Making Single Motherhood Normal

...I do not question that children in families that depend primarily on a woman's wage-earning ability are often disadvantaged...

...3 Stephanie Coontz suggests that fine-tuned research on single-parent families would probably find that they are better for children in some respects and worse in others...

...Through that magical process called socialization, families cause the attitudes, dispositions, and capacities of individual children who in turn as adults cause political and economic institutions to work or not work...

...Today the prospects for meaningful work and a decent income appear dim to many youth, and especially to poor youth...

...It is certainly plausible that parenting is easier and more effective if two or more adults discuss the children's needs and provide different kinds of interactions for them...

...cit., pp...

...Having liberals join this chorus is disturbing because it makes such preference much more mainstream, thus legitimizing discrimination against single mothers...

...Reductionism in the physical sciences has faced such devastating criticism that few serious physicists would endorse a theory that traced a one-way causal relationship between the behavior of a particular sort of atom and, say, an earthquake...

...Without such certainty, however, it is wrong to suggest that the liberty WINTER • 1994 • 89 Single Mothers of adults in their personal lives should be restricted...

...She resisted the interviewer's suggestion that there was something morally wrong or at least unfortunate with her choices and her life...

...Doesn't it make sense to trace some of the conflicts that motivate divorce to the structure of work or to the lack of work...

...Whitehead, Galston, Etzioni, and others claim that there is enough impressive evidence that divorce harms children emotionally to justify policies that discourage parents from divorcing...

...Presented at the Fourth Australian Family Research Conference, Manly, New South Wales, February 1993...

...Relating to children is a good thing in itself...

...I see nothing wrong with attaching paychecks and bank accounts to promote this end...

...Single mothers commonly experience credit and employment discrimination...

...In The Spirit of Community, Amitai Etzioni calls for social measures to privilege two-parent families and encourage parents to take care of young children at home...

...children need particular significant others...

...Children would likely benefit more from making it easier and less adversarial...

...Amato and B. Keith, "Parental divorce and the well-being of children: a meta-analysis," Psychological Bulletin 110, (1), 1991, pp...

...One should be careful not to correlate poverty with single-parenthood, however...

...Assuming that around one-third of households will continue to be 92 • DISSENT Single Mothers headed by women alone, men should be encouraged to involve themselves in close relationships with children, not necessarily their biological offspring...

...Women persist in such choices despite the fact that they are stigmatized and sometimes punished for them...

...This objection voices a very important concern, but there are ways to address it other than forcing men to get or stay married to the mothers of their children...

...Of course, with good job opportunities most of them would not need to be forced off welfare...

...It does not follow, however, that the second adult must be a live-in husband...

...Nonetheless, family values rhetoric has survived the election...

...In this simplistic model of society, the family is the most basic unit, the first cause that is itself uncaused...

...Condemning single mothers will legitimate harsh welfare reforms that will make the lives of some of them harder...

...Yet here we have otherwise subtle and intelligent people putting forward the most absurd social reductionism...

...Jean Bethke Elshtain is another example of a social liberal—that is, someone who believes in state regulation of business, redistributive economic policies, religious toleration and broad principles of free speech— who argues that not all kinds of families should be considered equal from the point of view of social policy or moral education...

...Real-world physical phenomena are understood to have many mutually conditioning forces...

...once they become parents, their opportunities to develop those skills usually decrease...

...Any sensible look at some of these families shows us that poverty is a cause of their difficulties and failures...

...Most parents require social support, some more than others...

...I do question the conclusion that getting single mothers married is the answer to childhood disadvantage...

...Having a baby can give a young woman's life meaning, earn her respectful attention, make her feel grown up, and give her an excuse to exit the "wild" teenager scene that has begun to make her uncomfortable...

...No woman should be disadvantaged in her education and employment opportunities because she has children at age fifteen, twenty-five, thirtyfive, or forty-five (for the most part, education and job structures are currently such that each of these ages is the "wrong time...

...Young inexperienced men today are just as ill prepared for parenting and just as unlikely to find decent jobs...

...Etzioni lays our worst social problems at the door of self-indulgent divorced or never-married parents...

...6. More broadly, the American public must cease assuming that support and care for children are the responsibility of their parents alone, and that parents who require social support have somehow failed...

...according to Coontz, a greater part of the increase in family poverty since 1979 has occurred in families with both spouses present, with only 38 percent concentrated in single-parent families...

