Strengthening American Families:
What Works and What Doesn’t Work

Whose Children? 

Before we answer “What Works?”  we need to know what it is that we hope to achieve.  When we ask this question, what works, in the context of families, we might give many answers. But mostly we will always come back to some variation of,  “providing for the fundamental needs of the individual,”  in what is quite often a cold, hostile and unforgiving world. 

“Solitary, Poor, Nasty, Brutish and Short!” –  the family stands against this bleak Hobbesian description of life.

What is it we hope to achieve?  What works?  While we are concerned with providing for the individual, as a society, we are most concerned with the care of those who cannot care for themselves.  We are most concerned about children.

 I recently participated in a conference at Harvard University on Women, Religion and Politics.  And the keynote speaker was a woman much admired for her life-long dedication to the well-being of children, Marian Wright Edelman, the President of the Children’s Defense Fund.  I’ve always been struck by the logo the Children’s Defense Fund uses:  it is a simple line-drawing of a small child, alone in a boat in a wide sea.  It’s an image that touches even the most hard-hearted:  a defenseless child.

Not surprisingly, Mrs. Edelman continued this theme throughout her speech evoking child poverty, substandard education, infant mortality, and hunger . . . all these issues that we must address – for our children.  “For our children.”  We must work together to solve these problems . . . for our children, she said.

She received a standing ovation.

As I scanned the adoring faces of the women around me, clapping wildly, it was quite clear that they had been inspired to action.  But what exactly, I wondered, was it that they thought they could do for “our” children?

What works?  The question returned to me recently as I jumped in a cab in Washington D.C. and met a remarkable man:  my cabdriver had immigrated to the United States from Nicaragua and was the father of eight children.  He lives with his six youngest children in Southeast Washington, an area known for its violent drug culture.  He supports his two oldest children who are in medical school in Nicaragua. 

In response to his obvious pride in his children – all of whom are excellent students – I ventured to ask him:  how does he protect his kids from the drugs and violence all around them? 

He didn’t mention any of the government programs that have been developed to address community violence.  The program that works for his children is . . . his vigilance.  Quite simply, he replied:  They don’t go outside unless he is out there, too.  They play while he washes his car.  He and wife work together to supervise the children. They do homework in the afternoon.

Working together, this man and his wife are providing for the needs of their children.  And they are thriving.  Even living in the midst of one of the worst areas of Washington, D.C.

What Works for Children?  Children Need Marriage

What programs work for children?  What provides for their needs?   It is a program centuries-old.  It is marriage. 

Without the marital bond between a man and wife, that provides a safe, defined space, for children they are in a boat at sea, buffeted by winds of chance and cruelty.  Despite all our good intentions, despite our urge to rush in to save “our” children, the absence of marriage in a child’s life is a gaping wound.

You are all no doubt familiar with much of the data that has been accumulating to support this statement – children in two-parent families are less likely to be involved in drugs; less likely to become pregnant out-of-wedlock; more likely to do well in school – the list goes on and on.  But, in addition to this now familiar litany, evidence for the importance of marriage shows up in unlikely and striking ways.

Decline in Infant Mortality

Turn with me to the data on infant mortality.  Since the 1920’s infant mortality in the United States has decreased dramatically.  On the surface, one could easily be cheered by such great progress.  But let’s look a little more closely: we still lose 7 infants for every thousand born in the United States.  Compared to other countries worldwide, this is still remarkably high – in 1960, the United States ranked 12^th in the world for low infant-mortality.  Today that ranking has slipped to 25^th.

As it turns out, the formidable American medical system is only able to do so much to care for vulnerable babies.  The front-line of defense is their mothers . . . and their fathers.  There has been a long-standing assumption that poverty and lack of health care endangered babies.  However, we are indebted to Nicholas Eberstadt for his groundbreaking research that demonstrated conclusively the link between out-of-wedlock childbearing and higher rates of infant mortality.  Marriage protects children from their earliest moments of life.  According to Gopal Singh of the National Center for Health Statistics, underscoring Eberstadt’s research, “The decline in the infant mortality rate would have been greater if not for a rising number of out-of-wedlock births.”

This statement has a horrible and tragic dark side to it:  while the decreasing rate of infant mortality grabs headlines, the mortality rate for these same babies for INTENTIONAL HOMICIDE, has been increasing.

