How much do single-parent households matter?
While the mainstream media and research groups have been focused on inequality, they have largely ignored family breakup. Why? Maranto and Crouch point to three reasons:
- University of Virginia sociologist W. Bradford Wilcox determined that children in high-income households who experienced family breakup fared less well emotionally, psychologically, educationally, and ultimately economically than their peers in two-parent families.
- Children of single or cohabitating, but not married, parents experience abuse, behavioral problems and psychological issues at higher rates than children of married couples, according to a study by the Centers for Disease Control.
- Just 2 percent of children raised in two-parent families experience poverty long-term, while more than 20 percent of children in single-parent families live in long-term poverty.
- Penn State sociologist Molly Martin estimated in 2006 that 41 percent of economic inequality generated between 1976 and 2000 was the result of changed family structure.
- According to researchers at the Brookings Institution, the U.S. poverty rate would be a full 25 percent lower today if the U.S. family structure resembled that of 1970.
Source: Robert Maranto and Michael Crouch, "Ignoring an Inequality Culprit: Single-Parent Families," Wall Street Journal, April 20, 2014.
- First, leftists do not want to side with social conservatives, despite the plethora of evidence.
- Secondly, minority families have experienced the worst family breakup, and bringing up the issue leads to fears of charges of racism.
- Lastly, because there is no immediate or quick fix to the family breakup problem: such a societal transformation will take decades.
Regarding the second reason I remember getting it in the neck from Tau Henare when the NZBR released my paper on Maori and Welfare in which I pointed out the correlation between the high rate Maori welfare dependence and ex-nuptial births. He wrote me a letter saying I was Maori bashing. In other words, racist.
5 comments:
Lindsay
I think it's fair to say that both the first two reasons are ideologically driven.
The third is a social-cultural problem that has resulted from the diminishing impact of religion / Christianity upon the lives of individual Kiwis and their families.
In an increasingly atomised western world, familes are the first to suffer.
A change in social policy towards fatherless parenting by the State would help, but there is very little the Government can do to reverse the trend.
Could you please translate that comment into English?
In other words, racist.
Lindsay, of course you're racist, You're white. You couldn't not be. And, of course, all the policy prescriptions you have will adversely affect Maori and other non-white residents, at least in the short to medium term.
there is very little the Government can do to reverse the trend.
The trend could be reversed overnight: the state can cancel the DPB and the Dole. You'd think NZ's leftists would like that - after all in the communist states there is no dole: work is compulsory for everyone, failure to work, to "contribute to society" was punished by prison sentences or execution.
While there is financial support upon which divorced (often non-working) parents and their children can reliably depend --- whether provided by the state, by churches, or by private charity --- then many "marriages" and defacto partnerships will break up. Any amount of counselling or ending "no fault" divorces will make no difference (once you want to divorce its easy to establish fault if the law requires it). Eliminating the DPB and Dole are the only public policy options that can address this. The rather more difficult question is whether this will lead to better long-term outcomes for the children concerned: that is, whether children are better off being raised in a single-parent home than they are being raised in a two-parent home where the parents would have split if they had the option.
Because if you look at the overall marriage/partnership break up rates, you will find that education, wealth, income and yes race (being white) are correlated with successful marriages, while being uneducated, poor, on the dole, or Mãori are correlated with unsuccessful marriages and disadvantaged children.
One of the things I remember from my teenage years was the churches saying very loudly that this is what would happen if divorce was normalised... and being told how heartless they were.
I wonder which gave the most grief -- divorce being hard to get, or divorce being easy?
Do you know of any good research?
Mary
How would you compare Mary?
How do you measure the hardship of staying married, versus the hardship of being a single parent? And I suspect the outcomes may vary between adults and children. As well the aggrieved party suffers more - at least in the short term.
It's a case of measuring the seen against the unseen.
That's not to say there isn't research...
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