The Connection Between Unemployment and Unmarried Parents

Originally posted at TheAtlantic.com.

The states with more single men without jobs have higher rates of nonmarital births.

“Le berceau” by Berthe Morisot

The Census Bureau has a new report on nonmarital births. Based on the American Community Survey—the largest survey of its kind, and the only one big enough to track all states—the report shows that 35.7 percent of births in 2011 were to unmarried mothers.

Beneath the headline number, two patterns in the data will receive a lot of attention: education and race/ethnicity. I have a brief comment on both patterns.

Education
The education patterns show a very steep dropoff in nonmarital births as women’s education increases. From 57 percent unmarried among those who didn’t finish high school to just nine percent among those who have graduated college.

Given the hardships faced by single mothers (especially in the United States), it looks like women with more education are making the more rational decision to avoid childbearing when they’re not married. And I don’t doubt that’s partly the explanation. But we need to think about marriage, education and childbearing as linked events that unfold over time. The average high-school dropout mother was 26, while the average college-graduate mother was 33. Delaying childbearing and continuing education are decisions that are made together, based on the opportunities people have. And completing more education increases both thelikelihood of marriage and the earning potential of one’s spouse.

So I think you could tell the story like this: Women with better educational opportunities delay childbearing, which increases their marriage prospects, and makes it more likely they will be married and financially better off when they have children in their 30s.

Race/ethnicity
The differences in nonmarital birth rates between race/ethnic groups in the U.S. are shocking, from about two-thirds for black and American Indian women to 29 percent for whites and 11 percent for Asians.

This pattern is related to the education trend, naturally, but that’s not the whole story. One aspect of the story is race/ethnic geography of opportunity in this country. I’ve written before about the shortage of employed men available for women to marry, a particular expression of racial disparity first popularized by sociologist William Julius Wilson a quarter century ago.

Using the new numbers on nonmarital birth rates for each state from the Census report, I compared them to the male non-employment rate—specifically, the percentage of unmarried men ages 22-50 that are not currently employed. Here’s the relationship:

The states with more single men out of work have higher rates of nonmarital births. Single mother, meet jobless man.

My conclusion from these patterns is that unmarried parenthood is primarily a symptom of lack of opportunity, especially for education and employment. Surely that’s not the whole story. Maybe we should be persuading people to marry younger or shaming them into avoiding parenthood. But I think those approaches increase stigma more than they change behavior or improve wellbeing—Pew surveys show that 77 percent of people already say raising a family is easier if you’re married and only 12 percent of single people say they don’t want to marry. So who needs convincing? Meanwhile, if we addressed the problems of education and employment, is there any doubt family security and stability would improve, and with it the wellbeing of children and their parents?

How many prisoners grew up with both parents?

A couple clarifications.

In her commentary on my commentary, Kay Hymowitz offered some evidence that single parenthood causes crime (or at least incarceration). She wrote:

Regardless, there is no disagreement that the majority, and perhaps the large majority, of inmates grew up in fatherless homes. It’s difficult to get up-to-date data since the Bureau of Justice doesn’t reliably track the family background of inmates. (They also put intact and step families in the same “two parent” category, though at least one study has found the later to be predictive of juvenile incarceration.) The 1987 “Survey of Youth in Custody” found that 70% did not grow up with both parents. Another 1994 study of Wisconsin juveniles was even more stark: only 13% grew up with their married parents. Here’s the conclusion of Cynthia Harper and Sara McLanahan, the doyenne of researchers about single parenthood: “[C]ontrolling for income and all other factors, youths in father-absent families (mother only, mother-stepfather, and relatives/other) still had significantly higher odds of incarceration than those from mother-father families.”

You can follow the links to see her sources, except the Harper and McLanahan link, which is dead. Shockingly, Brad Wilcox also provided a dead link to the same quote. I was curious to see it because I would be surprised if any social scientist used the words “controlling for … all other factors.”

Anyway, for some reason Hymowitz missed the large, national study the Bureau of Justice Statistics does on inmates, which includes family background information, repeated since 1991. If you look at their report on the 2004 survey (which focused on drug issues), and make a few simple calculations, you can figure out that 55% of state and federal prisoners did not “live most of the time while growing up” with both parents. They don’t count “fatherless homes” separately, but even assuming most of the those 55% were living with their mothers, “large majority” is a stretch.

But what does that tell us anyway? The survey also shows these folks have experienced high rates of poverty, homelessness, substance abuse, physical abuse, and family members’ incarceration. If only 55% of this population is from non-married-parents homes, that’s not a very strong case for an independent effect of family structure.

