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| | July 2002 | | In an article in The New Republic, Sarah Blustain reports that the women's fashion and beauty magazine, Marie Claire, is a co-sponsor of the recent "Marie Claire March" against domestic violence. The marchers (including last October's Marie Claire cover girl) all wore wedding gowns. Many of the gowns are provided by Kleinfeld, a store that sells ... wedding gowns.
As Blustain points out, this event is a remarkable and ultimately unsettling blending together of politics, consumerism, and commercial advertising. But what struck me most forcefully (though Blustain doesn't mention it) is the casual assumption from Madison Avenue that getting married is likely to be dangerous for a woman's heath -- that is, that there is a causal link between marital status and the risk of domestic violence. There is a link of course, but it's more the opposite of the one suggested by this little advert-protest. There is virtually no evidence suggesting that marriage causes or encourages domestic violence, and considerable evidence (see Father Facts, p. 78) suggesting that, if anything, the marriage commitment tends to inhibit tendency toward this crime. Posted by David Blankenhorn, 7-24-02 | Link. | | A recent study, from the National Bureau of Economic Research finds that the family income of children whose parents divorce and remain divorced for at least six years falls by 40 to 45 percent. When divorced parents remarry, these losses are reduced, but they remain significant. Other studies, using methods of measurement that the NBER economists view as less accurate, have concluded that the loss of family income of children following divorce is even greater. Regarding the policy implications of these findings, the authors (modestly) conclude that "policies that encourage two-parent families may be justified." The study can be purchased but not read online: Marianne Page and Ann Huff Stevens, "Will You Miss Me When I Am Gone? The Economic Consequences of Absent Parents" (NBER Working Paper No. 8786). Posted by David Blankenhorn, 7-23-02 | Link. | | The Institute's new report, Does Divorce Make People Happy?, was released today (July 11th). Authored by a team of family scholars chaired by Linda J. Waite of the University of Chicago, the report represents, to the best of our knowledge, the first serious effort to investigate whether divorce makes adults typically happier than staying in an unhappy marriage. Posted by Josephine Abbatiello, 7-11-02 | Link | | In regard to the much discussed (here and here) "mistake" that I made to a newspaper journalist about the recent State of Our Unions report, allow me to set the record straight. When I said that a woman in her 30s is more likely to have a baby "by herself," I meant that she is more likely voluntarily to have a baby without a guy in the picture, i.e., through artificial insemination or adoption. And I believe that is how the journalist understood it. The general data on out-of-wedlock births obviously don't relate to this point. Posted by David Popenoe, 7-11-02 | Link. | | ``Quality vs. Structure" (cont.): The disturbing headline in Saturday's Philadelphia Inquirer: "Census says 1 in 12 youths has disability." The article reports that this is the first time that the Census Bureau has collected such data, but that other sources, as well, indicate that the numbers have grown dramatically in recent years. Some of the reasons for the trend are largely positive, such as better care for premature babies and children with birth defects, enabling them to live longer, and increases in diagnosis and reporting of all disabilities. But many of the reasons are troubling, such as increases in many childhood illnesses, and a sharp rise in the diagnosis of learning disabilities and behavioral problems, including attention deficit disorder.
Dennis Hogan, a Brown University sociology professor who studies disabled children, is quoted as saying, "If you look at children with disabilities, they are more likely to be in single-parent homes, they are more likely to be poor, they are more likely to be in homes where secondhand-smoke exposure is a risk." He goes on to say, "But the direction of cause and effect is not certain. Single parenthood, per se, is not more likely to produce a disabled child, but poverty associated with being a single mom may well produce that result."
There it is again. Look carefully at Professor Hogan's explanation. First, he states that disabled children are more likely to live in single-parent homes -- an often unfashionable observation, but one that is backed up by a large body of social science evidence. Then he reports two other plausible correlations -- disabled children are more likely to be poor, and they are more likely to be exposed to second hand smoke. Next, assuming the role of the careful scientist, he reminds us that "the direction of cause and effect is not certain."
Yet he then makes a decidedly certain claim: "Single parenthood, per se, is not more likely to produce a disabled child." What? If the direction of cause and effect regarding these phenomena is "not certain," how can he be so certain about this point? And why does he insert that curious term "per se" into his sentence? At this point, our alarm bells should be going off in all directions, since using the term "per se" in statements about family structure is a widely practiced, yet deeply misleading, maneuver typically employed by academics who want to run away from their own findings.
Here's how it works. Faced with undeniable correlations between family structure and poor outcomes for children, these academics arbitrarily, and in clear violation of academic standards, disassemble and then rearrange the data, usually in ideologically self-serving ways. The usual formulation is that single parenthood "per se" is not the problem; instead, the culprit is said to be poverty, or the child spending lot of time unsupervised, or the lack of a adult role models, or any number of other "factors" that -- guess what? -- commonly accompany living in a one-parent home. The violation of academic standards here is the attempt to cover over the fact that single parenthood and almost all of these breakout factors -- less income, more unsupervised time, fewer adult role models -- typically go hand in hand.
Blaming the bad outcomes for children on one or more of the breakout factors, while at the same time studiously insisting that single parenthood "per se" is blameless, is silly and dishonest. It's like saying that what ruined the furniture was water damage, not the flood "per se."
