Posted on 06/08/2012 10:45:51 PM PDT by neverdem
When Charles Murray’s best-selling Coming Apart: The State of White America, 1960–2010 appeared a few months ago, the book’s fictional working-class neighborhood, Fishtown, became one more battleground in America’s 50-year-old culture war. Fishtown was representative, Murray argued, of a new white underclass in America—one produced by cultural decline, especially the collapse of marriage. Critics objected that the real source of misery in the nation’s Fishtowns wasn’t a lack of marriages; it was the extinction of manufacturing jobs. The disagreement was familiar to culture-war veterans: conservatives versus liberals, family breakdown versus dearth of good jobs, culture versus economics, David Brooks versus Paul Krugman.
Murray might have done more to acknowledge that globalization, technology, and the knowledge economy have wrenchingly changed the working-class world. Still, Coming Apart is correct: you can’t grasp what’s happening at the lower end of the income scale without talking about family breakdown. In fact, the single-mother revolution, as I’ll call it, takes us a long way toward understanding the socioeconomic problems on everyone’s mind these days: poverty, inequality, and the inability of those at the bottom to move up.
The single-mother revolution shouldn’t need much introduction. It started in the 1960s, when the nation began to sever the historical connection between marriage and childbearing and to turn single motherhood and the fatherless family into a viable, even welcome, arrangement for children and for society. The reasons for the revolution were many, including the sexual revolution, a powerful strain of anti-marriage feminism, and a superbug of American individualism that hit the country in the 1960s and ’70s.
The first public sign that the single-mother revolution had arrived came in 1965, when Daniel Patrick Moynihan published his controversial report on the black family. As a young assistant secretary of labor, Moynihan had stumbled across data showing that the percentage of black mothers who were unmarried at the time of their children’s birth was rising, reaching a then-staggering 24 percent, even while black male unemployment was falling. This puzzled Moynihan: Shouldn’t more male paychecks mean fewer single mothers? Moynihan realized that he was uncovering a new cultural phenomenon—voluntary single motherhood—and concluded that it would impede blacks’ economic progress.
After 1965 came the deluge. Other minorities and then whites joined the revolution, and it found plenty of extra recruits among the rapidly increasing number of women made single through divorce. In its broad outlines, the story is familiar by now. When Moynihan was writing, 93 percent of all American births were to women with marriage licenses. Sure, lots of these women might have married just before the baby bump, as had long been the case—but they nevertheless had husbands, with whom they formed a unit responsible for the coming baby. Over the next few decades, however, the percentage of babies with no father around rose steadily. As of 1970, 11 percent of births were to unmarried mothers; by 1990, that number had risen to 28 percent. Today, 41 percent of all births are nonmarital. And for mothers under 30, the number is 53 percent.
Though other Western countries also concluded that it was okay for the unmarried to have kids, what they had in mind as the substitute for marriage was something similar to it: a stable arrangement in which two partners, cohabiting over the long term, would raise their children together. The embrace of “lone motherhood”—women bringing up kids with no dad around—has been an American specialty. “By age thirty, one-third of American women had spent time as lone mothers,” observed family scholar Andrew Cherlin in his 2009 book The Marriage-Go-Round. “In European countries such as France, Sweden, and the western part of Germany, the comparable percentages were half as large or even less.”
Defenders of the single-mother revolution often describe it as empowering for women, who can now free themselves from unhappy unions and live independent lives. That’s one way to look at it. Another is that it has been an economic catastrophe for those women. Poverty remains relatively rare among married couples with children; the U.S. Census puts only 8.8 percent of them in that category, up from 6.7 percent since the start of the Great Recession. But over 40 percent of single-mother families are poor, up from 37 percent before the downturn. In the bottom quintile of earnings, most households are single people, many of them elderly. But of the two-fifths of bottom-quintile households that are families, 83 percent are headed by single mothers. The Brookings Institute’s Isabel Sawhill calculates that virtually all the increase in child poverty in the United States since the 1970s would vanish if parents still married at 1970 rates.
Well, comes the response, maybe single mothers are hard up not because they lack husbands but because unskilled, low-earning women are likelier to become single mothers in the first place. The Urban Institute’s Robert Lerman tried to address that objection by studying low-income women who had entered “shotgun” unions—that is, getting married after getting pregnant—on the theory that they represented a population roughly similar to those who got pregnant but didn’t marry. The married women, he found, had a significantly higher standard of living than the unmarried ones. “Even among the mothers with the least qualifications and highest risks of poverty,” Lerman concluded, “marriage effects are consistently large and statistically significant.” In another study, Sawhill and Adam Thomas ran an experiment simulating marriages between poor single mothers and unattached men with similar characteristics. Even though the men might have incomes lower than the average married father’s, the researchers found, the new “marriages” would mean a 65.4 percent decline in the number of poor children among the families in the study and a 43.2 percent rise in per-capita income.