As importantly, the 2004 survey shows that 74% of state and federal inmates had previously been sentenced to prison or probation. By Hymowitz’s logic, maybe the biggest cause of crime is incarceration. This is not crazy at all, of course, it’s just not the point she wants to make.

People who think incarceration reduces crime often don’t appreciate how many people get out of prison — like Elizabeth Marquardt, who described the policy as, “lock up a lot more of those fatherless boys and throw away the key.” But BJS statistics show that 44% of inmates were released in 2010 (roughly 700,000 out, 700,000 in).

In case you have lost the thread, I think Hymowitz and the others that are so exercised by my little post are trying to protect this narrative: Marriage decline substantially caused the increase in crime in the 1980s and 1990s, and then continued to apply this upward pressure while incarceration was so effective that crime rates fell anyway. I don’t buy it on either end.

Conservatives doubling down on single mothers and crime

The reaction from the right-wing family folks to my post about single mothers and crime.

In a post that appeared here and on TheAtlantic.com — but got extra attention when the figure appeared on Jezebel, Mother Jones, Slate, Andrew Sullivan’s Dish, Family Scholars, and Alas! — my point was that conservatives had been quick to attribute the rise in crime in the 1980s to the “breakdown of the family” and single parents. But then they didn’t revise their stories when crime dropped drastically without a reversal of the family structure trends. I thought single mothers deserved an apology.

They’ll have to keep waiting, I guess.

Within a few hours on Tuesday, we heard from some of the leading lights on the issue. Their conclusion was that if I don’t want more marriage then I must want more incarceration.

Maggie (let’s “drive a wedge between blacks and gays!”) Gallagher, on Family Scholars:

The ending of the violent crime wave was a great policy achievement. It seems however to involve massively incarcerating millions of young men we have not succeeded in civilizing. There is never only one way to skin a cat. But I’m not sure our souls should rest too comfortably on the solution we found.

Ross (Charles Murray is “brilliant!”) Douthat tweeted:

Fortunately, family breakdown doesn’t create any problems that mass incarceration of young men can’t solve.

(One good turn deserves another, I guess: Murray himself tweeted back: “Lovely. Menckenesque. Maybe even Wildeian (if Oscar had been a social scientist).”

Soon Elizabeth Marquardt, who is always committed to “excellent arguments and accurate data,” chimed in:

Well for pete’s sake, one thing we now do is lock up a lot more of those fatherless boys and throw away the key. Which means less crime.

Then Brad (recession is good news for marriage!) Wilcox produced a 10-year old graph of incarceration rates under the title, “Who Needs An Intact Family? Jail Will Do Just Fine,” suggesting that we might be “forced to choose between a stronger marriage culture and mass incarceration.”

What followed on all these blogs was a debate about all the interesting possible explanations for the decline of crime in America. Lost in all of it was that none of the old “family values” folks backed off the original story that crime rose in the first place because of family “breakdown.” Just to clarify: It is one thing to say that children who grow up with one parent present are more likely to commit violent crime. As a statistical association that is true, though the causal story is muddied by important confounds. But it is another — unjustified — thing to say that the crime wave of the 1980s and 1990s was substantially driven by the rise of single parents, which was a common claim, as I illustrated in the post.

Ballpark-acts of violence

(Here is the part where I spend more time thinking about the actual evidence than the pundits I’m complaining about. What follows isn’t scientific analysis: this is data ballparking and rumination.)

As Stephen Demuth and Susan Brown wrote in a 2004 article, identifying the causal effect of family structure itself on whether kids become violent is very difficult. You need to consider parental monitoring and supervision, the quality of the relationship between parents and children, the level of conflict in the home, as well as poverty, education, family transitions, housing, neighborhood factors, and so on.

In that article, however, they offered some numbers we can look at to ballpark the relationship between single-parents and violent crime.

Using the National Adolescent Survey of Adolescent Health, they added up the self-reported violent acts of students in grades 7 to 12 in 1995. The kids were asked how many times in the last year they (1) “hurt someone badly enough to need bandages or care from a doctor or nurse,” (2) “use or threaten to use a weapon to get something from someone,” and (3) “take part in a fight where a group of your friends is against another group.” They didn’t ask the specific number of times, but rather asked kids to report “0 (never), 1 (once or twice), 2 (three or four times), or 3 (five or more times).”

That’s enough to get a sense of what was going on in 1995, when the survey was done. If you take the scores on the three items added together, and take the mean of that sum for kids in different family structures, you can ballpark how many of these acts of violence kids in each family type committed. The idea is just to get a sense of the magnitude of the family structure difference and the relative contribution of kids in each group.

