In the U.S., welfare -- which requires a woman to be both a mother and unmarried to qualify -- actively discourages "shotgun weddings" and changed the social contract so that having babies out of wedlock is now much more acceptable than it was when the system was conceived. At the time, it was inconceivable that women would choose to intentionally have babies out of wedlock. This is no longer true in the U.S.
So, that is how welfare in the U.S. grew the population of "poor, single moms" -- by actively encouraging out-of-wedlock births. Single moms are typically poor. Families with two parents are usually better off.
Sorry, but this article is politically biased crap.
The assertion of the article that black women had more babies because they could afford to due to welfare is as laughable as it is insulting.
You know how much food assistance families get today? $1.50 per person per meal - when they get food assistance, as there's a variety of factors that prevent getting food assistance. As many as 12.3% of American households are food insecure. Food assistance programs are almost criminally underfunded when you consider the long term costs they have on the youth of the nation and the subsequent impact on the rest of society.
There has been a precipitous decline in "shotgun marriages" over the past 40 years as stigmas about unwed mothers changed, women became more sexually liberated, and men felt less need to raise their offspring. Combine this with a lack of jobs, a lack of access to contraceptives and basic sexual health information, a drug war, and institutionalized racism in housing, transportation, education, the judicial system, etc and you build up impoverished communities where unwed pregnancy is significantly more likely. Welfare did not create the oppression of African Americans, and certainly did not encourage unwed pregnancy in African Americans more than anyone else welfare is applied to.
Another common trope of this subject: "Just as welfare policies discourage marriage and the formation of stable families, they also discourage the development of a healthy work ethic". But many food assistance programs actually _require you to work_ or you get almost no food assistance - which again, exacerbates these problems, as if you could work, you wouldn't need as much food assistance, and many impoverished black communities don't have enough access to jobs.
Yet another ill-advised argument they propose is that some couples stay together and unwed in order to siphon benefits from the government. This is again, ridiculous, as marriage is not a detriment to food assistance. Dozens of states have social welfare programs dedicated solely for two-parent families, and many have programs incentivizing marriage.
We have far more unwed mothers, and they need more assistance than wed mothers, hence they receive more benefits. This is a sticking point for many conservatives because they use this as an example of how the "family unit" is being "attacked", with single parents receiving more benefits than married ones. But it only makes sense, as the single parent has less financial and organizational help in raising a child.
A huge percentage of welfare is dedicated to programs encouraging people to get married, and be abstinent. Who put these provisions in place? Conservatives, concerned about the lack of focus on the family unit. Google around and you will find thousands of websites talking about the "attack on marriage" that welfare has seemingly caused.
I think an excerpt like this sums it up well (from "Blame Welfare, Ignore Poverty and Inequality" (2006)):
The [1996 welfare reform] legislation asserts that public assistance (i.e.
welfare dependency), not poverty, reinforces personal moral failures, which
causes social pathologies. In other words, the consequence has become the cause.
Moreover, there is a subtext underlying the "family values" agenda. It is the
moral condemnation of alternaitve family structures and particularly the
degradation of poor single mothers of color.
"Family values" reinforce the racially motivated stereotypes of "poor ghettos",
which are supposedly charcterized by promiscuity, irresponsible parenthood, an
"epidemic" of teen pregnancies and debilitating welfare dependency. In fact,
poverty, unemployment, low wages, and lack of human and social capital are the
major causes of single parenthood and marital instability, teen pregnancy, and
stunted child development.
Welfare is structured so that single moms get more money if they stay single. It is bad for the kids to grow up without a father and it is bad for society to encourage it.
In America single parents get more access to welfare programs than married ones so they are specifically incentivizing divorce. It isn’t a function of the welfare state level in general it’s this disparate incentive.
Nobody's even going to mention the effect of welfare here, either, which subsidizes single motherhood and each additional child out of wedlock? Or the effect that this has had especially on the families of minorities?
> But is it really worse for society to have single mothers on welfare than to have mothers trapped in toxic marriages for financial reasons?
Surely this is an empirical question and not a theoretical one. Unfortunately it's hard to measure fairly. Let me offer a clearly flawed first pass.
If you take, just as a reference point, pre 1960 US society and post 1980 US society as exemplars of "lots of toxic marriage" and "lots of welfare mothers", then I think one would be hard pressed to show empirical evidence that the latter is doing any better than the former. Certainly by conventional measures of success, one could argue that the latter is worse (though there are so many confounding variables that I personally don't feel comfortable having an opinion).
My point here is that I don't think we can presume the welfare-single-mother outcome to be, a priori, obviously better than the old toxic-marriage status quo, when measured by society-level outcomes. There is ample evidence that both cases are clearly inferior to stable, non-toxic, two-parent households. So the question is an empirical one of the lesser of two evils, and I don't think we have a clean way to answer it so far.