Rise in Postneonatal Mortality for Intentional Homicide

Since 1980, there has been a 36% increase among white babies, and a 51% increase among black babies, who died before their first birthday as a result of intentional homicide.

Rise in Welfare Children Placed in Foster Care

We are seeing similarly troubling data coming out of the foster care system:  during the same period of time, the total number of children who have had to be taken from their parents and placed in foster care has nearly DOUBLED, rising to 520 thousand today.  Ninety percent of the increase has come from the welfare population.  Welfare children have increased from one-third of the foster care caseload in 1980 to well over half in 1998.

I believe it is no coincidence that as we’ve changed the definition of family – expanding family to include the nebulous and indefinable “families,” we’ve also expanded the number of vulnerable children. Similarly, the more “our” children become viewed as a corporate responsibility, belonging to everyone, the more likely the individual child is to be loved by no one.  What a tragic irony.

You see, collectively, it is easy to romanticize children.  But the individual child himself is needy, demanding and time-consuming – often in messy ways.  It is only within the teamwork of family that those messes are endurable; it is only within the commitment of family life that messes have eternal relevance.

Endurance and Eternity: these two factors – endurance in the face of hardship and the ability to transmit transcendence – are where bureaucratic approaches to the next generation fundamentally fail.

The deleterious effects of the spiritual deficit problem are as pressing as those arising from material deficits.  This is the lesson we must learn from the infant mortality data: through better medical technology, we have lowered the infant mortality rate . . .  only to see drug addiction and other irresponsible behaviors result in increasing numbers of babies born low-birth-weight, drug addicted, or HIV infected. . . while others born healthy, with all of the potential of their unique life in front of them, are beaten senseless and discarded like so much flotsam on the sea, by the transitory men who floated through their mother’s lives. 

Endurance and Eternity.  These are ingredients we need in raising our children.  But increasingly, they are in short supply in another context as well:  we no longer see endurance and we no longer value eternity in our family relationships either.  Let’s turn and briefly look together at some of the trends we are facing:

Decline in Marriage

As this graph dramatically illustrates, the marriage rate for unmarried women is at an all-time historic low.  If you look only at women between the ages of 15 and 44 – those most likely to be getting married – we find that only 78 per 1,000 are now married.  This is less than half what it was in 1950 when 166 women per 1,000 were getting married.  This trend shows little sign of abating in the near future.  A few years ago, there was an uproar when a national magazine reported that unmarried women over thirty had more chance of getting hit by a bus than getting married – the public outcry abated; the trend did not.

Rise in Divorce

This graph needs little explanation:  we’re all too familiar with the dire divorce statistics.  Half of all marriages have been ending in divorce since the early’80s.  Proponents of the new families derisively accuse us of wanting to return to the ‘50’s.  Unfortunately, by the ‘50’s we were already seeing nearly a quarter of all marriages fail – between 1910 and and 1930, the ratio of divorces to marriage doubled – it looks to me like we need to go back to the 1850’s!

What’s happening to all these unmarried and divorced people?  Well, many of the divorced remarry:  by 1990 only 65% of all marriages were first marriages. 

Rise in Cohabiting Couple Households

But a look at the numbers of people choosing to live together outside marriage tells the real story.  There are now almost 5 million cohabiting couples, which, if this trend continues – and there is no reason to think it will not – in another ten years we’ll see 9 million cohabiting couples.   This is an astonishing change for our country: as late as 1970 there were only half a million couples living together.  If the projections prove to be correct, by 2010 there will be only 7 married couples for every cohabiting couple.

And these unions are producing children.  But with a breakup rate that is double marital unions, the increase in cohabitation as a normative experience for young people is another ominous trend for children of the future.

Rise in Children Living in Single-Parent Families – Figures 5 and 6

Indeed, let us look at how these marriage choices affect children.  Today, nearly 3 out of 10, 28%, of all children under 18 live in single-parent homes.

Providing Housing or Supporting the Home?

So, what works?  Advocates of particular programs are, quite naturally, invested in them and tend to urge that they be evaluated in terms of their goals – which express the hopes and intentions of their designers – rather than purely in terms of their intrinsic capabilities and their objectively measurable outcomes.

