Politics (cont.): Earlier I was whining about family scholars and writers who seem more focused on the politics of the subject than on the subject. To me, what is intellectually hazardous here is the suggestion that the political implications of a viewpoint should properly shape our assessment of the viewpoint and even the viewpoint itself. As if all facets of life are ultimately subordinate to the "politics" of life.
This habit of thinking is often expressed in anything but subtle terms. A perfect example is next year's annual conference, to be held on April 11-13, 2003, of the Council on Contemporary Families. The title of the conference is "The Politics of Family Policy." Doesn't this title make it sound as if the "politics" is the main concern, the heart of the matter, whereas what follows the "of" is essentially derivative? Posted by David Blankenhorn, Nov 27, 2025 | Link.
The Best of Times, the Worst of Times: University of Virginia sociologist W. Bradford Wilcox looks to the future of fatherhood:
``[I]f the U.S. heads in the marital direction pioneered by Western Europe, as it probably will, we can foresee the following paradoxical state of affairs. A declining proportion of women and children—drawn disproportionately from white and Hispanic middle and upper-classes—will live in intact, married families characterized by higher levels of paternal involvement and lower levels of male household labor. A growing proportion of women and children—drawn disproportionately from the Hispanic and black lower-class—will live in cohabiting- and step-families characterized by lower levels of paternal involvement and higher levels of equality in the division of household labor. Finally, a growing proportion of women and children—drawn disproportionately from the black lower-class—will live in single-parent homes without ready access to fathers who can share the practical and emotional burdens and joys of family life.
``Thus, if the retreat from marriage again gains steam, we can expect a future with more fatherless families—concentrated in poor and minority communities—casting a serious pall on a paternal future that looks bright in so many other respects." Posted by Tom Sylvester, Nov 27, 2025 | Link.
Marriage and Health: Three Cheers for Nagging Wives. Guys, that means you should reverse this trend. Posted by Tom Sylvester, Nov 26, 2025 | Link.
Immigrant Families: A new study from the Urban Institute argues that marriage promotion efforts will do little to help poor immigrants, reports The New York Times. The study itself is not yet available online, but I wonder if it was the Urban Institute or The New York Times that highlighted the supposed mismatch between pro-marriage policies and the needs of immigrants. Either way, the mismatch is not surprising. Not every policy initiative will be directly relevant to every family on welfare, but that doesn't mean that those initiatives are therefore bad. Marriage education may not help a happily married immigrant couple from Mexico, but ESL classes wouldn't be much help for a poor mother in rural Arkansas. Since there is a limited amount of money for TANF, difficult trade-offs must be made. Marriage initiatives are the favored targets because they are new and controversial.
But the Times article also provides a reason to support marriage initiatives: ``Stable family structure…appears to shield children in low-income immigrant families from other difficulties. Low-income working immigrant parents are less likely to read to their children or to be involved in community or school activities, the study found, but the children are no more likely than their counterparts in nonimmigrant families to exhibit behavioral problems or a lack of engagement in school."
Also, it would be a serious mistake to assume that the left-of-center Urban Institute downplays the significance of family structure. Prominently displayed on their homepage is a paragraph on the benefits of marriage:
``The Marital Edge — There's a nuptial advantage, even for shotgun marriages, say new Urban Institute studies. Married parents are far less likely to experience material hardship than cohabiting or single parents. Marriage's positive impact is especially significant for the near-poor and for black households below 150 percent of the poverty line. Children living with married couples are less likely than those residing with cohabiting, unmarried parents to be poor, food insecure, read to infrequently, or the subject of behavioral problems." Posted by Tom Sylvester, Nov 26, 2025 | Link.
Changing Attitudes, Changing Behavior: Welfare reform may be changing attitudes about childbearing and marriage, suggests a research brief from the Welfare Reform and Family Formation Project (for a Washington Times article on it, click here). In Delaware and Indiana, 32 percent of single mothers on welfare agreed that welfare reform made them want to postpone or cease having more children; 13 percent said that the reforms made them think ``more seriously about getting married." Attitudes did significantly influence behavior, though to a limited degree. Only 14 percent of the women who wanted to get married actually did so, and 29 percent of women who did not want more children nonetheless had another baby. Moreover, 71 percent of unmarried women on welfare already expect to marry, the report said.
Based on that data, the report states that ``interventions touting the benefits of marriage are not needed so much as services that might help women fulfill the (pro-marriage) aspirations they already hold." This is certainly true to a large extent. Moral suasion is not sufficient if the means (marriageable men, family planning services, etc.) are wanting. As the Minnesota Family Investment Project showed, providing more economic support can increase marriage rates and marital stability.