I’ve turned the scale into the average number of acts to make the figure below. For example, the mean for children living with single mothers was 1.2 on the scale. I gave them 1.5 (for “once or twice”), and then, for the additional 0.2, added 0.2*2 (with 2 representing the difference between 1.5 and 3.5 for “three or four times”). That’s a total of 1.9 “ballpark-acts”:

To show the relative contribution of the different groups of kids, I set the width of the bars to their share of the sample, in which 26% were living with either a single mother or single father, which is about right for that period. You can see from the estimate, for example, that kids living with single mothers admitted to 0.7 more ballpark-acts of violence per year, and those with single fathers admitted to 1.1 more.

With the amount of violence committed by each kid, and the relative size of the groups, it’s easy to calculate that those 26% of kids living with single parents committed 35% of the violent acts — more than their share, but not most of the total.

Remember, there are no controls in that analysis – it’s just compositional. There are a host of real reasons children with single parents commit more violence. This is just to see how big is the difference we are trying to understand.

Still, I have no trouble believing the decline of married-couple living arrangements contributed to the rise in violent crime rates since the 1960s, especially if you set aside the huge spike in violence from the mid-1980s to the mid-1990s. Single-parent families have lots of challenges and shortages — mostly of money and time — that make it harder on average to keep their kids in line. (And, of course, one of the causes of single-parenthood is the rise of incarceration.) In the absence of sufficient big-government nanny-state infrastructure to help them get by, it’s not surprising that the problems they experience include a higher risk of violence.

But I see nothing to justify the apocalyptic end-of-civilization associations that were commonly served up then — and which apparently are still palatable to many of today’s family conservatives.

Aside: scale

In that Demuth and Brown article, they have multivariate models that allow us to compare effect sizes on violence. They show, for example, that having a parent who graduated college is associated with odds of committing violent acts 3.5-times as much as living with a single mother, once other factors are controlled (-.42 versus .12). It’s always easier to say there is an association than to ascertain how important it is relative to other things — and especially for how it contributes to a trend over time.

Consider some other findings in this literature that allow us to compare the scale of effects:

• A study of religion and family structure effects on delinquency (an amalgamated concept) reported that living with a single parent increased the odds of delinquency about as much as 6 years of education reduced the odds.
• A study from one school district found that, for boys (but not girls), having a single mother increased the odds of being referred for delinquency by 13%, compared with 9% for being poor.
• Many studies — like this, this, and this, find no effect of family structure on delinquency once aspects of the parent-child relationship are controlled.

A common finding is that the level of attachment children feel with their mothers swamps the family structure effect, as was found in this study, in which there was no effect of family structure on serious or non-serious delinquency. Some, like this one, find that living with a single mother has a significant effect on delinquency, but it is smaller than the effect of maternal closeness.

Given the importance of factors such as poverty level, parents’ education, and peer and network effects – as well as family relationships – the more important and useful questions have to do with how we can improve the environment and outcomes for children with single parents (and for their parents). The causal impact of family structure itself is less pressing.

Single Moms Can’t Be Scapegoated for the Murder Rate Anymore

This post originally appeared on TheAtlantic.com

Homicides in D.C. have hit a historic low, while the percentage of single-parent households remains steady.

As the year draws to a close, the Washington Post reports that the District of Columbia is heading for a historic low number of homicides: fewer than 100 for 2012. That’s down from the highs of about 450 per year at the start of the 1990s (while the population is about the same size).

Not mentioned in the story: the breakdown of the family. That’s surprising, because it was a big part of the story 20 years ago, when D.C. was the murder capital of the country during a national crime wave. I think single mothers—especially those who were raising their kids back in the 1990s—deserve an apology from the conventional-wisdom purveyors of that time.

Using the numbers from the Washington Post feature and Census data, I constructed homicide and single mother rates for 1990, 2000, and 2011, for Washington, D.C. Both trends have been pretty linear, so it’s reasonable to illustrate them with just a few points:

Sources: Homicide rates calculated from number of homicides reported by the Washington Postand population totals from the U.S. Census Bureau, along with single-mother rates, for 1990 and2000-2011.

The Post attributes the declining murder rates to rising incomes, improved law enforcement technology and community relations, and better trauma care (although the number of non-fatal assaults has fallen similarly). But if you go back to the Post from the late 1980s and early 1990s, you would have heard a lot about family structure.

A very early story, from 1985, raised the alarm about an apparent growing epidemic of amoral, violent, black young men:

Such incidents have raised new fears here [in D.C.] and across the country about the growing instability of urban black family structure and the creation of an underclass of young men capable of killing for a warmup jacket or a pair of running shoes. Social scientists, law enforcement officials and community leaders share some of the same theories about the reasons for this kind of homicide among poor black youngsters. They point to the intense desire for material things amid deprivation, easy access to handguns, and the inability of parents—often young, unmarried mothers—to control or instill values in their children.

