Families are important
Effective policy versus performative feel-good
Being a single parent is hard. Raising a child is hard even with two parents. Overall, single parents are heroes, and most of them manage to raise successful, well-adjusted children despite the hardships. One of the best mothers I know is a woman who had her child outside of marriage at midlife. She had always wanted a child, and she adjusted her career and lifestyle to give her more mom time, and raised a great and successful son. She should be admired by all.
However, while most single parents are successful, most unsuccessful families have single parents. People frequently fail to get that those are different things and that the difference is important. Just as we admire war heroes but should work hard to avoid needing them, we can admire the heroism of a successful single parent but understand that it is important to minimize how often we need parents to be such heroes. The risk of family failure is particularly high where the mother is a child herself, or is poor and/or addicted and lacks family or other resources to assist with the responsibilities of parenthood. Consider some statistics from the 1990s (I will explain the significance of that time period below). Of juveniles incarcerated in the US, about 70% were reared without fathers. Of 134,000 teenagers who ran away from home in 1994, 72% were leaving single parent homes. By 1994, about 70% of girls who had out-of-wedlock babies had been reared without fathers. A 1995 study by the Minneapolis county attorney of 135 children aged 9 or younger convicted of crimes including arson, theft, burglary, assault and criminal sexual conduct found that 70% were living in single-parent homes. It remains true today that about 70% of prison inmates were raised in single-parent homes. Notice a pattern?
Poverty is strongly associated with being a single-parent family, but the probability of becoming a prisoner is much more closely associated with coming from a single-parent home than with being on welfare before age 18 (42%), with having a parent who had been incarcerated (33%), or with experiencing any of the following as a child: witnessing violence, living with an ex-convict, living with a mentally ill or severely depressed person, or living with a drug addict or alcoholic. The only thing that correlates as closely (at 68%) is not being a high school graduate. Racial and ethnic differences in incarceration rates correlate strongly with racial and ethnic differences in rates of single-parent families. Family structure and high school graduation rates/education quality are things that we can improve without pie-in-the-sky, Age of Aquarius “we’ll fix everybody’s mind” useless exercises. If we competently address those two factors, then the immediate beneficial results will cause most people’s minds to fix themselves.
I don’t want to get too bogged down in numbers, but it is useful to look at the relationship between married parents and education and income. Of children living with a parent having an education at a given level, in 89.5% of households where a parent has an advanced degree, the parents are married. In other words, if 1000 children have a parent who has a post-graduate degree, 895 of those will be children with married parents. This slides down to 82.5% for a parent with an undergraduate degree, 60.2% for some college, 48.7% for a high school degree, and 47.7% for some high school.1 Professional people get married and stay married when they have children. That can also be seen by living-with-two-married-parents ratios by family income group2:
As you can see, this isn’t just a matter of families having 2 potential earners being better off than those with only 1. Families with 2 unmarried parents don’t follow the ever-increasing percentages of families with 2 married parents. The pattern for separated/widowed/divorced is different than the pattern for never married.
This is significant because rates of single-parent families, and especially rates of young single mothers, have varied substantially over time, as have rates of teenagers who are sexually active. They went through an explosion between 1960 and 19923 that correlates as one would expect with crime rates and incarceration rates, and then they declined, with the expected decline in crime and new imprisonment. The rise in rates particularly hurt already disadvantaged groups in America. Because the rates have risen and fallen dramatically, partly due to policy and partly due to social attitudes, we know that we can do something useful to support successful families and so to support the advancement of disadvantaged groups.
What happened between 1960 and 1995? Children of single mothers were 1.3% of the US population in 1960, rising to 2.1% in 1995, before dropping back to 1.6%. Single mother households as a percentage of all households more than doubled from 4.3% in 1965 to 9.9% in 1995, before dropping back to 6.3% today. This change hit black and Hispanic children much more heavily than white or Asian children. From 1880 to 1960, the difference between black and white families in rate of children living with two married parents stayed fairly stable, but in this period it split wide open.
67% of black children were living with a married couple in 1960, falling to 38.6% in 1988. Looked at another way (the statistics have a gap due to children “not with a parent”, commonly meaning with grandparents or other relatives), black children who lived in single-parent homes more than doubled from 22% to 55%. The status of white families in the early part of this period is hard to interpret because most Hispanic people were classed as white, and Hispanics have marriage habits in between black families and non-Hispanic white families. 7% of white children, so defined, lived in single-parent homes in 1960. In 1990 81% of non-Hispanic white children lived with two married parents and 15% in mother-only homes, compared with 38% of black children living with two married parents and 51% with their mother only, and 67% of Hispanic children living with two married parents and 27% with their mother only. The devastating effects of this change on black families were recently described in an article in the Black Wall Street Times.
