Debate Social Policy and Single Motherhood
Elshtain, Jean Bethke
What I found most surprising in Iris Young's analysis ("Making Single Motherhood Normal," Winter 1994) is the radical disconnection between her policy proposals and the constraints and...
...What I found most surprising in Iris Young's analysis ("Making Single Motherhood Normal," Winter 1994) is the radical disconnection between her policy proposals and the constraints and possibilities of our current situation...
...we need all the things Young blithely ignores...
...Civic philosophy dies when academics, in the name of radicalism, in the name, heaven help us, of that democratic socialism for which this journal has traditionally stood, endorse values that erode the only possible bases for creating and sustaining community institutions over time—calling for more individualism (hence Young's celebration of an individual woman's "choice" to have a baby whether she is thirteen years old or fifty, as if that choice and not any consideration of the child's well-being were the only value at stake...
...Are we to see forlorn bands of disconnected men roaming neighborhoods, knocking on doors, and asking if there is a baby inside they can "bond" with for a few hours...
...The stigma attached to single motherhood has virtually disappeared, if we trust the survey data, but the problems associated with the children of single parents do not go away so readily...
...What institutional forms will nurture and sustain such relationships...
...It is depressing to see these old nostrums refurbished as radical or reformist when they could scarcely be more conformist—to the naively anti-institutionalist, hyper-individualist tendencies of our time, with a heavy dollop of "separate spheres with a feminist face" thrown in for good measure...
...Economists Victor Fuchs and Diane Reklis have shown that the well-being of children worsened in a period when "purchases of goods and services for children by government rose very rapidly, as did real household income per child, and the poverty rate of children plummeted...
...We also know, from the National Commission on Children, the Center for the Study of Social Policy, the U.S...
...We know that poverty is associated with single parents...
...She calls for "public policy" to dispel any notion of "normality" in family structure...
...we need secure social institutions...
...Still, Young would "encourage" men to "involve themselves in close relationships with children, not necessarily their biological offspring...
...In the first group, the number of children who fell below the poverty line was 8 percent...
...She calls for states to "force men" to "pay child support for children they have recognized as theirs...
...Let's enter the real world...
...There are no "fathers" or "daddies" in Young's universe with direct, daily responsibility for child care and family sustenance, something not reducible to a paycheck...
...But mark this: there is no compelling evidence that a decline in government spending accounts for the past several decades' burgeoning litany of risks to children...
...Young's rhetorical demolition of what she takes to be onerous tradition combined with her wholly abstract, vague pleas for connection and responsibility shows us again that politics of denunciation and sentimentalism that undermined much of 1960s radicalism...
...The organizing base is families and churches—the remnants of intact institutions—for you cannot make lasting, meaningful change of any kind outside institutions...
...If you continue to track direct government expenditures per child up to the present moment you find no compelling correlation between government support and child well-being per se...
...But that means doing our best to create situations that do best for children, not continuing to try to patch things up when we know, because the evidence is in, that some familial arrangements are better for children than others...
...But, surely, we have already conducted that experiment and it has failed...
...Once again we are in a world of "women and children only," where a woman can do it all by herself, thank you...
...It has failed for the very people it was designed to help—single mothers and their children...
...Thus, we must seek explanations for the rising problems of that period in the cultural realm...
...I 268 • DISSENT Arguments have in mind, for example, the activities of the Industrial Areas Foundation...
...The period to which Fuchs and Reklis refer is the 1960-1970 decade...
...Of course, we should do our best for all children...
...The most recent profile included the following startling information...
...She reverts to the claim that "poverty" is the cause of all other troubles...
...Here she reproduces the very "one-way" causal claims she attacked just a few sentences earlier...
...The most successful organizing for change over the past fifty years has come from poor and working-class communities who form broad-based coalitions to work for housing, jobs, schools, in the most devastated urban areas—from Brownsville to San Antonio...
...For Young misses altogether what is at stake in the travail of the present moment...
...normlessness as a norm...
...She calls for "massive increases in state support for child care" when state budgets are strapped, cutbacks are being ordered across the board, and new initiatives in health care will gobble up whatever additional revenues are available...
...What this suggests is that marriage, somewhat delayed child-bearing, and high school completion— cultural and educational factors—fuel economic outcomes...
...If you control for all other factors, including economic status, you learn that father absence is the single most important risk factor for children, whether one is talking about poor health or poverty or behavioral problems (the latter being a euphemistic way of gesturing toward drug addiction, being the victim or perpetrator of violence, adolescent out-ofwedlock birth, and so on...
...That won't stop children from suffering...
...That won't help a child find security and trust and safety...
...There are dozens and dozens of such examples...
...The mountain of evidence now available from reputable scholars tells us that cultural changes— alterations in norms and values—are not mere epiphenomenal foam on the causal sea but are themselves vectors of economic trouble...
...But her formulation continues to put the onus for child-rearing and child "recognition," if you will, on women...
...The sad truth is that our public investment in children is being outstripped by "private disinvestment," in other words, the breakup of the two-parent home...
...In the second group, the number of children who fell below the poverty line was a startling 79 percent...
...A man could easily bypass Young's requirement by refusing to recognize a child as "his...
...The problem, of course, is that matters are far more complex than this...
...Indeed, we are spending more for children today in the public sphere than ever before...
...Who is to compel this recognition if the institutional framework within which it has taken place historically—the two-parent family— has been entirely dismantled as a "norm" or "ideal" of any sort...
...I will offer up evidence on this score—evidence Young systematically overlooks...
...If Young wants to see revitalization of communities in action she should check out the work of the East Brooklyn Congregations (EBC) and their Nehemiah Homes project or Baltimoreans United in Leadership Development (BUILD), a group that has made significant strides in school reform in the inner city...
...This is curious because Young thrashes reductionism before rapidly moving to her own reductionist formula, namely, that any "sensible look" at the plight of poor families reveals that "poverty" is the cause of, well, being poor...
...She claims men shouldn't be let off the hook where their responsibilities are concerned...
...Researchers looked at two groups and compared them: couples who completed high school, married, and waited until age twenty to have their first child against couples who did none of the above—they neither married nor finished school, and in which the girl gave birth before age twenty...
...more vast government projects, hence more clientage...
...we need children who are compelled by parents to stay in school...
...If we are to see investment "in the ghettos," the building of new houses and schools, the creation of "millions of decent jobs," no less, we need people capable of holding jobs...
...It is high time we set aside economic reductionism of the sort Young oddly endorses and looked to the dissolution of the fabric of families and communities, a tragedy entangled with the repudiation of those "norms" for male and female responsibility for children that Young finds oppressive because they "stigmatize" single mothers...
...Presumably she supports universal health care and favors moves in that direction...
...The Kids Count Data Book, published by the liberal Center for the Study of Social Policy, one of the most widely accepted scholarly sources in this area, offers up annual "Profiles of Child Well-Being...
...How...
...In fact, startlingly, her argument is a call for a return to a particularly rigid form of "separate spheres," something I thought feminists had a strong stake in criticizing and reforming...
...This means mothers, often very young SPRING • 1994 • 267 Arguments mothers (those "babies having babies" Jesse Jackson talks about) in a father-absent situation...
...I know: I was there...
...Department of Health and Human Services, and dozens of other reliable sources that children growing up in single-parent households are at greater risk on every index of well-being (crime, violence, substance abuse, mental illness, dropping out of school, and so on...
...and on and on...
...Do we change all of this by making a one-parent family suddenly "normal...
Vol. 41 • April 1994 • No. 2
