Family Stability Matters, Not Clear That Marriage Does
I got some pushback on yesterday’s post about Nordic family structure, well summed-up by RS who wrote “unmarried biological parents in northern Europe are more likely to stay together to raise the kid than married parents in the US. Jencks, Ellwood, and more recently Cherlin have written about this.”
Swedish dad in Södermalm (my photo available under cc license)
I don’t disagree with this. I just think it’s important to remember who’s who, what’s what, and where’s where in this argument. In the United States context you often hear it said that what we need to do to help kids is encourage their parents to be married. I think the experience of Denmark, Sweden, and Norway pretty clearly debunks that. On the other hand, Denmark, Sweden, and Norway don’t at all debunk the idea that having both of your biological parents heavily involved in your life is extremely helpful. But the issue isn’t marriage or non-marriage, it’s family dissolution. Non-married couples can stay together, and married couples can break up.
What’s more, it is worth looking at the cases of the UK and Iceland. Both of these countries really do have more one-parent households than the United States and still achieve substantially lower child poverty rates and more social mobility. I’m happy to dismiss Iceland as a bit of an odd case—and tiny anyway—but that doesn’t apply to the United Kingdom. The key thing there, frankly, is that the Blair and Brown governments decided that child poverty is a scandal and they were going to do something about it. And whatever other failings they had, they succeeded in reducing child poverty by a large margin. CAP’s Half in Ten project aimed at reducing child poverty by 50 percent in ten years is, in part, inspired by these Blair/Brown successes and shows you can do a great deal of good without reengineering people’s relationships. Unfortunately, what we’re seeing right now in the United States is a recession whose impact outpaces the anti-poverty efforts of the Obama administration.
25 Responses to “Family Stability Matters, Not Clear That Marriage Does”
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November 3rd, 2009 at 10:53 am
On the other hand, Denmark, Sweden, and Norway don’t at all debunk the idea that having both of your biological parents heavily involved in your life is extremely helpful.
Why “biological”?
November 3rd, 2009 at 11:08 am
a recession whose impact outpaces the anti-poverty efforts of the Obama administration.
Wouldn’t have to be much of a recession to outpace those! What anti-poverty efforts? Transferring hundreds of billions of dollars of the taxpayers’ money to large incumbent financial institutions and their shareholders?
November 3rd, 2009 at 11:12 am
In the United States context you often hear it said that what we need to do to help kids is encourage their parents to be married. I think the experience of Denmark, Sweden, and Norway pretty clearly debunks that.
You really don’t understand the difference between the “United States context” and the “Scandinavian context,” do you? The question for you to be asking is “in the United States, do marriage rates matter?” You are treating marriage like it’s some universally abstract concept equally applicable in all circumstances, and that’s just silly. Sorry if I’m being shrill, but society is more than just a bunch of public policies and tax rates handed down from PWKB.
The European context shows that marriage rates don’t *have* to matter, if you define marriage as a piece of paper issued by the state. It doesn’t show that in a practical sense, in the American social context, that they *don’t* matter.
November 3rd, 2009 at 11:16 am
The plural of anecdote is negroes!
November 3rd, 2009 at 11:21 am
I wonder how much the size/lack of density of our country impacts family dissolution rates. If parents don’t stick together, there’s a lot of pressure for them to move to where the work is. If you can’t get a job in city X, people tend to move to city Y, which is often hours away. Even within a given metro area you can wind up living a long way away from your kid. Of course, EU citizens are mobile as well, but there’s a much smaller set of places where their language skills will apply, and density is higher.
November 3rd, 2009 at 11:21 am
My guess is that’s it’s a psychological benefit for the child. Children will maintain the faith that their biological parents care about them and will seek to please those parents. Either the biological parents fulfill this expectation, which is psychologically gratifying for the child, or the parents fail to meet this expectation for the child, which becomes a difficult disappointment for the child to grapple with.
November 3rd, 2009 at 11:23 am
Again – I would like to point out that part of the answer has to do with cultural factors. I would also like to question the emphasis on family stability, and the notion that what makes Scandinavian out of wedlock children more successful than those in the US, is that Scandinavians form the same kind of families as people in the US, just dont get married.