The economic effect of this can seen in the following table of median family incomes for families with children based on 2020 census data. For each category (single mother, 2 unmarried parents, 2 married parents) there are racial and ethnic differences, though the difference between black and white unmarried couples is trivial. But there are larger differences between family types. A married couple makes about 2 ½ times what a single mother makes, and makes between 26% and 66% more than what an unmarried couple makes.
At the lower end of the family income range, in 1980 8% of white, 20% of black, and 23% of Hispanic children of married parents lived below the poverty line, while the same was true for 39% of white, 65% of black, and 65% of Hispanic children in single-mother households. The figures were similar in 1995, though these figures had hit their worst point and then started gradually improving in 1992. In 2021 the figures had improved so that 4% of white, 11% of black and 13% of Hispanic children in married households lived below the poverty line, while 29% of white, 42% of black, and 42% of Hispanic children did so.
The largest reason why overall median household income for black families was $52,860 in 2022 versus $62,800 for Hispanics, $81,060 for non-Hispanic whites and $108,700 for Asians is the following rates of marriage for families with children: Black – 55%, Hispanic – 71.5%, White – 83.1%, Asian – 91.9%. As the figures above show, black family median income could be 85% of white4 rather than 65% of white if black families had equivalent rates of marriage. The collapse of black families destroyed black family economics, with a similar intermediate effect for Hispanics and (as compared to Asians) for whites. Married parents are an important privilege.
Likewise, single parent families explain the bulk of the black-white difference in criminality, a difference that is tragic for black families and majority-black neighborhoods. The overall ratio of black single-parent households to white single-parent households ranged from 318% in 1960 to 322% in 1991 to 299% in 2023, while the rates of single-parent families and especially young single mothers rocketed up between 1960 and 1991 and then largely declined back down afterwards. In 1960 the arrest rates for white Americans (including Hispanics) for serious crimes was 0.35% and for black Americans overall it was 1.54%.5 In 1991 the rates were 1.16% for whites and 4.21% for black Americans. In 2023 it was back down to 0.51% and 1.74%. These ratios are similar to the black-white single parent ratios and the levels correlate with the single parent levels. Further, we have a very interesting data point in 1960, when the FBI statistics separated rural and urban results. Rural black families did not show the same degree of black-white difference in single parent rates that urban families showed. In 1960, rural black arrests for serious crimes were only 15.5% of total rural arrests, close to the 10.5% total ratio of black Americans in 1960. Strip away the difference in single-parent ratios, then, and the black-white criminality difference pretty much disappeared.6
What caused the collapse of the married family? It was not the invention of or increased generosity of welfare, which didn’t change much in the relevant years. One can envision what did cause it, however, and that view is supported (though he does not phrase it quite this way) by Professor Gerald Jaynes, the A. Whitney Griswold Professor of Economics, African American Studies, and Urban Studies at Yale.7 In the 1960s, the rise of the Baby Boomers resulted in the Age of Aquarius youth movement and of a new sort of black consciousness among urban black youth, whose parents had already somewhat tended to think that competing in the white economy wasn’t a winning strategy.8 Both trends led to young people feeling like they saw the world more clearly than prior generations had, and that their parents’ view of the world was obsolete and should be rejected. They rejected The System, and with it the values of The System. In prior generations, being an unmarried parent was embarrassing, and being on the dole was also embarrassing. The new sexual morality9 and the feeling that The System was oppressive and exploitative made these sources of embarrassment fade – not for everyone, but for enough. As one might expect, that effect was strongest among teenagers. For a teenager in the 1960s through the 1980s, becoming a single mom on AFDC10 meant you could go from being a child under the control of your strict parent to being a financially independent person who was, as a mother, viewed as being sort of an adult. It was teenage Nirvana.11
That resulted in the following effects on birthrates. Unfortunately, it is hard to get the desired detail before 1980, but from 1980 onwards we can see that the total birthrate for girls ages 15-19 for all races progressed as follows:12
While the breakdown for racial/ethnic groups was as follows:
We also have data on youth sexual activity during the decline period after 1995.