Thank you. I wondered if anyone else could see why the original essay is so ridiculous. It assumes that bad culture is the cause of poverty, and not the other way around. It's pretty obvious that the decision to get married and stay married is affected by material conditions. One consequence of the decline in manufacturing jobs is that less-educated men have pretty low employment rates. Since they can't hold down a stable job and be the primary breadwinner (as "bourgeois culture" expects them to), there's little reason for them to stick around (or for their partners to keep them around). This also explains the data Haidt and his group turned up on the correlation between parents' marriage status and children's future success. The couples that managed to stay together were the ones that had a better financial/employment situation. There's no reason to believe that a deadbeat dad would improve his child's future competitiveness that much just by staying married to the child's mother.
There's also the fact that single moms on welfare would lose their benefits if they married the father of their children. As one astute internet commenter on a similar article remarked, "Only an ivory tower egghead could think that poor people don't make rational economic decisions."
Nonsense. There were plenty of single-mother families before welfare. Men often died in industry or off at war. Life was excruciatingly difficult for these people, and private charity simply did not cut it. This is the kind of things that 'widows and orphans funds' were for, but they were never enough.
However, a majority of the newer studies show that welfare has a significantly negative effect on marriage or a positive effect on fertility rather than none at all. Because of this shift in findings, the current consensus is that the welfare system probably has some effect on these demographic outcomes.
Based on this review, it is clear that a simple majority of the studies that have been conducted to date show a significant correlation between welfare benefits and marriage and fertility, suggesting the presence of such behavioral incentive effects.
But it's also just obvious.
And then the effects of kids from single-mother homes:
This is all widely known and generally agreed on. That the outcomes of kids from single-mother homes are far worse than married coupled homes when you control for income, etc.
Mom-only households are 43.9% for Blacks, 12.0% for Whites.
"In the words of Harvard’s Paul Peterson, “some programs actively discouraged marriage,” because “welfare assistance went to mothers so long as no male was boarding in the household… Marriage to an employed male, even one earning the minimum wage, placed at risk a mother’s economic well-being.” Infamous “man in the house” rules meant that welfare workers would randomly appear in homes to check and see if the mother was accurately reporting her family-status.
The benefits available were extremely generous. According to Peterson, it was “estimated that in 1975 a household head would have to earn $20,000 a year to have more resources than what could be obtained from Great Society programs.” In today’s dollars, that’s over $90,000 per year in earnings.
That may be a reason why, in 1964, only 7% of American children were born out of wedlock, compared to 40% today. As Jason Riley has noted, “the government paid mothers to keep fathers out of the home—and paid them well.”
If we want this to improve, the simplest solution is to unlink being a single parent from getting extra welfare or preferential access to social housing. If we want to go even further, we could unlink welfare from having children at all, and just offer child tax credits instead and universal access to family planning.
The state has taken the place of the father as the primary bread-winner amongst the working class in the west. Prior to universal welfare most women would never have risked pregnancy outside a stable relationship because of the financial risks. There are no risks now, in fact there is actually an incentive single mothers get more money via state benefits that a single women with similar qualifications can earn in work.
Yes, people tended to have way more children. And pregnancies out of wedlock were way less prevalent too. Having two Walmart paychecks instead of one per household will make it way easier to raise a family. But nowadays single moms are heralded as heroes... so-much-progress. Such progressive times.
And further incentivize divorce? It's a dual-headed problem. Much of what has fueled the breakdown of family structure are policies that incentivize women to become single mothers. Children being raised by single mothers is not a good outcome. We need to stop pretending that it is.
Maybe we're just heading toward single motherhood with fewer but more prolific fathers which I think happened before. As a man without children relying on government assistance, the real issue is this arrangement these days tends to rely on welfare and therefore higher taxes for me who has no stake in it.
This reminds me of Simpson's Paradox in the sense that it may be true that life is better for a single mother because modern appliances make life easier but it is also true that society has greatly increased the number of single mothers. In 1980 18% of births were to single mothers compared to 40% in 2020[1].
It's possible that the amount of single mother suffering has increased even though the suffering per single mother may have decreased. (No change, I expect, in the children's suffering)
I appreciate the elaboration of your position, we seem to have more in common than originally thought.
> But I have eyes to see and it doesn't take much research to figure out who's getting the short end of the stick in our social order.
Part of the plight of single mothers is rising inequality and inability of the fathers to find decent jobs. Whenever arguments about children are made, I strongly believe at looking at a broader picture - how can we make sure the child grows up in a nuclear family for at least 16-18 years? I think that has to be looked at in the context of both sexes.
Thanks for the numbers as well, although I believe medical care is also subsidized for single mothers (at their median income level). It's hard to argue against expanding TANF (One of my college Economics courses examined effectiveness of welfare programs, and found that TANF was the most beneficial as far as how far each dollar goes).
It's an endless money pit because if you subsidize something, you get more of it. The massive increase in subsidies for low-income single parents has resulted in a massive increase in children born into single parent families over the last 50 years.
In the U.S., welfare -- which requires a woman to be both a mother and unmarried to qualify -- actively discourages "shotgun weddings" and changed the social contract so that having babies out of wedlock is now much more acceptable than it was when the system was conceived. At the time, it was inconceivable that women would choose to intentionally have babies out of wedlock. This is no longer true in the U.S.
So, that is how welfare in the U.S. grew the population of "poor, single moms" -- by actively encouraging out-of-wedlock births. Single moms are typically poor. Families with two parents are usually better off.
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