You might think that cohabiting mothers would have the same economic advantages as married mothers. You’d be wrong. About half of all unmarried mothers in the United States are living with the child’s father at the time of birth, and they do tend to be less poor than lone mothers—at first. But cohabiting relationships here, unlike those in Europe, have short shelf lives. According to the Fragile Families and Child Wellbeing Study, which examined couples in large American cities in the 1990s, about half of cohabiting couples split before their child was five—compared with just 18 percent of married couples. Cohabiters were also likelier to import instability and economic stress into new relationships. A full 60 percent of cohabiters—but only 21 percent of low-income married couples—already had children from earlier relationships.
Women and their children weren’t the only ones to suffer the economic consequences of the single-mother revolution; low-earning men have lost ground, too. Knowing that women are now expected to be able to raise children on their own, unskilled men lose much of the incentive to work, especially at the sometimes disagreeable jobs that tend to be the ones they can get. Ever since welfare reform, black women, the majority of whom will be single mothers at some point, have been joining the employment rolls while black men have been leaving them. Murray finds a similar divergence among working-class whites. In fact, scholars consistently find that unmarried men work fewer hours, make less money, and get fewer promotions than married men do.
Experts have come to believe that these are not just selection effects—that is, they don’t just reflect the fact that productive men are likelier to marry. Marriage itself, it seems, encourages male productivity. One study by Donna Ginther and Madeline Zavodny examined men who’d had “shotgun” marriages and thus probably hadn’t been planning to tie the knot. The shotgun husbands nevertheless earned more than their single peers did.
In describing what’s happened in places like Murray’s Fishtown, the conventional narrative generally doesn’t mention the single-mother revolution. Instead, it goes like this: in the past, men could drop out of high school and still earn enough to support a wife and children. Manufacturing jobs gave those men and their kids a foothold into the middle class. Today, however, low-skill factory jobs have either fled to China and Thailand or are being automated. High school dropouts—and grads, too—find themselves chopping tomatoes at Applebee’s or delivering newspapers. Men suffer, remembering how their grandfathers proudly worked the line; many give up. “The move from blue-collar to service work is brutal, and over time some employees lose the will to stick it out in a hateful job,” The New Yorker’s George Packer writes.
Meantime, women not only have joined the workforce; they have watched their earnings rise. Finding that they can “afford to go it alone,” as economist Nancy Folbre explained in a recent New York Times column, they became choosier about whom to marry, and many decide not to marry at all and to raise children on their own. But those children have been dealt a bad hand by the same forces of globalization and technology that hammered their fathers. These days, the Pew Economic Mobility Project reports, 42 percent of American children whose parents had earnings in the bottom quintile end up there as adults, a significantly higher percentage of immobility than one finds in Canada and much of Europe.
Parts of this story are indisputable. Good manufacturing jobs have indeed declined. The earnings of male high school dropouts and grads have barely budged since 1974. Jobs with health and retirement benefits aren’t so easy to find. Women are earning more and men less.
But the narrative’s omissions undermine its economic logic. For one thing, contra Folbre, many single mothers are barely getting by, as we’ve just seen. A father’s contribution to the family income, even if it was just $15,000, would dramatically improve the mother’s lot, not to mention that of her—or rather, their—children. Second, if you live the right way, it’s still possible to move up to the middle class, despite the factory closings of the last few decades. Ron Haskins of the Economic Mobility Project puts it this way: “If young people do three things—graduate from high school, get a job, and get married and wait until they’re 21 before having a baby—they have an almost 75 percent chance of making it into the middle class.” Those are pretty impressive odds.
As Haskins’s point suggests, one factor (though far from the only one) in America’s poor showing in the mobility rankings is the rise in single motherhood, which is more pronounced in the U.S. than in most developed countries. After all, the children of single mothers are twice as likely as children growing up with both parents to drop out of high school. Those who do graduate are less likely to go to college, even if you control for household income and the mother’s education. Decades of research show that kids growing up with single mothers (again, even after you allow for the obvious variables) have lower scholastic achievement from kindergarten through high school, as well as higher rates of drug and alcohol abuse, depression, behavior problems, and teen pregnancy. All these factors are likely to reduce their eventual incomes.
In sum, the single-mother revolution encouraged lower-income men and women to think that mothers could manage on their own—at the very historical moment that their children needed more education, more training, and more planning. The rise in single motherhood was ill adapted for the economic shifts of the late twentieth century.