Compare these figures with the following total population figures.
As you can see, the percentage of total households that were headed by single mothers declined after 1992, and the percent of the population represented by children under 5 declined more, but these changes were not as large as the decline in teen pregnancies.
That decline traced back to the Welfare to Work reform discussions that began in earnest in 1991. The actual changes in the welfare system weren’t enacted until 1996, but the political discussion leading up to them involved creating a very negative image of young welfare mothers, representing them as crack moms and other negative stereotypes. Embarrassment became a thing again. Further, we were moving into an era of Girl Power and an increase in teen self-respect.
In part13 because of these declines in single-mother households, and especially teen-mom and poor-single-mom households, the percent of children aged 12-17 who were perpetrators of violent crime dropped dramatically after 1991, so that in 2021 it was 11% of what it was in 1993, while the rate of serious violent crimes committed by youth 12-17 declined to 41% of its 1993 level and the total number of serious violent crimes declined to 30% of the 1993 level. Violent crimes of all types per 100,000 people declined from 758.2 in 1991 to 492.8 in 2005, 372.4 in 2015, and 377.6 in 2021. Arrest rates for serious crimes fell accordingly.14 Combined with the information above on poverty rates, one can see that these changes in teen births had a substantial positive effect for America overall and for disadvantaged communities in particular. These statistics do not show black Americans hoping that white liberals will rescue them by thinking anti-racist thoughts. Rather, black families have been taking care of their own business by taking concrete actions with very positive results. Laborist family policy will support them with focused investment and with sensitivity to the unintended anti-family side effects of the design of government programs.
Laborism will build on this very positive trend by promoting marriage and family and discouraging youth sex and pregnancy in an enlightened way. The phrase “discouraging youth sex” may sound unrealistic, but that in itself helps to show why it actually can be done. Look again at the sexual activity figures above. Without any particular effort by society, activity levels dropped, a lot. The sense that high school kids are all having sex is a product of the financier media. The media, in turn, is largely what young people rely on in deciding for themselves what is normal or cool or adult. Today the media is still largely selling the wrong message.
But this is an area where one can have good propaganda. Propaganda is evil when it tries to get people to believe things that are not true or to do things that are bad for them. Harnessing the same techniques for things that are true and are good for you is OK, as long as you would be proud to tell the target audience that that is what you are doing if they asked. There was nothing wrong with the intent of the old 1950s youth propaganda films, which were honest about their purpose, but they were pretty hokey and largely ineffective. The PR firms that have been busily selling the financiers’ messages as their paid tools are much, much better at what they do. A laborist government will hire them15 to ensure that our youth see a different picture when they are seeking to use the media to judge how they should behave. That picture will show smart, cool, attractive and successful girls avoiding sex in high school or, if they don’t, being VERY insistent on reliable birth control. Girls who don’t do these these things will be correctly shown to be headed for trouble and to be not-too-bright and uncool. Boys who don’t pressure girls for sex will be seen to be desirable and cool and romantic, and boys who have sex without reliable birth control will shown to be hapless idiots who suffer for it. College fraternities that seek to roofie girls will be properly shown as criminal scumbags. Married, stable parents, especially in poor and minority families, will be shown to be very good things. In the hands of a good PR firm, all of that can be done without presenting a bad image of single mothers. Good single parents would be shown as the heroes they are by emphasizing how difficult it is to raise a child by yourself, and how nice it is to have a loving and helpful spouse.
Laborism will ensure that everyone has easy access to reliable birth control and knows how to use it properly.
Of course, there will still be incompetent young single parents and incompetent or evil older married parents. Laborism will reform the child welfare, social work, and Head Start systems to ensure that every child gets the resources it needs, no matter how deficient her parent(s) might be. The Parents As Teachers program model will be greatly expanded. Laborism will invest in safe and friendly urban youth facilities, programs and parks, in after-school programs and enrichment, in quality nutrition and adequate housing for all children. It will get chemicals and pollution out of working-class areas so that the children of lower-income Americans are not poisoned. Law enforcement will protect youth from all threats, including other youth16, in all neighborhoods so that nobody joins a gang out of fear. Laborism will invest in quality education in every public school in America. It will take the profit out of illegal narcotics, enforcing against money so that we don’t need to enforce against people. It will reform the criminal justice system to separate the messed-up youth who need care and help from the bad kids who just need to be locked up.17 A solid family is the first defense for children, and laborism will promote that, but it will also take every other opportunity to protect, encourage and save children.