This appears to be the understanding of many commenters to the previous post.
As Matt points out the number of single parent households in Iceland is high – but many of these single parent households become two parent households at some point – at which point the children might come to live in a stable two parent household, but with only one of its biological parents. Other stable households with unmarried parents might brake up and join with other unmarried parents.
The whole point is that family structure is more fluid I think.
The key to this not causing some serious social problems or cause of some poverty traps is I think that these “family models” are pretty universal and not restriced to the underclass but are pretty universal. At the same time there is little if any stigma to single parenthood or illegitimacy.
Perhaps Iceland deserves to be dismissed as an odd case, but it still shows possibilities in social organization that are worth exploring. Leads to greater happiness for all and equality!
Then again, it might be an open question whether this has led to a devil may care attitude that then infused our banks…?
November 3rd, 2009 at 11:36 am
Agree with first poster, does the research show a big difference between children with their “biological” parents and with their adoptive parents? If not then there is no need for the qualifier.
November 3rd, 2009 at 11:37 am
Ya think?
November 3rd, 2009 at 11:45 am
I have a graph that shows how jiggaboos revert to their jungle ways the moment you give them food stamps.
November 3rd, 2009 at 11:49 am
My guess is that’s it’s a psychological benefit for the child. Children will maintain the faith that their biological parents care about them and will seek to please those parents.
I’m going to guess that by the time a child would actually understand the situation well enough to differentiate meaningfully between biological and nonbiological parents, it would have little impact on their development. For example, I would bet young children are going to seek to please the people they know as mommy and daddy (or indeed mommy and mommy or daddy and daddy) long before they have any firm grasp on the relevant biology.
November 3rd, 2009 at 12:07 pm
DTM,
There’s good evidence from the evolutionary biology literature that biological parents are significant less likely to abuse or neglect their children then adoptive parents or step-parents. Semi-biological parents (i.e. aunts, uncles) are somewhere in between.
I don’t like to bring up these studies, because I think adoption is a beautiful thing that speaks well of the human capacity for charity and empathy. And because the vast, vast majority of adoptive parents are perfectly fine people who don’t abuse or neglect their children. However, you did ask, so I’ll answer.
Needless to say, this doesn’t mean that adoption should not be encouraged, but it is still (from the point of view of the child) slightly riskier then the biological parents.
November 3rd, 2009 at 12:08 pm
I think the biology has much more of an impact on the parents’ commitment than it does on the children.
November 3rd, 2009 at 12:23 pm
Hector,
Assuming that is true, that still doesn’t support Matt’s claim as he stated it (”having both of your biological parents heavily involved in your life is extremely helpful”). I gather the idea would be that having two parents is only helpful if they are both not abusive/neglectful, and that your odds of having two such parents are somewhat lower if they are not both your biological parents. But as long as your odds of having two decent parents are still good with one or two non-biological parents, I don’t see this issue making the difference between “extremely helpful” and not, subject to this necessary qualification about abusive/neglectful parents not necessarily being helpful.
I think the biology has much more of an impact on the parents’ commitment than it does on the children.
Assuming Hector is right, maybe in some cases. But if you know many adoptive parents, this obviously isn’t true in all cases.
In fact my wife was adopted after her parents had two boys naturally, and she was definitely her father’s favorite, notwithstanding the difference in biological relationships.
November 3rd, 2009 at 12:28 pm
In, say, Sweden if a relatively low paid women gets “dumped” by a relatively higher paid man she has a much better safety net than her American sister, meaning that her children have a better shot at a higher income.
November 3rd, 2009 at 12:56 pm
There’s good evidence from the evolutionary biology literature that biological parents are significant less likely to abuse or neglect their children then adoptive parents or step-parents.
I’m aware that when it comes to sexual abuse “mom’s boyfriend” is usually the number one culprit. I’m also aware that abuse is higher when the children in a relationship are the offspring of previous sexual partners. Exampe: If a woman has a child at 22 and gets married to a new partner at 25 and has two more children, that first child faces a much higer risk of abuse and neglect.
That being said, I’m not aware that children that are adopted into new families face a higher incidence of abuse when you adjust for any childhood trauma they might have already encountered.