Reformers, like Marian Wright Edelman, generally have high-minded goals such as improving the material well-being of children through government action.  But often they have had too little regard for what history teaches about work-ability and for the unintended consequences of their proposals.

There are not enough government programs in the world to counteract the deficits that arise when you don’t have the institutions of marriage and family operating effectively to provide for the physical, emotional, and spiritual needs of children.  The experience of the last forty years shows that attempting to provide for the material needs of children in a negative relational setting – one where the child constantly encounters bad role models and emotionally harmful interactions – increases the likelihood that the child will not develop a capacity for empathy and responsibility, basic ingredients of our humanity. 

Without these elements of character to restrain their self-centered impulses, children’s capacity for self-indulgence and/or violent, evil behavior towards others shows no limits.

Throughout much of the last 40 years we have been subsidizing out-of-wedlock child bearing and the formation of single-mother household formation rather than work and responsibility.  As the empirical evidence of the folly of these approaches accumulates – the drug abuse, the child abuse, the lawlessness and the inhumane physical violence of youths – we are steadily being forced back to some old-fashioned solutions to the problem of socializing young people and modifying dysfunctional behavior:  making their parents model the discipline of work and self-reliance and holding the parents responsible for the actions of their children.

Those who optimistically advocate initiating government-operated programs to solve social problems simply have not studied the record of the effectiveness of programs like public housing.  The limits of social engineering are nowhere more evident than the failed public housing projects built in the 1950s in Chicago, Illinois.  These high-rise apartment dwellings were built with the best of intentions.  All the technological brilliance and deep monetary resources of modern America were brought to bear on providing housing for the needy.

But what we have learned, at the expense of a generation of children’s lives, is that providing housing is not the same as supporting the home.

The high-rise public housing in Chicago turned into little more than corrals for young single mothers and their children – places so violent even the police were reluctant to enter.  When the family heads of three-quarters of the households are women, there are not enough responsible fathers present to maintain order. Drug dealing and gang warfare are rampant.  Police simply cannot counteract the deficit left by the absence of responsible adult men.  The enormous spiritual void left by absent fathers. 

Unable to cope with the problems of these housing projects – and confronted by the unwillingness of even the poor to live in them –  Chicago is now planning to spend millions tearing the projects down and disbursing the residents throughout the city in renovated low-rise apartments.  Nothing is a clearer testament to children’s need for the presence of responsible fathers and the community’s need for intact families. 

What programs work?  Marriage works! Experience clearly teaches that it makes a difference how a goal is pursued.  Since you get more of what you subsidize, it is important to subsidize – or at the least not undermine –  work and family formation.  We must take care to differentiate between programs that strengthen marriage and family and those which displace them.

How do we do this?   We focus on homes rather than housing.  We evaluate all programs through a filter asking:  are we treating the symptom or the cause – doing our best to identify and avoid unintended consequences.

Our goals should be two-fold –  to support marriage and to encourage work.  Very briefly, two examples from each: 

Supporting marriage provides two great challenges.  To support marriage we must first change our tax laws to eliminate the marriage penalty. And second, we must ensure that the marriage contract is at least as valid an agreement as your average garden-variety business contract by eliminating no-fault divorce.

Supporting work provides two great examples of successful policy change.  We’ve seen great progress with welfare reform.  With the new emphasis on work requirements and time limits for assistance, nationwide we’ve seen the welfare rolls cut nearly in half.

Second, the earned income tax credit represents a policy of subsidizing work rather than out-of-wedlock child bearing.  With the option of receiving this credit as an annual lump sum payment, this assistance program also provides an important means for asset accumulation.  In 1975 the earned income credit accrued at a rate of only 10 percent on the first $4,000 of earnings but by 1996 this had been increased to 40 percent for a family with two or more children with earnings up to nearly $9,000.  

In the late 1980s and early 1990s, states were faced with explosive growth in the number of families seeking cash assistance, a large proportion of whom were never-married teenage mothers with no work experience.  Thus, there was a growing concern that giving cash assistance was encouraging the formation of single-parent families and long-term dependency.  As a result, most states capped their cash benefit payments and many also instituted a policy of not increasing benefit levels for additional children.  

