Researchers: Marriage reduces child poverty
[O]f the two-fifths of bottom-quintile households that are families, 83% are headed by single mothers. The Brookings Institution’s Isabel Sawhill calculates that virtually all the increase in child poverty in the United States since the 1970s would vanish if parents still married at 1970 rates.
Well, comes the response, maybe single mothers are hard up not because they lack husbands but because unskilled, low-earning women are likelier to become single mothers in the first place. The Urban Institute’s Robert Lerman tried to address that objection by studying low-income women who had entered “shotgun” unions — that is, getting married after getting pregnant — on the theory that they represented a population roughly similar to those who got pregnant but didn’t marry. The married women, he found, had a significantly higher standard of living than the unmarried ones.
“Even among the mothers with the least qualifications and highest risks of poverty,” Lerman concluded, “marriage effects are consistently large and statistically significant.”
~ Kay S. Hymowitz, Los Angeles Times, June 3
[Photo via urbanmoms.ca]
Jill Stanek is a nurse turned speaker, columnist and blogger, a national figure in the effort to protect both preborn and postborn innocent human life.
They say the way to avoid poverty is graduate from high school, get a full-time job and get married and have children after the wedding. Very simple, yet this common way of life eludes many in our society, the richest and most advanced that has ever existed. I think we are just looking for the wrong things in life. Call it bourgeois and boring, but it puts food on the table and makes for a happier life.
I agree Chris. There are years of research to back up what you are saying. Two books by Glenn T. Stanton Why Marriage Matters and The Ring Makes All the Difference. Excellent research summary at http://frc.org/marriwebsite/162-reasons-to-marry not pc but teach your children and oldies (like myself) that ”shacking up” is not equivalent and doesn’t cut it.
Astonishing! You’d almost think God knew what He was doing when He ordered things that way: marriage first, then children.
Huh!
I believe it. I work with many troubled families — I say ninety percent, at the very least, are headed by single moms. Not all single moms are “bad,” of course — some do a very good job – but it’s a fact that households headed by single women are less stable that those with a married couple. I can count the cases I have where the father is in the home on the fingers of one hand.
Astonishing! You’d almost think God knew what He was doing when He ordered things that way: marriage first, then children.
I’m glad my daughter and fiance are doing things “in order.” Sadly, they’re a minority in the AA community nowadays.
Wait, I thought pro-lifers just wanted to control women, and I thought we didn’t care about born babies or about children living in poverty. So, like, how dare we force our archaic, dark ages views on marriage down people’s throats! Right? How dare we promote marriage as a way to actually prevent children from living in poverty! Right??
How dare we suggest that family values might actually benefit society. *eyeroll*
Here’s the answer right here. It’s a little long but so, so worth it.
http://www.boundless.org/2005/articles/a0001154.cfm
The interesting thing is of course, what happens when these “shotgun” marriages dissolve through no-fault divorce? The answer is that both women and men fall to lower poverty levels than they were before.
The real question to answer is “Does Marriage itself provide actual benefit, OR do the tax and legal benefits associated with marriage provide the benefit, i.e. does the impediment to dissolving a Marriage provide benefit?”
Take an equal amount of couples about to marry, and 1/2 of them sign prenuptual agreements detailing exactly how a divorce would go, from custody to division of assets. Essentially, when one person wants a divorce, its over within a month. The other half of couples will follow normal laws of Equitable Distribution, with a minimal waiting period of 1 year separation before divorce proceedings begin. You can use a “choice of law” provision in the proceedings for this.
Both groups have marriage certificates, rings, enjoy ALL tax and legal benefits of Marriage, so the ONLY variable is how easy it will be to leave the Marriage. States with 2 year waiting periods for divorce appear to have the lowest divorce rates, but when you break it down, Marital satisfaction and happiness cannot be attributed to the State in which you live.
If tax and legal benefits of Marriage are responsible for the benefit, could we set up programs where single mothers needing assistance could live together, and receive the same types of tax and legal benefits of married couples for a period of 1-2 years?
“we could set up programs where single mothers needing assistance could live together”
Or…! We could stop pretending that we are magically more wise than our ancestors just because we have Internet access. We could stop acting like we know better because we go on Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube, and that PROVES that everything our ancestors believed about faith and family was just a load of bunk. We could stop playing these little social experiment games in our endless attempts to flee from ANY responsibility for our actions.