In 1991, when Health and Human Services Secretary Louis W. Sullivan released a study on homicide trends, he declared:

The collapse of the American family in the past few decades is historically unprecedented in the U.S., and possibly in the world. Nowhere is this trend more apparent than in the black community…. Some argue that the high rate of single parenthood has not adversely affected our children. But, sadly, the research does not bear them out. . . . Study after study has shown that children from single-parent families are five times more likely to be poor and twice as likely to drop out of school. . . . They are also more likely to be involved in criminal activity, to abuse drugs and alcohol, to suffer ill health, and to become trapped in welfare dependency.

Sullivan’s solution was a return to a “culture of character,” which he described as “a culture in which parents invest time and attention in their children, and the children of a neighborhood; a culture in which children growing up without a father are a small minority.”

A 1994 article focusing on the increase in homicide among young people summarized it this way:

At the bottom of all this, people in every section of the juvenile justice system say, is a critical lack of parenting. … Federal officials estimate that 70 percent of children in juvenile court are from single-parent households. In the last 30 years, the proportion of single mothers has grown from one in 20 to one in four.

Family structure and parenting were not the only explanations offered for the epidemic of murder. There was plenty written about crack cocaine and the drug war turf disputes, the availability of guns, and about poverty and failing schools. But that single-parent theme was quite widespread.

I’ve written before about the assumption that the rise in single-parent families was responsible for the violent crime bonanza of the 1980s and 1990s. (Romney and Ryan returned to this theme.)

Looking at it from the perspective of 1990, it was easy to assume a strong causal relationship between the rise in single motherhood and the murder epidemic. By my reading of the research, it is true that children of single mothers are more likely to commit crimes. But other factors are more important. That must be the case, or we wouldn’t see the overall trends in the United States split this dramatically starting in the 1990s:

Sources: Crime data from the Bureau of Justice Statistics, family structure from the U.S. Census Bureau.

Violent crime has fallen through the floor (or at least back to the rates of the 1970s) relative to the bad old days. And this is true not just for homicide but also for rape and other assaults. At the same time, the decline of marriage has continued apace. Looking at two aggregate trends is never enough to tell a whole story of social change, of course. However, if two trends going together doesn’t prove a causal relationship, the opposite is not quite as true. If two trends do not go together, the theory that one causes the other has a steeper hill to climb. In the case of family breakdown driving crime rates, I don’t think the story will make it anymore.

And I’m open to explanations for why crime has really fallen, even including some minor role for the incarceration craze. But there were a lot of people who were not nearly so circumspect about the soundness of their causal stories when the family-breakdown-crime assumption served their ends. And it would be big of them to own up to it now.

Debate debate on single mothers and crime

In response to the presidential debate last night, a debate broke out over the role of single-mother families and crime. Here’s what happened, with a repost from one year ago, when I reviewed this issue.

In response to a question about the availability of assault weapons, Mitt Romney responded in part (from the transcript):

But let me mention another thing, and that is parents. We need moms and dads helping raise kids. Wherever possible, the — the benefit of having two parents in the home — and that’s not always possible. A lot of great single moms, single dads. But gosh, to tell our kids that before they have babies, they ought to think about getting married to someone — that’s a great idea because if there’s a two-parent family, the prospect of living in poverty goes down dramatically. The opportunities that the child will — will be able to achieve increase dramatically. So we can make changes in the way our culture works to help bring people away from violence and give them opportunity and bring them in the American system.

In response, I tweeted:

and then:

Then Kay Hymowitz (the author of Manning Up: How the Rise of Women Has Turned Men into Boys) wrote: “The vast majority of violent criminals come from fatherless homes. Sorry. Them’s the facts. Doesn’t explain Aurora though.”

And then we had this exchange:

Me: Ok. But violent crime rates have plummeted while single parenthood keeps going up.

Her: Yes, crime has declined for a variety of reasons including, sadly, mass incarceration.

That reminded me that I looked over this research one year ago this week, and wrote the following, which I repost here:

Single parents, crime and incarceration

Sometimes a diagram is helpful to organize your thoughts.

A little while ago I commented that crime rates had fallen through the floor even though single parenthood is still on the rise, apparently contradicting a generation of conservative conventional wisdom that attributed rising crime rates to the decline of the nuclear family. In the graphs I showed a very strong positive relationship between crime and single parenthood from 1960 until 1991, after which the relationship was reversed.

