Ezra over at Pandagon takes on Barbara Ehrenreich’s lampooning of the Bush administration’s marriage education initiative:
While she’s right to note the absurdity of promoting marriage for the poor while attacking it for poor gays, she’s wrong to take aim at the idea of marriage education in lower income areas. Children born to single-mothers — or for that matter, single fathers — are far more likely to be born into poverty, 50% more likely to drop-out of high school and 20% more likely to have a child as a teen. This is not, as some would argue, the fault of single mothers. It’s very much the fault of having one parent who needs to support x children on one income — there’s simply less time for parenting. Two parent families offer more support and supervision flexibility than do one parent households, and that’s simply good for the kids. It’s clearly not a cure for poverty, but two incomes make the financial pain less excruciating.
Good point. The question is, though, whether the marriage education programs lead to substantially improved marriage rates or greater combined income for poorer families. As the comments to Ezra’s post point out, there is every reason to be skeptical that those implementing the ‘education’ are less interested in facilitating wise choices than in imposing moralistic notions that people need to be married whatever the cost. Absent closer scrutiny of these programs, it’s hard to say if that’s indeed the case, but given the Trojan Horse trajectory by which conservative Christian goals have been repackaged and sublimated into Compassionate Conservatism, the suspicions aren’t unreasonable.
More likely, I suspect the danger is that the service that such education could provide - essentially state-subsidized marriage counseling - will misdiagnose the cause of low marriage rates among the poor and thus have little impact. After all, are marriage rates lower because the parties involved don’t know conflict management or communication skills? I wouldn’t argue anything so offensive as the notion that the relationships of poor and working poor aren’t affected by the interpersonal dynamics as everyone else. But the counseling that (sometimes) works for middle-class couples does so in a relatively stable marriage market.
And the marriage market gets more dysfunctional the lower down the social scale you go. (It perhaps is dysfunctional further up as well, for different reasons). On one hand, you have a smaller-than-ideal pool of marriageable men, whose ranks are marked by incarceration (past or present) and marginal participation in the labor market. On the other hand, you have a high proportion of single mothers, whose chances on the marriage market are undoubtedly hurt by having children already. This undoubtedly simplifies the way such a marriage market works (and, sociologically, it really does work as a market, even if its sublimation into supposedly non-pecuniary decisions makes us whince at the suggestion), but I don’t see how you can explain the higher incidence of marriage in one group over the other by simple resort to individual decisionmaking. The internalization of objective life chances informs our decisions about marriage as much as other cultural (religious and moral) beliefs.
I myself don’t know the solution, other than policy that chips away at economic inequality and unemployment. So I’m willing to call a truce: liberals can grant a $100M experiment in marriage education here and there if conservatives leave Massachusetts alone and let us have our gay marriage experiment here. Sounds fair.
No comments have been added to this post yet.