November 3rd, 2009 at 1:16 pm
This morality play is going to die hard. The belief that poverty is caused by single motherhood dovetails far too nicely with the belief, wildly popular among rich people, that they deserve it because they’re smart and moral and they work hard.
These beliefs exist for their believers’ convenience, not because of any particular study or body of evidence.
November 3rd, 2009 at 1:23 pm
A totally silly unrelated question: the caption says “photo credit Matthew, available under cc license.” But did you get an approval from the adult on the picture, and if he’s not the dad, an authorization from a legal representative of the child to use the picture? I would guess this here is a commercial use of the picture, since it draws readers to the ads on the right. But the caption even encourages further use of the picture. I’m curious.
November 3rd, 2009 at 2:23 pm
These beliefs exist for their believers’ convenience, not because of any particular study or body of evidence.
“Our research shows that if you want to avoid poverty and join the middle class in the United States, you need to complete high school (at a minimum), work full time and marry before you have children. If you do all three, your chances of being poor fall from 12 percent to 2 percent, and your chances of joining the middle class or above rise from 56 to 74 percent.”*
*Brookings
November 3rd, 2009 at 4:01 pm
The fundamental basis of Matt’s philosophy of public policy for America is like that old joke about the physicist, chemist, and economist who are shipwrecked on a desert island with a can of beans. They hold a symposium on how to open the can of beans, and the economist, going last, says, “Gentlemen, I have a much more elegant solution. Assume we have a can opener …”
Well, Matt’s basic assumption about American public policy is: “Assume we have 300,000,000 Swedes …”
November 3rd, 2009 at 4:05 pm
Matt asserts:
“But the issue isn’t marriage or non-marriage, it’s family dissolution.”
You’re missing the point about the key difference between Sweden and America. The problem in America is less that kids end up in single parent homes because of “family dissolution” but that kids are in single parent homes because there was no “family formation” in the first place.
November 3rd, 2009 at 4:08 pm
Matt,
You really need to read up on this major topic. You’ve been floundering for two days now because you are young and haven’t much experience of life, and most of the data are too politically incorrect for you have to have stumbled upon.
Steve
November 3rd, 2009 at 6:04 pm
Re: Needless to say, this doesn’t mean that adoption should not be encouraged, but it is still (from the point of view of the child) slightly riskier then the biological parents.
I can see why step-parenting might be a problem (though in my family it was decidedly a blessing), but adoptive parenting? If we are talking about adotion where both parents adopt a child (not where a step-parent adopts a spouse’s child) then it would seem that adoption should be the same, or even superior, to biological parenting. The child is a planned and a chosen child after all, not something that came along either by accident (as biological children sometimes do) or as part of a package deal when a step-parent joins a family. Nor does either parent have a pre-existing relationship with the child, and there is (usually) no other parent in the picture to complicate the relationship.
Re: The problem in America is less that kids end up in single parent homes because of “family dissolution” but that kids are in single parent homes because there was no “family formation” in the first place.
Failed families due to divorce are not a trivial problem. In fact they may be every bit as big a problem. Divorce (or the rarer but still present fact of parental death) interjects powerful emotional damage into a child’s life if s/he is old enough to understand what is happening. At least a child of a never-married mother doesn’t have to deal with that trauma.
November 4th, 2009 at 12:29 am
The UK, where the illegitimacy rate was 46% the last time I looked, is hardly a good example for the unimportance of unwed motherhood. Compare the British white working class to their distant cousins, the American white Protestant working class, and you’ll find among the British higher rates of burglary, assault, car theft, binge drinking, and so forth. (Homicide is higher in America, of course, because there are so many guns, but I wouldn’t be surprised if more people get beaten with with baseball bats per capita in Britain than in the U.S., despite there being no need for baseball bats in Britain other than to hit people with.)
For stats from the 1990s, see:
http://www.ojp.usdoj.gov/bjs/pub/press/cjusew96.pr
November 4th, 2009 at 6:19 am
Re: Compare the British white working class to their distant cousins, the American white Protestant working class
Is there any reason you tacked a religious identity obnto the American side of the equation? The American Catholic working class, the American Mormon working class, the American secular working class etc. do not count for anything?
For that matter if we are discussing class comparisons why should race be dragged in as well?