In response, someone countered:

Your graphs on single-mother families and crime rates, and your accompanying commentary, conveniently miss any reference to the massive increase in incarceration since the 1980s … Were it not for the fact that this country has incarcerated more than a million men behind bars since the late 1980s, it is likely that the upward swing in single-motherhood & nonmarital childbearing would have been paralleled by an upward swing in crime.

I have written before about the family consequences of the drug war, focusing on how incarceration affects families, rather than on how (whether) family structure drives crime; as well as other aspects of the prison boom (such as giving birth in chains, distorted marriage markets, and how prisons contribute to the spread of HIV).

But I didn’t address the question of how incarceration may have saved us from a worsening crime wave driven by single parenting.

I still don’t have an answer, but I have some thoughts, which I have chosen to express in the form of a conceptual diagram, with references. Each of these links is at least plausible and at most conclusively shown by the research listed below. If I were to dig into this research, this is where I would start: an annotated free-association figure:

Click to enlarge the diagram.

From what I can see so far, it looks like incarceration causes single-parent families more than single-parent families cause crime. The numbered references are below. (Thanks to Chris Uggen for some leads.)

References (with links that might hit pay walls)

1.  Demuth, S. and S. L. Brown. 2004. “Family structure, family processes, and adolescent delinquency: The significance of parental absence versus parental gender.” Journal of Research in Crime and Delinquency 41(1):58-81. Schroeder, Ryan D., Aurea K. Osgood and Michael J. Oghia. 2010. “Family Transitions and Juvenile Delinquency.” Sociological Inquiry 80(4):579-604.

2. Charles, Kerwin K. and Ming C. Luoh. 2010. “Male Incarceration, the Marriage Market, and Female Outcomes.” Review of Economics and Statistics 92(3):614-627.

3. Childs, E. C. 2005. “Looking behind the stereotypes of the ‘angry black woman’ an exploration of black women’s responses to interracial relationships.” Gender & Society 19(4):544-561. Robnett, Belinda and Cynthia Feliciano. 2011. “Patterns of Racial-Ethnic Exclusion by Internet Daters.” Social Forces 89(3):807-828.

4. Dixon, T. L. and D. Linz. 2000. “Overrepresentation and underrepresentation of African Americans and Latinos as lawbreakers on television news.” Journal of Communication 50(2):131-154.

5. Dixon, T. L. and K. B. Maddox. 2005. “Skin tone, crime news, and social reality judgments: Priming the stereotype of the dark and dangerous black criminal.” Journal of Applied Social Psychology 35(8):1555-1570. Dixon, Travis L. 2008. “Network news and racial beliefs: Exploring the connection between national television news exposure and stereotypical perceptions of African Americans.” Journal of Communication 58(2):321-337.

6. Tonry, Michael. 2010. “The Social, Psychological, and Political Causes of Racial Disparities in the American Criminal Justice System.” Crime and Justice: A Review of Research, Vol 39 39:273-312.

7. Pettit, Becky and Bruce Western. 2004. “Mass imprisonment and the life course: Race and class inequality in US incarceration.” American Sociological Review 69(2):151-169. Reiman, Jeffrey. 2007. The rich get richer and the poor get prison: ideology, class, and criminal justice. Boston: Pearson/Allyn & Bacon. Wakefield, Sara and Christopher Uggen. 2010. “Incarceration and Stratification.” Annual Review of Sociology 36:687-406.

8. I made this argument in a recent blog post here. For a more thorough review of media depictions of single parents, see: Usdansky Margaret L. 2009. “A Weak Embrace: Popular and Scholarly Depictions of Single-Parent Families, 1900-1998.” Journal of Marriage And Family 71(2):209-225.

9. On conservative foundation support for traditional-family-is-good research, see a few of my posts here, here, here, and here.

10. Nagin Daniel S., Francis T. Cullen and Cheryl Lero Jonson. 2009. “Imprisonment and Reoffending.” Crime and Justice: A Review of Research 38:115-200.

Single mothers’ hardships

From the article, “Effects of unemployment and underemployment on material hardship in single-mother families,” in Children and Youth Services Review, comes this list of hardships recorded by single mothers on the Survey of Income and Program Participation from the mid-2000s.

For context, you can situate the mid-2000s on this trend-mashup I made:

Sources: Employment from Table FG5 here ; TANF caseloads from these reports; poverty from Census, here.

Employment down (after rising in the 1990s), poverty up, TANF non-responsive; lots of financial, health, food and housing hardship.

 

 

TOTN: Challenges for single parents

I shared a segment on Talk of the Nation with Isabel Sawhill, ostensibly triggered by her op-ed in the Washington Post, “20 years later, it turns out Dan Quayle was right about Murphy Brown and unmarried moms.” It was mostly not about preventing unmarried parenting or analyzing the trends, but about the current issues and problems single parents face (education, custody, work hours, dating, among others).

