could help others. But her first daughter was born with cerebral palsy and Keshwar spent the next seven years caring for her at home. She grew isolated. Her husband worked in construction, but jobs were sporadic, and the family relied on government assistance. “It was a real dark space for me,” Keshwar said. “I kept thinking, ‘This cannot be my life. I know I have the potential to do so much more.’”

A turning point came when Keshwar was asked to join a group of families who had self-organized as part of an initiative that helps people in low-income communities achieve their goals. Called the Family Independence Initiative (FII), its approach is radically different from the American social service model. Although it is still quite small — working with a few hundred families — its results are so striking that the White House has taken notice. What FII does is create a structure for families that encourages the sense of control, desire for self-determination, and mutual support that have characterized the collective rise out of poverty for countless communities in American history.

FII is not a “program” in a traditional sense. It doesn’t seek to implement changes, but to elicit them from others. It was launched as a research project by Maurice Lim Miller in Oakland in 2001. Lim Miller, whose mother was an immigrant from Mexico who worked multiple jobs to support her children, had previously spent 22 years building Asian Neighborhood Design, a youth development and job training program, for which he was honored by President Clinton during the 1999 State of the Union address.

Lim Miller had come to believe that the American social welfare system focused too much on poor people’s needs and deficits, while overlooking — and even inhibiting — their strengths. A safety net is crucial when people are in crisis, he said. But most poor families are not in free fall. They don’t need nets to catch them so much as they need springboards to jump higher. In a conversation with Oakland’s mayor Jerry Brown (now California’s governor), Brown challenged Lim Miller to try something different and gave him broad scope to be creative.

Lim Miller wanted to see what families would do if they came together in a context that supported their initiative. He began by identifying families in low-income communities who were surviving, but who had “given up hope” of aspiring to more. He asked them to pull together six to eight other families. He offered them a challenge. ...

They offered families $30 for every success they reported up to a maximum of $200 per month. (FII pays for reporting, not for specific actions, a different anti-poverty approach known as “conditional cash transfers” that we have reported on in Fixes.) Lim Miller reasoned that if he were to hire a consultant to collect this data, it would cost three or four times more. The families agreed to meet with an FII liaison every three months for an audit. Anything they reported — a pay increase, a doctor visit, an improvement in a child’s grades — had to be documented.

Most important, families had to agree to meet as a group at least once a month in a confidential setting to discuss their goals and any issues they deemed important. FII didn’t guide the agenda and its liaisons did not act as facilitators. They established the structure and backed off, creating a vacuum for families to take the lead. Lim Miller gave his staff strict instructions that they could not offer any advice — not even friendly suggestions. For some, this proved too difficult; he had to fire people who couldn’t help but be helpful. Lim Miller was convinced that the assumption of incapacity behind the helpfulness was a big part of the problem.

“When you come into a community that is vulnerable with professionals with power and preset ideas, it is overpowering to families and it can hold them back,” he said. “Nobody wants to hear that because we’re all the good guys. But the focus on need undermines our ability to see their strengths — and their ability to see their own strengths.”

Labels: class, culture, poverty

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