Nevertheless, I believe the report is too quick to discount the potential positive effects of directly promoting healthy marriages. According to Mary Parke and Theodora Ooms, only five states ``allocated significant TANF funds to strengthen marriage and two-parent families" after 1996. So not much has been tried. Moreover, the ``marriage promotion" policies in Delaware and Indiana seemed to be limited to family caps on cash payments (meaning if you have more kids, you won't get additional money), though Delaware also eliminated special restrictions on married-parent families.
The report also calls for increased access to family planning services. That is all well and good. Interestingly, the Delaware program already required recipients to ``obtain information about family planning from a family planning clinic." But while the disappointing outcomes in Delaware led the report's authors to suggest abandoning marriage promotion per se, those same outcomes led the authors to call for more family planning services. Why not more marriage efforts, too? Posted by Tom Sylvester, Nov 25, 2025 | Link.
Normalizing family fragmentation (cont.): On "Tiny Toon Adventures" on Nickelodeon on Saturday morning, my daughters and I watch a cartoon about a cute, patriotic American bald eagle. The eagle discovers an egg in his nest, and excitedly shouts out: "Honey, look what the stork brought!" But then he realizes something: "Wait a minute! I'm not married. So I guess I'm a single father. But what the heck, it's the 90s!" Posted by David Blankenhorn, Nov 25, 2025 | Link.
Marriage On the Air: Using welfare money to promote healthy marriages was the subject of NPR's The Connection yesterday (Listen to it here). Policy expert Theodora Ooms explained what the marriage proposals actually contain, thereby assuaging concerns that welfare dollars would be used to coerce poor women into marriage. Fatherhood leader Joe Jones called for more dialogue between the fatherhood movement and the marriage movement.
But Avis Jones-DeWeever of the Institute for Women's Policy Research didn't like the marriage proposals one bit. She called them ``disturbing," ``dangerous," and ``amorphous, fuzzy, feel-good programs." A caller added that they were ``offensive" and might be a ``violation of human rights." And, yes, Ozzie and Harriet were trotted out. I wonder how much proponents of family diversity would like it if people constantly referred to cohabitation as the ``Mork and Mindy model." Because it's about as relevant. Nanoo nanoo. Posted by Tom Sylvester, Nov 22, 2025 | Link
Trial Marriages?: Reuters reports that about a quarter of cohabiting women don't plan on ever marrying their partners. Posted by Tom Sylvester, Nov 21, 2025 | Link.
From The Onion: ``Infant Doing Everything In Her Power To Save Relationship." Eight-month-old Courtney Brindle is trying her best to save her parents' crumbling marriage, the infant reported Monday. "I put in a good hour today grabbing Daddy's finger, which I think made him feel closer to me and, by extension, to Mommy," Brindle said. "But my real dilemma is, is it better to provide lots of cute moments to fill the house with a feeling of warmth and love, or should I suffer constant health problems to unite them in fear? I can't do both." Posted by Tom Sylvester, Nov 21, 2025 | Link
A survey of 40,000 students by the Minority Student Achievement Network indicates that students from all racial groups value school achievement at similar levels. However, there is a significant achievement gap between white and Asian students and black and Latino students. The reasons for this achievement gap are complex and sometimes controversial, but ``the study found that black and Hispanic students often had fewer resources at home to help them succeed in school," including computers and college-educated parents. Also, ``black and Hispanic students in the districts were more likely to live with one or neither parent." While the Associated Press article gives the breakdown of the ``digital divide," it does not report that three-quarters of white and Asian students surveyed lived with both their parents, compared with 55 percent of Latino students and 36 percent of black students. But what's really more likely to help a child—a computer or a father? Posted by Tom Sylvester, Nov 21, 2025 | Link.
Anti-marriage academia?: In an interview with Alex Kotlowitz, Kathryn Edin, a sociologist who does ethnographic research on low-income families, points to a real problem in academia:
``... What really struck me in those interviews [with low-income couples] was how many people talked about the desire to get married. I would go back and talk to my friends in academia and they would say, `Oh, they can't mean that.' But I would hear it again and again…."
``Now, you say, in some ways you didn't want to believe it -- because?"
``Well, it was not something that other academics were talking about. I was a young woman, just finishing my graduate degree, and I thought, `Oh, my gosh, if I start talking about this, I'll never get an academic job.'"