The combined effect of increasing the earned income credit and the capping of cash benefit payment levels produced a dramatic reversal in the priorities.  In 1975 for every dollar spent on cash assistance, the federal government spent 27 cents on earned income credits.  By 1997 the federal government was now spending $2.37  on earned income credits for every one dollar it spent on cash assistance payment.

The result of this two-pronged emphasis on work – decreasing cash benefits and increasing the earned income tax – has been dramatic.  In only ONE YEAR, the number of adult welfare recipients of welfare who were employed increased by 10 percentage points.  In 1997, only 13% of adult welfare recipients were employed, but by 1998, this had increased to 23%.

The Solitude of Self  

Why do I emphasize work alongside family formation? These two are integrally connected because providing for one another in times of need is the foundation of what the family does.  When the government steps in to supplant this family function it usurps something very precious.  Providing for one another begins to build the intricate and essential web of dependencies  – financial, emotional and spiritual – that binds a family together.

We are all of us, men and women, dependent on our loved ones as we journey throughout our lives – beginning with our birth and ending with old age and death.  Without this mutual dependency we would have no enduring need for family and for the community it creates.  It is in this context – the interaction between people who are committed to love and support each other, truly “in sickness and in health; for richer, for poorer,” – that the word “OUR” begins to have meaning.

Our children.  Our family.  Our community.

I was moved recently to think more deeply about this importance of family, and how it works, when I was reminded of a speech given by Elizabeth Cady Stanton, an amazing woman who dedicated her life to securing for American women the right to vote.  Nearing the end of a long life fighting for the suffrage, in 1892 Mrs. Stanton was asked to testify before the United States Congress.   She delivered a moving and eloquent talk entitled, The Solitude of Self.

“Think for a moment,” she asked the Senators, “of the immeasurable solitude of self.  We come into the world alone; we leave it alone under circumstances peculiar to ourselves.  We ask no sympathy from others in the anxiety and agony of a broken friendship or shattered love.  When death sunders our nearest ties, alone we sit in the shadows of our affliction.  Alike mid the greatest triumphs and darkest tragedies of life we walk alone. . . Whatever the theories may be of woman’s dependence on man, in the supreme moments of her life he can not bear her burdens.  Alone she goes to the gates of death to give life. . . No one can share her fears, no one can mitigate her pangs; and if her sorrow is greater than she can bear, alone she passes beyond the gates into the vast unknown.  And so it ever must be in the conflicting scenes of life, on the long weary march, each one walks alone.  We may have many friends, love, kindness, sympathy and charity to smooth our pathway in everyday life, but in the tragedies and triumphs of human experience each mortal stands alone.”

 Her words are moving in evoking these common experiences.  Life is indeed, more often than not, “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short.”  But is it true that none can touch us in our sorrow?  Is it true that none can help us carry our burdens?

When I read Mrs. Stanton’s eloquent words, my mind returned to a scene indelibly etched on my memory.  My mother-in-law was a spirited woman, whose keen mind and boundless energy was felled only by the onset of Alzheimer’s.  It was a final journey, a final testing, that was indeed a solitary one.  But she did not face it alone.  Her bed sat in the middle of our dining room for many long months as she fought her final battle, and in the end, she was surrounded by all four of her children.

We did this together as a family – we endured – because she was ours.

Avoiding the Tragedy of the Commons

Skeptics say it is too late to rebuild the family.  Others that it is impossible or irrelevant.   Kathlee Kierman, a family scholar says that:  “The increasing diversity and turnover in family life which largely emanates from partnership-changes makes policy built on marriage increasingly problematic . . .  Parenthood rather than marriage contracts should underpin family relations.”  And Arlene Skolnick, another family scholar says:  “There’s no way of going back to where we were before.”

BUT WE MUST.

I have seen the failed Chicago housing projects.  And the image that remains in my mind is that of barren ground.  Barren ground littered with trash. This is the classic problem economists have named “the tragedy of the commons.”   If there is no one who has a personal stake, personal ownership, then no one will be invested enough to take care of common ground.  There was nothing that was personally “ours” in the Chicago Housing Projects.  And they failed miserably.  No one was willing to expend the effort to pick up the trash, care for the grass, water the trees, plant flowers.  It quickly became barren ground. When it comes to children, we can not afford a tragedy of the commons.  Children need a family in which the word “our” has meaning.  We must not allow America’s children to become barren ground.