Who Needs Marriage!!

If we are to believe a pair of articles in the Washington Post, only upper crust women still live by the old adage -- first comes love, then marriage, then the baby carriage.

“As marriage with children becomes an exception rather than the norm, it is also becoming the self-selected province of the college-educated and the affluent” wrote Blaine Harden in his Post article (“Numbers Drop for the Married with Children,” 3/4/07). Meanwhile, the working class and the poor “increasingly steer away from marriage, while living together and bearing children out of wedlock.” I have a vision of masses of low income women who steer away from marriage in order to have babies on their own.

Isabel V. Sawhill, an expert at the Brookings Institution, concludes: “The culture is shifting, and marriage has almost become a luxury item, one that only the well educated and well paid are interested in.” One has to wonder why the poor are uninterested in marriage.

Sociologists call the tendency of educated, affluent people to unite in marriage “assortative mating.” A corollary to the theory applies to uneducated, poor people who also tend to unite, but in hookups and pregnancies, forgoing marriage.

What accounts for this increasing divergence? Harden blames “the rise of a class-based marriage gap to the erosion since 1970 of the broad-based economic prosperity that followed World War II.” Harden seems to believe that economic prosperity peaked just after WWII, demonstrating a gross ignorance of basic macro-economics.

Harden concedes that “marriage raises the earnings of men and motivates them to work more hours… and reduces by two-thirds the likelihood that a family will live in poverty.” I can tell you that babies born into loving families motivate the father’s working/earning gene at least as much as the marriage itself. Unfortunately, marriage and childbearing seem to be “de-coupled” among many black people with about three-quarters of first births coming before marriage (which usually never happens) compared to a third among white women.

In his Post op-ed (“Family Value Chutzpah,” 3/7/7) Harold Myerson notes that “the Ozzie and Harriet family still rolls along within the upper-middle class but has become much harder to find in working-class America, where cohabitation without marriage has increasingly become the norm.” Myerson blames conservative policies that have “condemned American workers to lives of economic insecurity and as their level of economic security declines, so does their entry into marriage.”

Let’s parse that conclusion: Conservative policies lead to economic insecurity which leads to children born out of wedlock. Myerson believes, apparently, that times are tougher now than during the Great Depression when illegitimate births were rare.

Here is an alternate perspective. Liberal theories and policies (feminism, welfare, entitlement and irresponsibility) lead to babies born to single mothers leading to economic insecurity and poverty.

Look at the evidence.

“In 1960 just about everyone, from a Smith grad living in New Canaan to a high school dropout in Appalachia, first tied the knot and only then delivered the bouncing bundle of joy,” wrote Kay Hymowitz in the City Journal (“Marriage and Caste”). Far less than 1% of high school graduate women had children without being married, while the rate among high school dropouts hit barely 1%. How things changed, as the affluence of Americans bloomed. By 2000 the out-of-wedlock birth rate among college graduates increased to 4% while the rate soared to about 15% among mothers with less than a high school education.

Furthermore, when college educated women get married they tend to stay married. As of 2000 only about 10% of mothers with college degrees were living without husbands compared to 36% of mothers without college degrees. Overall the situation is dire with fully 33% of children born to single mothers in 2004, amounting to 1.5 million children, the highest number ever. The vast majority of those children are going home to dysfunctional homes.

Hymowitz maintains that “the marriage gap results in a yawning social divide.” Among upper-middle-class families (those making more than $75,000 yearly) 92% of the children are living with both parents. Among the poor (earning less than $15,000) only 20% of the kids live with both parents. The consequences for children are severe: “Children in single-parent families are getting less of just about everything that we know helps to lead to successful adulthood.” The odious result for these poor people is “entrenched, multigenerational poverty.”

Hymowitz explains the upper class dynamic as “The Mission: the careful nurturing of their children’s cognitive, emotional, and social development, which, if all goes according to plan, will lead to the honor roll and a spot on the high school debate team, which will in turn lead to a good college, then perhaps a graduate or professional degree, which will all lead eventually to a fulfilling career, a big house in a posh suburb, and a sense of meaningful accomplishment.” They sound like Palos Verdes moms to me.

The pregnant question is this: Why don’t their low-income sisters “still believe in marriage as an institution for raising children?” Who needs marriage?

Unfortunately the women who are going without husbands are precisely the ones who need them the most. Hymowitz concludes: “When Americans made marriage optional, low-income women lost a culture that told them the truth about what was best for their children.”

What can be done about this burgeoning crisis? As with all serious problems the first step is to acknowledge it exists. This problem needs to be discussed, not swept under the rug. We need more Bill Cosby’s.

The next step is to search out the root cause. Does poverty lead to children living without their fathers or do children living without their fathers lead to poverty? Liberals (Harden, Myerson, Clinton, Obama) need to start telling the truth.

Finally, the educational system and social institutions, the media and government need to work hard to deprogram the lower income groups from their destructive practices. Bearing children out of marriage needs to be regarded as a tragedy, as it was before 1960. The Murphy Brown example should be held in contempt. Men fathering children, but not being their fathers, must be stigmatized, as it was before 1960. Family values make a difference.

This all brings me back to my most serious criticism of the report from the New Commission on the Skills of the American Workforce. (“Critiques of the Education Report,” 3/5/07). You can’t be serious about reforming education when you completely ignore the most critical issue, the breakup of the nuclear family, particularly among the poor. As Kay Hymowitz succinctly put it: “Marriage may not be a panacea. But it is a sine qua non.”