Similar figures apply when just looking at the education level of the mother, except that the difference between less than a high school diploma and high school graduates increases.
Source: 2020 Census data, families with children under 18, Table C3-All. The missing percentages are children with no parent present.
The public data is not year-by-year for some of the items of interest, so here I use 1995 as the closest proxy for the 1992 turning point where necessary.
It should be 100%, of course, but this gets you most of the way, and other laborist policies will close the rest of the gap. My family is a United Nations of white, black, Asian, partial Native American, Catholic, protestant, Jewish, Taoist, and free thinkers. While we have strong individual differences, we are all similar in achievement. The same should be true for America’s diverse population overall. The policies tried over the last 60 years haven’t done the trick.
It should be noted that the percentages of arrests by race for serious offenses closely match victim reports of the race of the criminal, with white arrests rates actually being inflated (66% of arrests for violent crime were of white Americans and 32% of black Americans, versus victim reports of 57% and 40%, respectively).
This is generally true for recent African immigrant and Afro-Caribbean families, too – fewer single parents and lower criminality.
His paper speaks for itself, and as noted he phrases his conclusions differently, so I am not intending to speak for him here.
These are all generalizations, and in fact different people thought different things, which is why none of the papers on this subject are especially convincing. Overall, though, this general explanation appears to be more consistent with the data than any other, and is supported in various flavors in various academic papers.
The new sexual morality was in turn driven in significant part by access to birth control, which had the odd effect in the hands of dumb teenagers of tending to increase teen births.
Aid for Families with Dependent Children, the welfare system of the period.
For similar reasons, choices of potential male sexual partners were skewed. Where responsible males likely to stick around and contribute income were traditionally favored, “rebels’, “outlaws”, and plain old criminals willing to smite a teenage girl’s enemies became more popular. For evidence of this change, one need look no further than the example of Snoop Dogg. In 1993, he was a member of the Rollin’ 20s Crips. He and his gang colleague/bodyguard, Malik, spotted 3 members of a rival gang, including Philip Woldemariam, eating burritos in a park in Rollin’ 20s Crips territory. Snoop and Malik drove out in an open Jeep to confront them in a threatening manner, with Snoop driving. Accounts differ as to whether Malik or Woldemariam drew first, but Malik shot Woldemarium dead. The jury found Snoop and Malik not guilty as having acted in self-defense. Snoop’s notoriety from his murder prosecution was a big boost for his rapper career, which made him rich, which led to him being a widely popular gameshow host, sports commentator, and brand spokesman. That career path would have been unlikely for anyone in the 1950s. Drug dealers and gangsters tend not to be respectful boyfriends or devoted husbands and fathers.
Source: National Center for Health Statistics, National Vital Statistics System.
Changes in gang activity, policing and the like also played a role, of course, and the crime rates were dropping before the birth rate declines would have had an effect, but the long-term stable decline is most easily explained in terms of the change in family structure. Further, the changes in family structure were obviously much more positive than the incarceration explosion that had been the earlier response.
By 56% for whites and 59% for black Americans. I am defining “serious crimes” as homicide, robbery, assault, rape and other non-prostitution sex offenses, kidnapping, burglary, larceny, auto theft, embezzlement, fraud, fencing, forgery, weapons offenses, and other offenses against family and children.
They will be looking for work because laborism will put them out of the business of doing evil.
I went to an inner-city high school. It struck me at the time that if adults were subjected to the same degree of crime and risk in their offices that we were in school, there would be a huge social hullabaloo about doing something to fix it. For all that Americans say they care about children, historically we sure haven’t acted like it.
My brother worked as a juvenile detention guard and administrator. In his observation, the large majority of the kids they got were in the former category of kids that just needed responsible adults to care about them. However, there was a different group who were pretty easy to identify who the guards knew would keep coming back until they killed somebody. The two groups should be in entirely different systems. Another data source for me is a friend who was a public defender. 100% of her clients were guilty (they got very excited once when they thought they had an innocent one, but it turned out he was just a really good liar). She did not take pride in trying to get them off on technicalities. What she did take pride in was being really good at helping all the ones who were just hapless bozos, which was most of them, to shape up and do better with their lives. They needed someone to care. But we mustn’t confuse them with the ones who are irretrievably broken and dangerous.