It’s 30 minutes, and they’ve posted the audio and a transcript online here. (Unfortunately, the transcript has a few places where the names of the speakers are scrambled.)

Here are a few of my comments:

On the role of government in promoting marriage:

ME (it says “SAWHILL” here): I think it’s important for us to try to get beyond wringing our hands over the decline of marriage. The government hasn’t been able to do very much of anything to reverse that trend, despite kicking millions of people off welfare. That was supposed to encourage marriage. Promoting marriage through the Healthy Marriage Initiative…

NEAL CONAN: It was supposed to encourage other things, too, of course.

COHEN: Right, no, it was very successful at encouraging work, but if you look back at what they were saying at the time, it was about encouraging marriage, also.

How government policy should address the problems of single parent families:

I think if you look at the benefits of marriage, which are very real, if you break them down, you find that many of them are not – are quite tangible. They’re not mysterious. And as Isabel said, childcare is one of them, time – but also security, health insurance, stable housing. These are among the things that are transferred from married parents to their children in terms of benefits, and those are things where we should try to focus our energies rather than worrying about the marital status of the parents.

On the importance of single parents being able to continue their education:

I think it’s important to realize that there are different ways of investing in children’s future. It can be direct through their own education and care, and it can also be through investment in the skills and opportunities of the parents. And if we can cross that hurdle of public recognition that we have a collective interest in that kind of investment, I think we’ll be much better off and find that, like with good-quality childcare, making education available to single parents may translate into not only economic benefits for them but future benefits for the children.

For a souvenir, I took this picture of the Talk of the Nation green room:

Flattering motherhood, still

I offered the first draft of this — for free — to the major newspapers, to no avail. In the meantime, there have been some great short pieces written on the recent motherhood-is-work kerfuffle. I don’t remember them all, but I liked those by Katha Pollitt, Nancy Folbre, Adia Harvey Wingfield, Barbara Risman, Laura Flanders, Feminist Hulk, and Linda Hirshman. The feminist field on this issue has been crowded, which is great.

* * *

Hopefully we can agree that that the true measure of motherhood is somewhere between “toughest job in the world” and “nothing.”

On the one hand, both President Obama and pundit Hilary Rosen have now called motherhood the world’s hardest job. And with the Romneys flopping onto the all-mothers-work bandwagon, it appears we’re reaching a rare rhetorical consensus.

On the other hand, the majority in both major political parties agrees that poor single mothers and their children need one thing above all – a (real) job, one that provides the “dignity of an honest day’s work.”* For welfare purposes, taking care of children is not only not the toughest job in the world, it is more akin to nothing at all. When Bill Clinton’s endorsed welfare-to-work he famously declared: “The days of something for nothing are over.” President Obama and Mitt Romney both support that welfare reform.

Of course parenthood is work. But it’s really many jobs, not one. And now that more and more of them are also available for a fee — as real jobs — we can see how much the “market” thinks they’re really worth. Answer: not much. When sold as services, the many tasks of parenthood are disproportionately done by women. Some of its core tasks – such as cooking, cleaning, diaper-changing and laundry – are among the lowest-paid, most demeaning, female-dominated occupations.

Source: My calculations from 2010 American Community Survey.

As I wrote before, when it comes to reproductive labor, there’s work and there’s work:

Katha Pollitt made this point more eloquently in her column:

But the brouhaha over Hilary Rosen’s injudicious remarks is not really about whether what stay-home mothers do is work. Because we know the answer to that: it depends. When performed by married women in their own homes, domestic labor is work—difficult, sacred, noble work. … When performed for pay, however, this supremely important, difficult job becomes low-wage labor that almost anyone can do—teenagers, elderly women, even despised illegal immigrants. But here’s the real magic: when performed by low-income single mothers in their own homes, those same exact tasks—changing diapers, going to the playground and the store, making dinner, washing the dishes, giving a bath—are not only not work; they are idleness itself.

Instead of the money men get for their labors, mothers are asked to settle for less money and a rhetorical pat on the head (if they are middle class “moms” instead of merely poor mothers — I think that’s known in economics as a “compensating differential“). As Barbara Ehrenreich put it, nobody ever put motherhood on a pedestal until feminists pointed out that “the pay is lousy and the career ladder is nonexistent.”

Still, the universal agreement that motherhood is “work” marks a genuine moment. Among other possible interpretations, it is a victory of “choice” feminism – which would have us “respect women in all the choices they make,” in the words of the newfound feminist Mrs. Romney. (Work = respect, nowadays in America, though it wasn’t always that way.) But celebrating the choice to do something most women can’t choose is the dangerous outcome of putting motherhood on a pedestal. It divides women according to the value of their motherhood.