Many children are suffering. The least we can do is face upintellectually to all of the reasons why. Posted by Elizabeth Marquardt, 7-9-02 | Link | | ``Quality" vs. ``Structure": In an article in a special welfare reform issue of The American Prospect, Richard Weissbourd spends too much of his time flailing against straw men and presenting us with a false choice between good parenting and family structure.
Weissbourd wants to criticize those who are concerned about high levels of divorce and out-of-wedlock childbearing. He does acknowledge that such concern is ``legitimate" (though he also derides it as ``hand-wringing") and even offers a good list of reasons why it's tougher for children who live with only one parent. But then he attempts to dismiss the entire topic by noting that ``the reality is that most children in single-parent families are not morally defective" and that ``single parenthood is only one of many factors that determines the prevalence of these moral problems."
But who could disagree with these obviously true statements? These slay-the-straw-man assertions do not negate the strong evidence showing that father absence is a significant risk factor for children. (Also, why set such a low bar for child well-being? What parent thinks: ``When Johnny grows up, my greatest hope is that he's not morally defective!")
Weissbourd then seeks to expose the ``big hole" in the family breakdown argument: ``A mountain of research now shows that it is the content of adult-child interactions, not the structure of families, that most strongly determines the shape of children's ethical development." In other words, family structure isn't important—it's the quality of the parenting that matters.
This is a recurring argument, but repetition doesn't make it any stronger. (I have written about the weaknesses of the ``it's family process, not family structure" argument here, and David Blankenhorn has discussed it numerous times in Propositions.) The essential problem with this argument is that good parenting is much more likely to occur in a married, two-parent family. According to a new Child Trends report, ``Children in two-parent families spend far more time with their parents than those in single-parent families." Children with married parents are more likely to be read to each day and have a parent highly involved in their school. Weissbourd doesn't acknowledge these correlations anywhere. He discusses the problem of parental depression, but fails to tell readers that single parents are twice as likely to be depressed as parents in an intact family.
Rather than see parent-child relationships as significantly influenced by family structure, Weissbourd wrongly pits them as independent variables competing against each other for our attention. This is a false choice if there ever was one.
Consider this analogy. In the area of wealth accumulation, it's income, not educational attainment, that is most important. For example, most people without a college degree are not living in poverty. And the lack of education is certainly not the only factor that determines the prevalence of poverty. Research also shows that wealth correlates more strongly with income than it does with educational attainment. Therefore, we as a society should focus on raising people's incomes, not on improving education.
This argument is completely wrong-headed, of course. In the real world, educational attainment typically and significantly influences a person's income. To say that income is the best predictor of wealth is closer to a truism than an argument, and it certainly doesn't dismiss the importance of education. But this obviously defective argument precisely parallels Weissbourd's reasoning regarding the relationships between family structure, parenting quality, and child well-being. Posted by Tom Sylvester, 7-9-02 | Link | | A new report by the University of Virginia's W. Bradford Wilcox (Then Comes Marriage: Religion, Race, and Marriage in Urban America) finds that, among urban mothers, and especially African Americans, regular church attendance correlates strongly with the likelihood of being married, and with the likelihood of marrying within one year after having a nonmarital birth. It seems that religiosity is about as accurate as social and economic status in predicting marital status among urban mothers. Wilcox also reports that one-third of urban, unwed mothers regularly attend church.
To me, none of these findings are surprising, but Wilcox does usefully point out that: a) while the relationship of socioeconomic factors (such as income and educational attainment) to marital status in the inner city has been frequently studied and discussed, the role of religiosity, curiously, has not; and b) these findings underscore again the important current and prospective role of the African American church in confronting the crisis of father-absence and non-marriage in the inner city. Posted by David Blankenhorn, 7-9-02| Link | | TAPPED, the blog of the American Prospect, highlights a mistake the sociologist David Popenoe made in an interview regarding a study he did on men's attitudes toward marriage. Reuters quotes him as saying, "Once a woman gets into her 30s, it's more likely … that she will have a child by herself."
Tapped cites Census data showing that about 83 percent of all births to teens occur outside of marriage, whereas only about 13 percent of all births to women in their 30s occur outside of marriage. But this fact doesn't necessarily prove their point. Consider this hypothetical. Say you have 1,000 teen girls and 1,000 women in their 30s. Forty teens give birth, and 33 of those births are outside of marriage. In the older group, 400 give birth, of which 52 are outside of marriage. The unwed percentage is of course much higher for the teens (83 percent vs. 13 percent), but at the same time, an older woman is more likely to have a child by herself than a teen (5.2 percent vs. 3.3 percent).
In fact, according to the Census Bureau, an unmarried woman in her early thirties is just as likely to have a baby as an unmarried teenager (see table 17).
Nevertheless, Tapped is correct in saying that unwed women in their 30s are much less likely to have a child than unwed women in their 20s (table 17 again). But they also imply that Popenoe makes this inaccurate claim in the study itself, which is not true. In the Reuters interview, he wanted to suggest that, as single women get older, they are more likely to consider having a child on their own. So congrats to Tapped for catching the error, but they shouldn't overstate it. Posted by Tom Sylvester, 7-01-02 | Link. |
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