...905-9...

...William Julius Wilson, another academic who has been close to Democratic party policy makers, considers out-of-wedlock birth to be a symptom of social pathology and promotes marriage as one solution to problems of urban black poverty...

...Their "welfare ethos" impedes individual efforts to move ahead in society...

...But she believes that in ten years, with hard work, social support, and good luck, she will have a community college degree and a decent job doing something she likes, as does her mother, now thirty-four...

...Although the majority of these births continue to be to young mothers, a rising proportion are to mid-life women with steady jobs who choose to have children...

...Communitarians are leading the liberal chorus denouncing divorce and single motherhood...

...Indeed, millions of white professional women currently in their fifties followed a similar pattern...

...5 It is harder to raise children alone than with at least one other adult, and the stresses of doing so can take their toll on children...

...5 Coontz, op...

...Conservatives have always stated a preference for two-parent families...

...They are free to seek adventure, sleep around, or start new families, while single mothers languish in poverty with their children...

...Some of the answers to this question are obvious, some not so obvious, but in the current climate promoting a stingy and punitive welfare state, all bear discussion...

...Similarly, Galston attributes fearsome social consequences to divorce and single parenthood...

...Celebrating marriage brings a renewed stigmatization of these women, and makes them scapegoats for social ills of which they are often the most serious victims...

...2. Whether poor mothers are single because they are divorced or because they never married, it is wrong for a society to allow mothers to raise children in poverty and then tell them that it's their fault when their children have deprived lives...

...2 Rosemary Dunlop and Alisa Bums, "The Sleeper Effect—Myth or Reality?—Findings from a ten-year study of the effects of parental divorce at adolescence...

...6 In the work cited above, Astone and McLanahan found that teachers treated children differently if they believed that they came from "broken" homes...

...She lives in a subsidized apartment and participates in a job training program as a condition for receiving AFDC...

...Discrimination against single mothers in renting apartments was legal until 1988, and continues to be routine in most cities...

...But many women are single mothers by choice...

...Some studies have found that the addition of any adult to a single-mother household, whether a relative, lover, or friend, tends to offset the tendency of single parents to relinquish decision making too early...

...Family-values reductionism scapegoats parents, and especially single parents, and proposes a low-cost answer to crime, poverty, and unemployment: get married and stay married...

...In order for children to have equal opportunities, moreover, equal respect for parents, and especially mothers, requires state policies that give greater support to some than others...

...we are all made poorer by the inability or unwillingness of young adults to become contributing members of society...

...In a world where it can be argued that there are already too many people, it may sometimes be wrong for people to have babies...

...We all pay for systems of welfare, criminal justice, and incarceration, as well as for physical and mental disability...

...The planned birth of a third child in a stable two-parent family may be morally questionable from this point of view...

...Most of them, of course, were supported by husbands, and not state subsidy, when they stayed home to take care of their young children...

...who had recently given birth to her second child...

...The great and dangerous fallacy in this imagery, of course, is its implicit assumption that non-familial social processes do not cause family conditions...

...The single-mother family is not going to fade away...

...Too many men are running out on pregnant women and on the mothers of their children with whom they have lived...

...The Clinton campaign successfully turned the family values rhetoric against the GOP by pointing to George Bush's veto of the Family and Medical Leave Act and by linking family well-being to economic prosperity...

...Gang warfare in the streets, massive drug abuse, a poorly committed workforce, and a strong sense of entitlement and a weak sense of responsibility are, to a large extent, the product of poor parenting...

...There is reason to think that much of the world, including the United States, has plural childbearing cultures...

...They should not assume that there is a single appropriate time to bear and rear children...

...According to Coontz, for a good part of American history this fact was assumed...

...Recently I heard a radio interview with an eighteen-year-old AfricanAmerican woman in Washington, D.C...

...The only antidote to this injustice is for public policy to regard single mothers as normal, and to give them the social supports they need to overcome disadvantage...

...Many women raise children alone because their husbands left them or because lack of access to contraception and abortion forced them to bear unwanted children...

...findings...

...6 There is no hope that discrimination of this sort will ever end unless public discourse and government policy recognize that femaleheaded families are a viable, normal, and permanent family form, rather than something broken and deviant that policy should eradicate...

...Needless to say, there is a need for massive increases in state support for child care if these women are to hold jobs...