Accepting pedestal status instead of equality is a bargain some feminists have refused for a century or more. One of those was Harriet Stanton Blatch (Elizabeth Cady Stanton’s daughter), who wrote in 1908: “Of all the people who block the progress of woman suffrage, the worst are the women of wealth and leisure who never knew a day’s work and never felt a day’s want, but who selfishly stand in the way of those women who know what it means to earn the bread they eat by the sternest toil” (emphasis added).

Parenthood won’t get the respect it deserves – including men embracing it in more equal numbers – until the monetary reward it draws matches the rhetoric of its symbolic value. That means recognizing the real value of parents’ sternest toils – even if they’re not married – from which we all benefit.

–

*California Gov. Pete Wilson, Washington Times, 12/7/1995, p. A21.

Poverty, single mothers and mobility

In 1994, Sara McLanahan and Gary Sandefur published, Growing Up With A Single Parent: What Hurts, What Helps. The growth of children living with only their mothers was — then as now — a matter of concern not only for children’s well-being, but for intergenerational mobility. One of their empirical conclusions was this:

For children living with a single parent and no stepparent, income is the single most important factor in accounting for their lower well-being as compared with children living with both parents. It accounts for as much as half of their disadvantage. Low parental involvement, supervision, and aspirations and greater residential mobility account for the rest.

The biggest problem, in other words, is economic. The other factors —  involvement, supervision, aspirations, mobility — are related to social class and the time poverty that economically-poor parents experience.

Examples

Here are some bivariate illustrations — that is, head-to-head comparisons of the difference between children of poor and non-poor versus single and married parents.

These are the “skill group” rankings by teachers of children by socioeconomic status (or SES, a composite of parents’ education, occupational prestige and income) versus race/ethnicity, gender and family structure. SES shows the widest spread in reading teachers’ group placement of first graders.

Source: Condron (2007).

Similarly, the poor/nonpoor difference is greater than the two-parent/single-parent difference in kindergarten entry scores:

Source: Early Childhood Longitudinal Study (2009).

Those are just two examples from early-childhood assessments. More importantly, here is the breakdown seen in a longitudinal study of children growing up. When women grow up to be mothers, their poverty level in childhood is more important than their family structure for predicting whether they will be in poverty themselves. The poverty difference is large, the family structure difference is not:

Source: Musik & Mare (2006).

This study included a more sophisticated set of multivariate analyses than this simple graph, but the author’s conclusion fits it:

Net of the correlation between poverty and family structure within a generation, the intergenerational transmission of poverty is significantly stronger than the intergenerational transmission of family structure, and neither childhood poverty nor family structure affects the other in adulthood.

That is, childhood poverty matters more.

Fewer single parents, or less poverty?

But if single parenthood and poverty are so closely related, some people say, we should spend hundreds of millions of dollars promoting marriage to help children avoid poverty (and other problems). That’s what the government has done, with money from the welfare budget. Even if it worked, which it apparently doesn’t, it’s only one approach. What about reducing poverty? And, more specifically, reducing the relative likelihood of poverty in single-parent families versus those with married parents. That is, address the poverty gap between the two groups, rather than the size of the two groups. This has the added advantage of not singling out one group — single mothers — for social stigmatization (of the kind I mentioned here). And, because it defines the problem as economic rather than moral, may make it easier to build public support for helping the poor.

Consider a recent paper by David Brady and Rebekah Burroway, which will be published in Demography. They analyzed the relative poverty of single mothers versus the total population — that is, what percentage had incomes below half the median (per person, after accounting for taxes and government transfers). Such a relative poverty measure is really a measure of inequality, but specifically inequality at the low end. (Regardless of how rich the rich are, it’s theoretically possible to have no one below half the median income). Here is my graph showing that result, with only the countries that have reliable sample sizes in the survey:

The Nordic countries have the lowest overall poverty rates. But in absolute terms their advantage is much bigger for single mothers. (The red line shows equal poverty rates for single mothers and the total population.) The US and UK have the largest difference in poverty rates between single mothers and overall poverty. That is, we have the largest poverty penalty for single motherhood. If the relative poverty rates for single mothers were lower in the US, we might spend more time and money addressing poverty and less trying to change family structures.

Single parents, crime and incarceration

Sometimes a diagram is helpful to organize your thoughts.

A little while ago I commented that crime rates had fallen through the floor even though single parenthood is still on the rise, apparently contradicting a generation of conservative conventional wisdom that attributed rising crime rates to the decline of the nuclear family. In the graphs I showed a very strong positive relationship between crime and single parenthood from 1960 until 1991, after which the relationship was reversed.