On the other side of the tracks, parents in the upper income quintiles were able to accommodate both their child-rearing and marital habits to the new economic realities. College-educated mothers were never full participants in the single-mother revolution. Though many are reluctant to say it aloud, they still tend to see children and marriage as a package deal. They’re almost always married before they have children, and their divorce rate has been falling since the 1980s. Not only do college-educated mothers themselves make more money than their less educated counterparts; they generally have a joint bank account, too.
Add what social scientists call “assortative mating” to the mix, and you have greater, more intractable inequality. Assortative mating refers to marriages between men and women of similar educational status. In the past, women tended to “marry up”: nurses married doctors and secretaries their bosses. But as women increased their presence on campuses and then began to bring home more money, college-educated men decided that they were better off marrying one of their own. Think of the implications for household earnings. A lawyer was always likely to earn more than a plumber—but today, plenty of upper-income households are headed by two lawyers. That considerably widens the gap between a power couple and a lower-middle-class duo. Sociologist Christine Schwartz has estimated that assortative mating brought about a 25 percent to 30 percent increase in inequality among married-couple families between 1967 and 2005. Between power couples and single-mother families, the gap is far wider.
Assortative mating also affects mobility. Greg Duncan and Richard Murnane found that between 1972 and 2006, well-to-do parents more than doubled their “enrichment expenditure” on their children, paying for activities like music and art classes, books, sports, and tutoring. And money isn’t the whole story. Those children are more likely to have two parents, both actively invested in their well-being, living in the house. Beginning in the 1990s, researchers discovered, parents began spending more time with their kids even while mothers were more likely to be at the office during the day; the increases were especially high among college-educated mothers and fathers. Research by Meredith Phillips of UCLA shows that high-income parents of children up to six years old spent an average of 1,300 more hours taking their children to “novel” places (that is, other than their homes, day-care centers, or schools) than lower-income parents did.
It’s easy to poke fun at “helicopter parents,” but in today’s economy, their investments pay off. In a wittily titled article, “The Rug Rat Race,” psychologists Valerie and Garey Ramey of the University of San Diego speculate that college-educated parents are reacting to the increased competition for college admissions by relentlessly building their kids’ cognitive, social, and emotional skills even in the earliest years. The approach appears to have worked: child rearing of this sort prepares kids for college and turns them into competitive workers in a knowledge-based economy. The news from the lower end of the economic scale, of course, is quite different. Not only do poorer children have fewer “enrichment expenditures”; they also get less parental time and involvement. Their educational outcomes show it, and so do their future earnings.
So the single-mother revolution has left us with the following reality. At the top of the social order is a positive feedback loop, with kids raised in stable, high-investment, and relatively affluent homes going to college, finding similar mates, and raising their own children in stable, high-investment, and relatively affluent homes. At the bottom is a negative feedback loop, with kids raised by single mothers in unstable, low-investment homes finding themselves unable to adapt to today’s economy and going on to create more unstable, single-mother homes.
Not only do we have more poverty, inequality, and immobility; we have the makings of a caste society, with an inherited elite and an entrenched proletariat. That’s not an America that anyone finds very attractive.
And this is one of those subjects that nobody is supposed to talk about.
Remember how Dan Quayle was lambasted by the liberals, for his observation about single motherhood, and how society is so non-judgemental about same?
He particularly mentioned the TV show, “Murphy Brown”, in which the title character had a baby out of wedlock. Quayle pointed out that TV presented that situation as just another lifestyle choice.
I remember that the show did an episode where they highlighted what Quayle said. I remember Candace Bergen made a speech on the TV show, in which she put Quayle in his place, saying that “families come in all sizes and shapes”. How dare he suggest that there is a preferred family structure!!
Smug liberal TV writers thought they put Dan Quayle in his place, but, the poor outcomes for single mothers and children brought up that way remain.
And this is one of those subjects that nobody is supposed to talk about.
Remember how Dan Quayle was lambasted by the liberals, for his observation about single motherhood, and how society is so non-judgemental about same?
He particularly mentioned the TV show, “Murphy Brown”, in which the title character had a baby out of wedlock. Quayle pointed out that TV presented that situation as just another lifestyle choice.
I remember that the show did an episode where they highlighted what Quayle said. I remember Candace Bergen made a speech on the TV show, in which she put Quayle in his place, saying that “families come in all sizes and shapes”. How dare he suggest that there is a preferred family structure!!
Smug liberal TV writers thought they put Dan Quayle in his place, but, the poor outcomes for single mothers and children brought up that way remain.
