Mother and Father Know Best

...Tragically, we are in great danger today of losing that critical mass...

...Between presidential appointments—Horn led the Children's Bureau within Health and Human Services under the first President Bush and has served on numerous commissions on children—he co-founded the National Fatherhood Initiative and was its president from 1995 to 2001...

...Along with Steven Nock, professor of sociology at the University of Virginia, and Norval Glenn, professor of sociology and American Studies at the University of Texas, Waite more recently chaired a team of 13 family scholars who have produced a booklet-sized digest of the same and similar material...

...BY BETH HENARY CONVINCED that healthy, two-parent families are best for children, the Bush administration is looking for ways to promote sound marriages among welfare recipients and clients of programs like Head Start...

...Another of Horn's projects is to tweak the historic 1996 welfare reform law when it comes up for renewal this year...

...Head Start's regional office in Boston is already offering its satellite centers up to $10,000 each to add marriage enrichment to the weekly lineup...

...A tiny minority of these children come from intact, married families...

...Why it's a terrible idea to help couples who've chosen marriage for themselves to develop a skill set which will allow them to have a healthy marriage...

...He wants to make $100 million available to states and nonprofit organizations, on a competitive basis, to improve and expand programs supporting marriage...

...Take the parents of a newborn infant who are unmarried...

...Horn proposes adding marriage-enrichment classes to the list, helping couples, for example, improve their listening and conflict negotiation skills...

...Why anyone would argue with this, he fails to understand...

...Un veiled February 14, this report—Why Marriage Matters: Twenty-One Conclusions from the Social Sciences—shows, for example, that children and adults in married families enjoy, on average, better health— mental and physical—and make more money than individuals in other types of families...

...Already Head Start provides parenting classes and job training for the adults, on the theory that these will ultimately benefit the children...

...Until a confirmation conversion, he publicly supported giving married families precedence over single mothers for social services from Head Start to public housing...

...The argument must be made," he writes, "frequently and with great passion—that society needs a critical mass of married two-parent families, both to raise their own children well and to serve as models for children growing up in alternative family structures...

...Horn and others in the marriage movement cite such research not to detract from the hard work of single parents, or to argue that those who do not want to marry should...

...Married men have better relationships with their children than single dads...

...His books include the New Father Book: What Every Man Needs to Know to be a Good Dad and Seven Things States Can Do to Promote Responsible Fatherhood (with Eric Brenner...

...You're finding out what it Beth Henary is an editorial assistant at THE WEEKLY STANDARD...

...This isn't about telling anybody who should marry who...

...He hopes someday to offer interested couples vouchers to help pay for either secular or religious counseling...

...He also wrote a weekly "Fatherly Advice" column, exploring factors that contribute to family breakdown—from negative images of dads on television, to the marriage-unfriendly tax code, to "family relativism," the idea that all family structures are socially and morally equivalent...

...Its point man in the effort is psychologist Wade Horn, assistant secretary of Health and Human Services for children and families and longtime champion of the importance of fathers...

...is that your clients are thinking about, and trying to move them in a direction that's healthy...

...But Horn's eagerness to see creative experimentation in this field—he backs a West Virginia program that gives married welfare families a $100 benefits bonus each month—has deep roots, stemming from his long experience in the fatherhood movement and the larger marriage movement...

...For now, Horn is not pushing more radical ideas he has explored in the past—like financial incentives to discourage out-of-wedlock pregnancies...

...But when you have a couple who say, we're interested in getting married, or who are already married, it's about helping them develop the skills and knowledge necessary to form and sustain healthy marriages...

...This is just "good casework," Horn believes...

...Married mothers have lower rates of depression than single mothers do, and for children the consequences of maternal depression are not nearly as great if the mother is married as they are if the mother is single...

...Someday someone has to explain to me what the controversy [over his initiatives] is...

...Already in most states, the fathers are invited to acknowledge paternity, though they may decline...

...In The Fatherhood Movement: A Call to Action, a 1999 collection of essays he edited with David Blankenhorn and Mitchell B. Pearlstein, Horn lays out the consequences of family breakdown—not just a higher incidence of poverty and violence against children, but the further weakening of family bonds as generations pass...

...one of Horn's ideas is to encourage hospital paternity workers to ask if couples have considered marriage—more than half have, according to one study—and if so, to offer them information about premarital counseling...

...Or consider Head Start, the Great Society child-development program currently serving over 857,000 low-income children...

...In the programs under his purview, Horn does not seek to put single mothers out in the cold, but simply to advance the truth he's learned over the years— that mother and father, together, know best...

...The money would be shifted out of an existing program intended to lower rates of out-of-wedlock child-bearing that Horn says has accomplished little...

...in some communities it has already been lost...

...One tactic of the fatherhood and marriage movements has been to publicize the growing body of social science research being done at major universities that has documented benefits of marriage for individuals and society...

...I don't want to play Cupid," Horn says...

...University of Chicago demographer Linda Waite summarized findings from many disciplines in The Case for Marriage (2000...