In response, someone countered:

Your graphs on single-mother families and crime rates, and your accompanying commentary, conveniently miss any reference to the massive increase in incarceration since the 1980s … Were it not for the fact that this country has incarcerated more than a million men behind bars since the late 1980s, it is likely that the upward swing in single-motherhood & nonmarital childbearing would have been paralleled by an upward swing in crime.

I have written before about the family consequences of the drug war, focusing on how incarceration affects families, rather than on how (whether) family structure drives crime; as well as other aspects of the prison boom (such as giving birth in chains, distorted marriage markets, and how prisons contribute to the spread of HIV).

But I didn’t address the question of how incarceration may have saved us from a worsening crime wave driven by single parenting.

I still don’t have an answer, but I have some thoughts, which I have chosen to express in the form of a conceptual diagram, with references. Each of these links is at least plausible and at most conclusively shown by the research listed below. If I were to dig into this research, this is where I would start: an annotated free-association figure:

Click to enlarge the diagram.

From what I can see so far, it looks like incarceration causes single-parent families more than single-parent families cause crime. The numbered references are below. (Thanks to Chris Uggen for some leads.)

Work process aside: I love a good conceptual diagram. For working things out I can use one like the above. Ideally, though, you would already understand the thing at hand before you present one to others, to make things more clear. I like this classic one from James Coleman, illustrating Weber’s Protestant Ethic:

Unlike my random scattering, this uses the location of the nodes to simply convey the conceptual hierarchy — religion and capitalism as macro, values and behavior as micro, with each path a potentially observable process. The diagram also is intuitive because it shows time moving from left to right. And it’s simple — any less to it and there’s no need for a figure.

On the other hand, I guess a diagram could help keep things straight when they’re complicated, like this one, from “Toward an Integrated Theory of Gender Stratification,” by Randall Collins and colleagues:

References (with links that might hit pay walls)

1.  Demuth, S. and S. L. Brown. 2004. “Family structure, family processes, and adolescent delinquency: The significance of parental absence versus parental gender.” Journal of Research in Crime and Delinquency 41(1):58-81. Schroeder, Ryan D., Aurea K. Osgood and Michael J. Oghia. 2010. “Family Transitions and Juvenile Delinquency.” Sociological Inquiry 80(4):579-604.

2. Charles, Kerwin K. and Ming C. Luoh. 2010. “Male Incarceration, the Marriage Market, and Female Outcomes.” Review of Economics and Statistics 92(3):614-627.

3. Childs, E. C. 2005. “Looking behind the stereotypes of the ‘angry black woman’ an exploration of black women’s responses to interracial relationships.” Gender & Society 19(4):544-561. Robnett, Belinda and Cynthia Feliciano. 2011. “Patterns of Racial-Ethnic Exclusion by Internet Daters.” Social Forces 89(3):807-828.

4. Dixon, T. L. and D. Linz. 2000. “Overrepresentation and underrepresentation of African Americans and Latinos as lawbreakers on television news.” Journal of Communication 50(2):131-154.

5. Dixon, T. L. and K. B. Maddox. 2005. “Skin tone, crime news, and social reality judgments: Priming the stereotype of the dark and dangerous black criminal.” Journal of Applied Social Psychology 35(8):1555-1570. Dixon, Travis L. 2008. “Network news and racial beliefs: Exploring the connection between national television news exposure and stereotypical perceptions of African Americans.” Journal of Communication 58(2):321-337.

6. Tonry, Michael. 2010. “The Social, Psychological, and Political Causes of Racial Disparities in the American Criminal Justice System.” Crime and Justice: A Review of Research, Vol 39 39:273-312.

7. Pettit, Becky and Bruce Western. 2004. “Mass imprisonment and the life course: Race and class inequality in US incarceration.” American Sociological Review 69(2):151-169. Reiman, Jeffrey. 2007. The rich get richer and the poor get prison: ideology, class, and criminal justice. Boston: Pearson/Allyn & Bacon. Wakefield, Sara and Christopher Uggen. 2010. “Incarceration and Stratification.” Annual Review of Sociology 36:687-406.

8. I made this argument in a recent blog post here. For a more thorough review of media depictions of single parents, see: Usdansky Margaret L. 2009. “A Weak Embrace: Popular and Scholarly Depictions of Single-Parent Families, 1900-1998.” Journal of Marriage And Family 71(2):209-225.

9. On conservative foundation support for traditional-family-is-good research, see a few of my posts here, here, here, and here.

10. Nagin Daniel S., Francis T. Cullen and Cheryl Lero Jonson. 2009. “Imprisonment and Reoffending.” Crime and Justice: A Review of Research 38:115-200.