If even Gloria Steinem chose to marry, the rest of her ideological followers should have taken some clues.
"Even welcome," eh? THAT's the REAL definition of the "single-mother revolution" - getting women to actually accept hating the men who father their children.
That's all feminism is really about - getting women to hate men. Because when women hate men, they immediately need something to take their place. And voilà - they then find the Democrats standing there with open arms, with communism-hiding-as-socialism-hiding-as-democracy-hiding-as-feminist-collectives ready and willing to take the place of those horrible men (you know, the ones women can never stop thinking about and yearning for, and punishing each other and themselves for those feelings).
That's why the phrase "single-mother revolution" is the whole point of this article - a meme designed to claim that feminism isn't really the obvious catastrophe that women are waking up to seeing - no, it's a revolution against the elite and the proles! LOL, these whackjobs just CANNOT get Marx and Lenin out of their rigid little brains.
Divorce is evil, remarriage is evil, psychology is evil
Bttt
bttt
I see people living this out every day at work at the factory.
There is no future for young people without an education. Sometimes life has to smack them up-side of the head before they realize it. The smart ones adapt.
The dumb ones keep partying.
Thanks for posting it!
Regards,
All of this damage was begun when teens and single women stopped valuing their sexual purity and it became fashionable to sleep around. It is painful to see the awful relationships that young people cobble together these days.
The problem with these stories and books is that they never seem to look at the other side of the equation: the male side.
Clearly, marriage is an institution that favors women and children. That’s been proven time after time. In that sense, this article is not really going over any new territory. In the macro sense, women have always benefitted from marriage. Children have always benefitted from marriage.
But what about men?
There is a saying that has become sage wisdom amongst males: why buy the cow if all you want is a little milk? I would argue that the bigger problem here is not so-called women’s liberation, but the fact that younger men are deciding that marriage is a very bad deal for them. Ultimately, you have to get the male side of a marriage to say YES. And what is increasingly happening is that men are saying HECK NO.
You can go through the effort to convince women that marriage is to their benefit, write books, compile statistics, etc. But that does little good if men are running full tilt in the other direction away from marriage.
One big contributing factor is affirmative action for women, especially black women (who get double points).
Guys are not that easy to live with, and many women who have a choice, choose not to.
What I’m seeing is two-income couples choosing not to have kids at all, and enjoying all that leisure and money themselves. I also see their marriages as more successful because they didn’t have the stress of raising kids...
Cow & Milk analogy? How about the analogy that men control 90% of the world's wealth, but women control 100% of the
P-ssy. Apology for being crude.
In addtion to government assistance to single mothers, the divorce laws generally RAPE the man, causing him to lose his family and large portions of his income. Men lose in most divorce cases, even when they do not want the divorce and cannot fight the ‘irreconcilable differences’ claim.
Nor are women easy to live with. IT TAKES full commitment on both parties.
"Women can't live without 'em, can't shoot 'em." Tom Arnold in True Lies. BTW: ALL of liberalism is a LIE. Every damn bit of liberalism is a lie with disastrous effects.
“Family breakdown is limiting mobility and increasing inequality.”..........finally, somebody gets it.
Yes, that's true, but economic cycles, technological change, war, and other factors have always "wrenchingly changed" the lives people expected into something drastically different. Those who could adapt to the new circumstances did well, perhaps much better than they could have anticipated under previously prevailing conditions. Those who could not adapt became "the needy," subjects of charity, contempt, social engineering, or whatever the better-off were inspired to provide.
Factors that are hindering this kind of adaptation and contributing to the growing "underclass" include government schooling, minimum-wage laws and other job-killing legislation, welfare (which removes the impetus to adapt), and yes, sexual immorality and its attendant "mother and whatever children" "families."
“Men lose in most divorce cases, even when they do not want the divorce and cannot fight the ‘irreconcilable differences’ claim.”
That is why marriage, even reproduction, are dead issues today; I’d think 90% of pregnancies at this point involve an “involuntary” father (who is of course 100% responsible for his actions).
These demographic projections they tout about 2050 are nonsense; anyone who has been to a maternity ward can see that Hispanics are filling this country - NOW. Areas that are officially 90% “white” have student populations that are 70% Hispanic. This isn’t some change coming “down the road”; as black America found out when they were told in 2000 that Hispanics had passed them in numbers (this was projected to happen in 2010), these changes are happening NOW.
That's an example of something that works for individuals if only a few do it, but is disastrous for society if too many people do it. Your retirement plans are dependent upon there being a next generation which keeps the wheels turning.
Structuring things so as to make it viable (and effectively mandatory) for women of child-bearing age to be in the work force may prove the downfall of Western society.