While Edin's admission provides a ``gotcha" moment for critics of out-of-touch academic elites, it also suggests that up-and-coming scholars are not as ideologically afraid of marriage as others entrenched in the field. Also, though deeply skeptical of pro-marriage welfare policies, Edin says, ``I think the social science evidence…is overwhelming, in terms of marriage being good for children. It is the best environment for ensuring investments to children that we've invented as humans."
And who says all liberal professors disdain ``moralistic" talk about marriage? Ron Mincy of Columbia University, a critic of the Bush Administration's welfare policy, tells Kotlowitz, ``There's a definite moral argument in the conservatives' views with relation to marriage. But what's wrong with that? Lots of our public policies are made that have a moral underpinning to them. All of our ideas about restitution, about reciprocity, have a moral underpinning to them." Posted by Tom Sylvester, Nov 18, 2025 | Link.
Sex (and Marriage) and the City: In The New Republic, Lee Siegel devastatingly exposes the lie at the heart of HBO's Sex and the City:
``The dominant fiction projected by commercial society is that you can gratify yourself at no cost except to your wallet or your pocketbook; and Sex and the City has taken that illusion for reality. The show sublimates actual sex into ideal sex-in- an-emotional-vacuum in the same way that sitcoms from the 1950s sublimated actual family relations into ideal family relations. Sex and the City is Leave It to Beaver after dark."
In the show, the four lead characters, all single women in their thirties and early forties, search in vain for stable relationships and perfect sex, though they value the latter at the expense of the former. Good sex causes them to stay with creeps while mediocre sex causes them to ditch good men. The irony is that, in real life, their best bet would be to get married. Posted by Tom Sylvester, Nov 15, 2025 | Link.
Labels, cont.: The website for Let's Get Married asks, ``Are the Conservatives Right?" While I (sort of) defended the use of political labels below, this question is unfortunate. The issue of how to strengthen families is not a zero-sum political battle. Of course there are ideological tensions within the marriage movement, but it has tried—and has largely succeeded, I think—to avoid pushing people and arguments into political boxes. Organizations like the Institute for American Values, the National Fatherhood Initiative, and the National Campaign to Prevent Teen Pregnancy are truly non-partisan (not in the way the Heritage Foundation or the National Organization for Women are ``non-partisan").
Moreover, the ``marriage movement" largely consists of educators, counselors, and scholars—not political strategists and ideologues who have a Manichean view of the world. And the political differences that do exist lead, more often than not, to productive debate, not partisan (``we're right, you're wrong") acrimony.
Nevertheless, I shouldn't nitpick. It's great that Kotlowitz encourages more liberals to get involved in the discussion of how to strengthen marriage. And he shows that he fundamentally gets it when he writes, ``In the end … it all comes down to the kids."
P.S. I can't help but wonder if a PBS website would ever incredulously ask, ``Are the Liberals Right?" Posted by Tom Sylvester, Nov 15, 2025 | Link.
``If you label me...": A Baltimore Sun reviewer says that Alex Kotlowitz's new documentary on marriage does not lend itself to simplistic ideological sloganeering:
``Let's Get Married deserves praise not just for exploring the relationship between culturally embedded attitudes toward marriage and huge social problems that we have been unable to solve for more than 40 years, but for doing so in a context that makes simple-minded conservative-liberal, Republican- Democratic and black-white distinctions all but impossible."
Yet in his op-ed in yesterday's New York Times, Kotlowitz frames the marriage debate largely along political lines. What's going on?
First, Kotlowitz is generally correct to point out that many liberals haven't done enough to emphasize the social importance of marriage, and that many conservatives do tend to discount how much poverty itself discourages marriage. At the same time, most thoughtful commentators on either side of the aisle (as well as some who reject the political labels) know that marriage matters and acknowledge that both cultural and economic factors play causal roles. Thus, making generalizations about liberals and conservatives, as Kotlowitz does, isn't all that productive.
But I think there's more to it. Kotlowitz and other liberals (I include myself in this category) recognize that, for far too long, and to the detriment of children, their side ignored the negative effects of father absence. Kotlowitz's best-seller on the horrors of growing up poor in Chicago's housing projects, There Are No Children Here, would have been even stronger had it confronted the fact that there were no fathers there, either. And while many liberals are now ready to discuss the importance of family structure, they fear being lumped in with conservatives. To reassure themselves that they are still liberals and not Jerry Falwells, they defensively cling to the old labels.
