I stepped out into the early
Sunday morning gloom, already ominous with the threat of the impending humid
heat that I could feel coming up from the blacktop driveway, to pick up the
paper, and immediately retreated to the cool of the kitchen. I made myself a mug of tea and sat at
the kitchen table with the front page spread before me. The large article that caught my eye
was “Two Classes, Divided by ‘I Do’.” The article is about two mothers of young children in Ann
Arbor, Michigan. The women are
work colleagues and friends. The
author, Jason de Parle, has written very ably about issues of poverty in this
country. In this article he uses
the two women to exemplify some general patterns of contemporary society.
The
gist of the piece is easily summarized in the following two points: (1) stably
married mothers of young children tend to enjoy marked financial and social
advantages over unmarried mothers of young children, and (2) the children of
stably married parents have many advantages that the children of single mothers
often lack. Now as a “news” story
this one strikes me as ranking somewhere between the revelations that the Pope
is Catholic and that bears have hair.
Nonetheless, the Times seems
to present it as a kind of discovery that parallels, on the sociological level,
the isolation of the Higgs boson particle. Its central claims are attested to by “studies”, and blessed
with the confirming opinion of a credentialed academic—a colleague in the
Princeton Sociology Department, as it happens.
There
is very little that is amusing about the crisis of the contemporary American
family or in the hardships inflicted on so many of our children and no small
number of our women. And certainly
there is nothing amusing about the difficulties faced by the unmarried mother
in this story. But I do find it a
little funny, or at least quirkily odd, that the most obvious kind of moral and
economic common sense should be treated as a sociological “discovery”.
Modern
society is complex, and many of the grave problems we face in this country are
interrelated in complicated and sometimes subtle ways. Blanket suggestions for their remedy
are often justly criticized for their simplism. But there is another kind of simplism practiced by many of
our policy gurus and academic intellectuals when they refuse to recognize home
truths that have been the common wisdom of generations. The old home truth that love and
marriage go together like a horse and carriage has not been abrogated by the
disappearance of equine transportation.
According
to Mr. DeParle the illegitimacy rate in this country is now 41%. He does not use the word
“illegitimacy,” of course, which has been banned from the vocabulary as
politically incorrect and “judgmental”.
In fact, it is simply an old legal term reflecting the fact that marriage
has traditionally been one of society’s most fundamental legal contracts. If you prefer “out-of-wedlock”, that’s
fine. The rate of out-of-wedlock
births for black Americans in 2010 was 71%! That is staggering, but according to the article the white
lower middle class is rapidly catching up. The unmarried (white) woman in the Times story had three
children with her unmarried partner before they split. The author laconically reports that she
“has trouble explaining, even to herself, why she stayed so long with a man who
she said earned little, berated her often and did no parenting”. Well, the question does occur to one.
To
judge and to criticize are actually cognate terms, as we see in the phrase
“literary criticism”. A very great
deal of our moral and mental lives consists in judging one thing to be better
or worse than another. Whatever
reluctance there may be to discuss unwed motherhood and deadbeat paternity in a
moral context, let alone in a context illuminated by traditional religious values—that
is, to be (dreaded word!) judgmental--certain
other judgments are inevitably being made. The one chiefly advanced by the Times article is economic.
Single mothers and their offspring are often comparatively, or even
absolutely, poor. We say that two heads are better
than one; two incomes certainly are.
So the widening national “income gap,” already extremely troubling, is
closely related to the phenomenon of single motherhood.
What
is frequently called “cultural capital” is scarcely less important for a young
child’s nurture than is material sufficiency. The huge advantage that comes from spending one’s early
years in a stable family, with two parents cooperatively engaged in the
parenting enterprise, is almost impossible to exaggerate. Such parents read to and with their
children, eat with them, take them on cultural expeditions small and
grand. Comparatively few of us
have trust funds. Most people face
financial necessity to greater or lesser degree, but a stable married couple
has the option of dividing the labors of breadwinning and of homemaking in the
ways most effective for their personal circumstances. All
of this takes time, imagination, and a sacrificial effort motivated by
love. The challenge of addressing
the ravages of what amounts to early cultural bankruptcy is one that has so far
been hardly recognized, let alone engaged. A serious national discussion of such topics as the moral
and social responsibilities of having children is so inimical to our reigning
me-firstism that it is difficult to imagine how it might so much as be set in
motion. But I regard it as one of
the great social follies or delusions of our time to think that any government
program or any public school curricular innovation can provide an effective
solution.
