Divergent Responses to Family Inequality

Single parenthood, resulting from nonmarital births and divorce, is increasingly becoming associated with lower levels of education for women. Crosssectional comparisons show that children of married parents are less likely to suffer material deprivation. To reduce hardships for children, therefore, some analysts advocate policies that would increase marriage rates. I argue that alternative approaches offer more chance of success: increasing education levels and reducing the penalty for single parenthood. There is ample evidence to support both alternative approaches. Education levels are increasing and are associated with lower levels of child hardship net of family structure. And comparative research shows the negative economic consequences of single parenthood are ameliorable through state policy. In contrast, the hundreds of millions of dollars spent promoting marriage, and the reform of national welfare policy intended to compel poor mothers to marry, have produced no discernible effects on marriage rates or child well-being. Divergent Responses to Family Inequality McLanahan and Jacobsen (Chap. 1) express concern that family patterns associated with poverty—single motherhood, early age at first birth, mothers’ non-employment, and divorce—are becoming increasingly associated with lower levels of education. The apparent effect of these trends is to concentrate disadvantage among children who not only have parents with low levels of education, but who also have family structures and trajectories that are not conducive to escaping poverty and its harms. Although they focus on several trends, the core issue is single motherhood, and that is the focus of this comment. Single motherhood occurs through the birth of children to women who are not married—which continues to become more P.N. Cohen (&) Department of Sociology, University of Maryland, College Park, MD, USA e-mail: [email protected] © Springer International Publishing Switzerland 2015 P.R. Amato et al. (eds.), Families in an Era of Increasing Inequality, National Symposium on Family Issues 5, DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-08308-7_2 25 prevalent, especially among younger women and those with relatively low education (Martin et al. 2013)—and through divorce, which is concentrated among couples with lower levels of education (Cohen 2014). To reverse that trend, McLanahan and Jacobsen (Chap. 1) suggest, first, a family intervention: giving less-educated women “a good reason to postpone motherhood” (p. 21). Their second recommendation is to “improve the economic prospects of men, especially men with no more than a high school degree,” because “[w]omen are not likely to marry men whom they view as poor providers” (p. 21). Although this second recommendation focuses on economics, McLanahan and Jacobsen favor it because it will decrease the prevalence of single motherhood, concluding, “nothing could be more important for preserving the institution of marriage” (p. 22). Thus, in response to the trends by which “the second demographic transition is leading to growing disparities in children’s access to parental resources,” McLanahan and Jacobsen seek to alter family structure, to reduce single parenthood. The approach they propose, however, is just one of several logical responses to family inequality—and the one that recent history suggests is not likely to succeed. I illustrate their argument in Fig. 2.1. In Fig. 2.1, McLanahan and Jacobsen’s “diverging destinies” appear as increases in b/b′ over time, or the increasing tendency of women with low levels of education to engage in “behaviors associated with poor child outcomes.” That is, in addition to the direct effects of mothers’ education on child outcomes (through income and other resources, labeled e), family behaviors exacerbate social class inequality. Changing the family behavior of the low-education group is their proposed response. Logically, however, to reduce harm to children, we might consider two alternative approaches: (1) promote the flow labeled a, which moves more women into the highly educated category or (2) reduce the quantity d, which indicates the negative outcomes associated with single motherhood. I discuss these alternatives first. Low-education