...Citizens who love and are committed to some particular children are more apt than others to think of the world in the long term, and to see it from the perspective of the more vulnerable people...

...First, the state should force men who are not poor themselves to pay child support for children they have recognized as theirs...

...The consequences of family failure affect society at large...

...Etzioni is joined by political theorist William Galston—currently White House adviser on domestic policy—in supporting policies that will make divorce more difficult...

...Around one-third of families in the United States are headed by a woman alone...

...When Dan Quayle denounced Murphy Brown for having a baby without a husband in May 1992, most liberals and leftists recognized it for the ploy it was: a Republican attempt to win an election by an irrational appeal to "tradition" and "order...

...For example, the state should assist single-parent support systems, such as the "mothers' houses" in some European countries that provide spaces for shared child minding and cooking while at the same time preserving family privacy...

...If teen pregnancy is a social problem, this is not because the mothers are unmarried, but because they are young...

...WINTER • 1994 • 93...

...this proportion is about the same world-wide...

...After health care, Clinton's next big reform effort is likely to be aimed at welfare...

...Our racism, sexism, and classism are only thinly concealed when we praise stay-athome mothers who are married, white, and middle class, and propose a limit of two years on welfare to unmarried, mostly non-white, WINTER • 1994 • 91 Single Mothers and poor women who do the same thing...

...If we want to reduce the number of teenage women who want to have babies, then education and employment policies have to take girls and women much more seriously...

...If there is any serious commitment to equality in the United States, it must include an equal respect for people's reproductive choices...

...we all suffer if our society is unsafe and divided...

...Women who give birth out of wedlock, moreover, often have chosen to do so...

...There is nothing in principle wrong with such a pattern of having children first and getting education and job training later...

...I am not invoking a Platonic vision of communal childrearing...

...It is not an exaggeration," says Barbara Dafoe Whitehead in the Atlantic (April 1993) "to characterize [family disruption] as a central cause of many of our most vexing social problems, including 88 • DISSENT Single Mothers poverty, crime, and declining school performance...

...Most people have forgotten another explicit aim of Dan Quayle's appeal to family values: to "explain" the disorders in Los Angeles in May 1992...

...And what about all the causal influences on families and children over which parents have very little control—peer groups, dilapidated and understaffed schools, consumer culture, television and movie imagery, lack of investment in neighborhoods, cutbacks in public services...

...But non-parents ought to take substantial economic and social responsibility for the welfare of children...

...When making their reproductive decisions, everyone ought to ask whether there are too many people in the world...

...3 Nan Marie Astone and Sara McLanahan, "Family Structure and High School Completion: The Role of Parental Practices," Institute for Research on Poverty Discussion Paper no...

...This stress is mitigated, however, if the child has a close supportive relationship with at least one of the parents...

...She affirmed wanting both children, and said that she planned to have no more...

...Public policy should, however, also acknowledge that taking care of children at home is work, and then support this work with unstigmatized subsidy where necessary to give children a decent life...

...How do single-mother families "cause" poverty, for example...

...4. Public policy should take positive steps to dispel the assumption that the two-parent heterosexual nuclear family is normal and all other family forms deviant...

...Particularly disturbing is the fact that the refrain has been joined by people who, by most measures, should be called liberals, but who can accept only the two-parent heterosexual family...

...Divorce today already often drags on in prolonged acrimony...

...Complex and multiple social causation makes it naive to think we can conclusively test for a clear causal relationship between divorce and children's well-being...

...For example, although adults in single-parent families spend less time supervising homework, single parents are less likely to pressure their children into social conformity and more likely to praise good grades . 4 Much less controversial is the claim that children in single-parent families are more often poor than those in two-parent families...

...26-46...

...1. There is nothing in principle any more wrong with a teenage woman's choice to have a child than with anyone else's...

...From a moral point of view, is there an important difference between the two kinds of dependence...

...Galston and Etzioni endorse proposals that would impose a waiting period between the time a couple applied for divorce and the beginning of divorce proceedings...

...Although those using family values rhetoric rarely mention gays and lesbians, this celebration of stable marriage is hardly good news for gay and lesbian efforts to win legitimacy for their lives and relationships...

...Madison, WI, 1989...

...Only if the economy offered women decent-paying jobs, moreover, would forcing welfare women to get jobs lift them out of poverty...