But as Andrew Sullivan notes, marriage isn't the only political topic in which old categories are no longer useful. Posted by Tom Sylvester, Nov 15, 2025 | Link.
``On the heels of a fatherhood movement," writes Alex Kotlowitz in an op-ed in the New York Times, more and more inner-city couples ``are considering marriage." Two recent studies, neither of which Kotlowitz mentions, support this observation. A 2001 report from the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities finds that the proportion of Black children living in two-parent, married-couple homes rose about 4 percent during the late 1990s. Another recent study from the Urban Institute finds that, among low-income children, the proportion living with their two, biological or adoptive parents increased from 1997 to 1999, while the proportion living in single-parent homes dropped from 44 to 41 percent.
Given the possibility of an emerging trend, should policy makers do more to encourage marriage? Kotlowitz isn't sure. Moreover, and to me disappointingly, he shows far more interest in the larger ideological ramifications of the issue -- how do "liberals" differ from "conservatives" on these matters? -- than he does in the issue itself. For Kotlowitz, the main point seems to be that the "conservatives who are driving" current pro-marriage efforts don't know what will work, stupidly use bad words like "illegitimacy," and don't care enough about the economic hardships that poor people face; whereas "liberals," who presumably would not suffer from such shortcomings, "haven't done enough to emphasize the importance of marriage" and therefore "need to enter that conversation."
OK, fair enough. And Kotlowitz does mention, although almost in passing, that "there is now a growing consensus among social scientists that, all things being equal, two parents are best for children." But why is it so often the case that our public conversation focuses on the politics of the thing instead of the thing itself? Posted by David Blankenhorn, Nov 11, 2025 | Link
Hooking Up: The New York Times has a story on how teenage girls are becoming more sexually assertive and aggressive. One 19-year-old college student (who's writing a book on the supposed trend) said, "All kids are scared of long-term relationships now. Our parents are all divorced, and we have never seen a successful long-term relationship. Girls don't want to think of sex as something which is about love because that will just come back and bite them later. The sex thing is just the most visible sign of disconnectedness we feel." Sound familiar? Posted by Tom Sylvester, Nov 7, 2025 | Link
Must-See TV: On Nov. 14, the PBS series Frontline is showing a documentary on the marriage movement. The program, titled ``Let's Get Married," will feature interviews with James Q. Wilson, Ron Mincy, Wade Horn, Barbara Dafoe Whitehead, and many others. Based on Frontline's track record, it should be an even-handed and excellent show. Posted by Tom Sylvester, Nov 7, 2025 | Link
Soundtrack to Fatherlessness: Eminem on fatherhood. Posted by Tom Sylvester, Nov 4, 2025 | Link.
Seedbeds of Hip Hop: Curtis Hanson, director of the new movie 8 Mile, which stars rapper Eminem, told The New York Times Magazine, ''Churches, schools, family are supposed to give structure to kids, but now they're all part of a dysfunctional culture. No one's helping kids figure out where they're going -- not just in the inner cities but in the suburbs. Hip-hop comes out of that. It is a voice for people who don't have another voice.'' Posted by Tom Sylvester, Nov 4, 2025 | Link.
A Real `Difficult Dialogue': In contrast with Stanford forum below, Barnard College recently sponsored (along with the Institute) a symposium that truly featured an ideologically diverse panel (also see here and here). Posted by Tom Sylvester, Nov 4, 2025 | Link.
Tough Talk: Stanford University is hosting, under the rubric ``Difficult Dialogues," a forum on ``The Changing Structure of the Family." According to its website: ``Each panelist was carefully selected to ensure that both an interdisciplinary and ideologically diverse perspective is represented."
But on the roster of panelists, the non-Stanford participants are Stephanie Coontz, Frank Furstenberg, William Pollack, Esther Rothblum, and Judith Stacey. Based on their writings, it seems to me that these scholars will have little difficulty in agreeing: 1) that regarding family structure, families are "changing," not declining; 2) that people who worry publicly about deteriorating family structure constitute a bigger problem than deteriorating family structure; 3) that scholarly public concern about unwed childbearing and divorce overlooks the ``real" problems; 4) that we need public policies that recognize and support family diversity; and 5) that efforts by policy makers and others to strengthen marriage and in other ways reverse the trend of deteriorating family structure fall somewhere between naive and malicious. In what sense will the dialogue among like-minded participants be "difficult"? Posted by Tom Sylvester, Nov 1, 2025 | Link. |
