symposium

0 Comments | Insight on the News, Dec 13, 1999 | by Nancy L. Johnson, | Patricia Ireland

Q: Should Congress fight poverty by promoting marriage?

Yes: We now know that marriage keeps parents and their children out of poverty.

BY REP. NANCY L. JOHNSON

It is impossible to deny the statistical connection between poverty and marriage. According to the most recent Census Bureau data on poverty, families headed by a single woman are almost six times more likely to be poor than married-couple families (29.9 percent vs. 5.3 percent). Correlations of this magnitude in social policy are rare.

Even so, avoiding poverty is not the major reason our society should reinvigorate its emphasis on marriage. The effects of single parenting are devastating for children. Of course, many single parents struggle against serious odds to do a good job and succeed but, despite individual heroic cases, single parenting is on average associated with a host of social ills, including poverty, mental-health problems, violence against children, school failure, delinquency and crime -- as well as divorce, unemployment, welfare dependency and other problems when the children of single parents grow up. These conclusions are based on 20 years of increasingly sophisticated social-science research, recently summarized in masterful fashion by Maggie Gallagher in The Age of Unwed Mothers and by Linda Waite in her forthcoming book, The Case for Marriage. Today there are virtually no social scientists who deny the connection between single parenting and a legion of dour outcomes.

For social scientists, the turning point for acknowledging the vital importance of marriage probably was the publication in 1994 of Growing Up With a Single Parent by professors Sara McLanahan and Gary Sandefur of Princeton University. Throughout the seventies and much of the eighties, most social scientists insisted that single parenting was not bad for children. Their nostrums, based on paltry research and lots of faulty thinking, enabled a generation of opinion leaders to deny that marriage was crucial for the well-being of adults and children. Once social scientists no longer could deny their own studies, it simply was a matter of time before intellectuals were obliged to change their tune, too. As early as 1993, Barbara Dafoe Whitehead had published the widely discussed "Dan Quayle Was Right" article in Atlantic magazine. Whitehead's trenchant article presented a convincing case, in a highly regarded and visible forum, that marriage was critical to the well-being of adults and children. After that, even the chattering classes had to admit that the evidence on the advantages of marriage was overwhelming.

Now comes evidence, primarily from McLanahan at Princeton, that poor mothers who give birth out wedlock are closely connected with their baby's father at the time of birth. Based on her research on nonmarital births in 20 major metropolitan areas, McLanahan finds that 50 percent of these couples are cohabiting at the time a child is born. Equally surprising, 80 percent of the couples label themselves "romantically involved," and 70 percent even say there is at least a 50/50 chance they will get married. Unfortunately, other research shows that within two years, less than 10 percent of these fathers will be living in the household with their children. Clearly, the year or so around the time of the child's birth is critical for any program that wants to help these young couples overcome the odds and turn their relationship into a marriage. Good programs, especially those conducted by community- and faith-based organizations, can make this happen, according to the program operators who testified at our hearings. All of them pointed out that inner-city fathers, including those with criminal records, say they are highly motivated to do right by their children and not to repeat the mistakes of their own fathers. I am confident that marriage can again become a central institution in the inner city.

Thus, working with my Republican colleague, Clay Shaw, and my Democratic colleague, Ben Cardin, we have written a bill that establishes three goals: to promote marriage, to promote better parenting and to help fathers find jobs or improve their skills. Our idea was to give federal funds to local organizations around the country, especially community- and faith-based groups. To be considered for funding, a project would have to explain in detail how it would create and conduct a program that achieves all three goals of the legislation. We wrote the law to give preference to those projects that begin helping families at or near the time of a child's birth and that promote child support and visiting between single fathers and their children.

A 10-member bipartisan panel of judges will review applications for funding. Some judges will be appointed by Republicans and some by Democrats; some will be appointed by Congress and some by the Clinton administration. A scientific evaluation of the best projects to be funded will be part of the legislation. The general idea of the bill is to attract small, community-based organizations and churches, to encourage applicants to develop and conduct innovative programs, to select the best projects among the submitted applications and then to carefully evaluate the best projects to determine whether they could increase marriage rates, improve parenting and improve the economic status of poor fathers. Our major goal is to build a knowledge base of successful intervention techniques and to nurture the growth of a network of projects that employ these techniques to promote marriage, better parenting and more employment among poor fathers.