...But I am concerned here with the implications of family values rhetoric for another despised and discriminated-against group: single mothers...

...When citing statistics about rising rates of out-of-wedlock 90 • DISSENT Single Mothers birth, journalists and scholars rarely break them down by the mother's age, occupation, and so on...

...Ignoring the myriad social conditions that affect families only enables the government and the public to escape responsibility for investing in the ghettos, building new houses and schools, and creating the millions of decent jobs that we need to restore millions of people to dignity...

...Women increasingly initiate divorces, and many single mothers report being happier after divorce and uninterested in remarriage, even when they are poorer...

...5. Some people might object that my call for recognizing single motherhood as normal lets men off the hook when it comes to children...

...2 Results also suggest that Australia's stronger welfare state and less adversarial divorce process may partly account for differences with U.S...

...Thus the evidence that divorce produces lasting damage to children is ambiguous at best, and I do not see how the ambiguities can be definitively resolved one way or the other...

...Constructing an education and employment system that took girls as seriously as boys, that trained girls and boys for meaningful and available work would be a far more effective antidote to teen birth than reprimanding, stigmatizing, and punishing these girls...

...A closer look at the data, however, yields a much more ambiguous picture...

...259-60...

...Notes ' P.R...

...Unmarried women with children lie at the source of the "lawless social anarchy" that sends youths into the streets with torches and guns...

...If we assume that there is nothing morally wrong with single-mother families, but that they are often disadvantaged by lack of child care and by economic discrimination and social stigma, then what follows for public policy...

...Single mothers and their children also face biases in schools...

...Etzioni claims that children of single parents receive less parental supervision and support than do children in two-parent families...

...Although many Americans agree with me about divorce, they also agree with Quayle, Wilson, Galston, and others that single motherhood is undesirable for children, a deviant social condition that policy ought to try to correct...

...They are inexperienced in the ways of the world and lack the skills necessary to get a job to support their children...

...3. The programs of schools, colleges, and vocational and professional training institutions ought to accommodate a plurality of women's life plans, combining childbearing and child-rearing with other activities...

...4 Stephanie Coontz, The Way We Never Were (Basic Books, 1992...

...But principles of equality and reproductive freedom must hold that there is nothing more wrong with a woman in her thirties with a stable job and income having a baby than with a similar married couple...

...To their credit, American voters did not take the bait...

...Still, there is something wrong with a society that gives her few alternatives to a mothering vocation and little opportunity for meaningful job training...

...But these remain problems even when the women marry the young men with whom they have conceived children...

...The left should press instead for the sorts of principles and policies that treat single mothers as equal citizens...

...Just as we should examine the assumption that something is wrong with a mid-life woman having a child without a husband, so we ought to ask a more radical question: just what in principle is more wrong in a young woman's bearing a child without a husband than in an older woman's doing so...

...But job training and employment programs for girls and women must be based on the assumption that a large proportion of them will support children alone...

...Liberal family values rhetoric also finds the "breakdown" of "the family" to be a primary cause of all our social ills...

...But the objection above requires more than child support...

...As many as 50 percent of single-parent families are likely to be poor, which is a shocking fact, but intact two-parent families are also increasingly likely to be poor, especially if the parents are in their twenties or younger...

...Discussion of the "problem" of "illegitimate" births commonly assumes the image of the irresponsible and uneducated teenager (of color) as the unwed mother...

...She does not like being poor, and does not like having uncertain child care arrangements when she is away from her children...

...Beyond that, I submit that we should affirm an unmarried young woman's right to bear a child as much as any other person's right...

...A ten-year longitudinal study released in Australia last June found that conflict between parents— whether divorced or not—is a frequent cause of emotional distress in children...

...Although many young unmarried women who bear children do so because they are effectively denied access to abortions, many of these mothers want their babies...

...One meta-analysis of ninety-two studies of the effects of divorce on American children, for example, finds statistically insignificant differences between children of divorced parents and children from intact families in various measures of well-being.' Many studies of children of divorce fail to compare them to children from "intact" families, or fail to rule out predivorce conditions as causes...

...I will close by sketching a few proposals...

...Families unprotected by wide networks of supportive institutions and economic resources are bound to suffer...

...In a study of housing fairness in Pittsburgh in which I participated, most people questioned said that rental housing discrimination is normal in the area...