“Don’t shift the blame. I believe the blame is roughly equally shared between men and women.”
I don’t. This is a hole of women’s digging. Let’s face the facts: the so-called women’s liberation movement has accomplished a great deal. American women are by and large better educated, have stronger legal protections, and are well on their way to earning more than men. And they’ve achieved a pyrrhic victory if their ever was one.
Your analogy, however crude, is essentially accurate. But it ignores a bigger issue: men ultimately control 100% of the “I DO.” And that’s quickly becoming “NO THANKS.”
Are you so sure these couples are choosing their childless state, or simply making the best of it?
The truth is few couples opt not to have children. And the ones who can’t are unlikely to volunteer that information. It’s indescribably painful and nobody’s business.
I guess the way they refer to pregnant women as “breeders” and donate tens of thousands to Planned Parenthood gives me a clue...
“I guess the way they refer to pregnant women as “breeders” and donate tens of thousands to Planned Parenthood gives me a clue...”
Yeah, I’m sure you personally know dozens of couples who fit that mold.
It’s also certain that the CDC is just making up all those hard statistics about the 40 million American couples undergoing medical treatment for infertility.
And couples without children who object to self-righteous, uncharitable, and nosy speculation from those who won the baby lottery are just overly-sensitive.
If you and your mate (Black Ink?) are suffering from fertility problems, my sympathies and prayers and wishes for your success in conception soon and may every conceived child come to term healthily.
It is quite a different issue that more couples today aren’t our grandparents’ couples. More DINKs. More premarital agreements. Some things were better off being old fashioned.
I come form an age and milieu that childbearing was rather declasse and "barefoot and pregnant." I did get far away from that milieu, however. I never found that warm, welcoming community that wanted babies around that young parents fantasize about. Mostly I found people ready to pick at every difficulty I had bringing them up and expressing annoyance that they made noise and messes in public.
If it comforts to get bent out of shape at some remark that has nothing to do with you, from some stranger whose face and voice you've never seen or heard, go ahead.
Great post!
“And what is increasingly happening is that men are saying HECK NO.”
I’m one of them. There is not one single reason I’d get married, at least not in this country.
The proverbial writing on the wall is there; actually, it’s been there for a long time.
“There is not one single reason I’d get married, at least not in this country.”
I understand and respect that decision on your part; I have never-married friends and family, and there is much to be said for that. It is a shame that the consequences of those decisions are all around us; in my town there are a decreasing number of signs in English, and the school population is increasingly foreign. I understand the predicament you are in (in terms of marriage and breeding), but the results are here now...not later, but now.
I married in this country, but she isn’t from this country.
It sucks. But jumping on the Titanic isn't a sane choice, at least as far as my thinking goes.
“I married in this country, but she isn’t from this country.”
I hear you...great minds and all that. The last two women I've been seriously involved with, including my current, longtime g/f, are both from other countries originally. Coincidence? Nope. If a time comes when the marriage bug bites, I already told her we move to her homeland; no way am I doing it here.
“But jumping on the Titanic isn’t a sane choice, at least as far as my thinking goes.”
I’m not recommending that at all; in fact, make sure the marriage in her country doesn’t have legal implications here before you do it.
After getting my dose of feminism at a state college 20 years ago, I look at these pathetic women unable to find a spouse and wonder whether or not they even understand why they can’t. Do they really believe the nonsense dished out on TV about men “avoiding commitment”, or do they know the truth (that men don’t see any point to paying alimony - and possibly child support - when their wife gets bored after three years or so)?
I have friends.family that would probably make good wives for good men, but I just don’t see it happening; with every passing year their opportunities for having children shrink...
I know you’re not suggesting a trip on the Titanic; I’m calling the odds of surviving a marriage about the same as surviving a trip on the Titanic (which varied, pending on the “class” one was in.
I hear you regarding marriage implications somewhere else appearing here.
Female friends like you refer to are also losers in this game, because if they are good quality people, there are good guys out there that are missing on them. But again, in this climate, is it worth the risk for the men?
And your assessment about being made a human ATM (courtesy of a badly skewed, anti-male legal system) is 1,000% spot on. I can’t contemplate volunteering to put myself in harm’s way. If I die alone and am only discovered after the stench on my rotting carcass forces a neighbor or mailman to call the police and find me, so be it. At least the state won’t have ribs on my bones...
“ribs” should be “dibs”
I hear you; best of luck regardless of which road you travel. I know several people in the same boat (pardon the Titanic pun).
Thank you Kearny!
You’re quite welcome; be safe.
Thank you! Keep up your brilliant posts - they are “must read” for me!
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