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Farewell, June Cleaver: ‘Non-Traditional Families’ and Economic Opportunity
As the traditional nuclear family fades into history, we've entered the era of the "non-traditional" family: single parents, pairs of moms and dads, blended families, multi-generational households, grandparent caregivers. With a growing share of babies today born outside marriage, American society seems to be finally leaving behind the Leave it to Beaver model.
A new study by Pew Economic Mobility Project asks how family structure--a divorced or single-parent household versus a conventional married one--affects a child's economic opportunities later in life. Society's attitude toward divorce and single parenthood has become more open over the past few generations, but has our economy?
It's easy to assume that divorce or single-parenthood would lead to some hardships, and Pew did find a link between marital status and socioeconomic advancement across generations. But the outcomes are also heavily influenced by race and class factors, which persist among poor households whether children grow up with one parent or two.
For children who start at the bottom third of the economic ladder, Pew found, "only 26 percent with divorced parents move up to the middle or top third as adults, compared to 42 percent of children born to unmarried mothers and 50 percent of children with continuously married parents."
In terms of "absolute mobility," or the potential to rise relative to their parents' income level, divorce does not have a clear impact on children's mobility:
Among children who start in the bottom third, 74 percent with divorced parents exceed their parents' family income when they reach adulthood, compared to 90 percent of children with continuously married parents.
Still, the study concluded:
Perhaps surprisingly, there is no evidence that being born to an unmarried mother reduces upward absolute mobility from the bottom third of the income distribution-the rates for those children and for children with continuously married parents are statistically indistinguishable.
When you slice the data by race, a different picture emerges. Divorce appears to make a bigger difference for black children's future prospects.
Among African American children who start in the bottom third of the income distribution, 87 percent with continuously married parents exceed their parents' income in adulthood, while just 53 percent of those with divorced parents do.
Among white children who start in the bottom third, about the same proportion of adult children exceed their parents' income regardless of whether their parents were continuously married (91 percent exceeding) or divorced (92 percent exceeding).
Pointing out that "family structure can explain only some of the differences in economic mobility rates between African Americans and whites," the study raises intriguing questions about how social policy interacts with parents' life choices.
The sweeping welfare reforms of the Clinton era continue to reveal the ramifications of using welfare to impose certain social norms at the expense of those who don't fit the mold. As Kate Boo explained in her trenchant 2003 New Yorker article "The Marraige Cure," the supposed correlation between marriage and economic well-being became perverted into the rationale that promoting marriage could reduce systemic poverty.
The "reforms" targeted urban black single mothers who were stereotyped as antithetical to the "traditional" family: degenerate, shiftless women who couldn't stop having babies. The result was a national crusade to push impoverished single mothers simultaneously into the labor market and the marriage market, for better or worse.
To antipoverty and racial justice activists, the pro-marriage credo has simply repackaged the old blame-the-poor canard in the rhetoric of "family values." In fact, poor single mothers have been systematically locked out of the social privileges that their middle-class married counterparts typically take for granted. Welfare rights activists since the 1960s have shown that policies intended to relieve poverty end up punishing women for not being June Cleaver.
In addition to the patriarchal conservatism inherent in pro-marriage ideology, women face practical barriers to getting hitched: Black women especially may have trouble finding a long-term male partners in communities devastated by mass incarceration. Not to mention, some old-fashioned types see marriage as a matter of conjugal love rather than social engineering. Go figure.
Despite the talk of "personal responsibility" in welfare policy, the real barriers poor single mothers face are rooted in poverty itself. According to a 2002 policy paper by Stephanie Coontz and Nancy Folbre:
Non-marriage is often a result of poverty and economic insecurity rather than the other way around. The quality and stability of marriages matters. Prodding couples into matrimony without helping them solve problems that make relationships precarious could leave them worse off. Two-parent families are not immune from the economic stresses that put children at risk. More than one third of all impoverished young children in the U.S. today live with two parents.
Pew doesn't directly critique welfare reform's legacy, but the research does point to policy changes that could help break the cycle of intergenerational poverty. The Earned Income Tax Credit, for instance, has helped lift millions of children out of poverty through targeted income supports. Paid family leave time, subsidized child care, and career training and unemployment insurance programs that recognize challenges unique to working single parents, would help move non-married families toward long-awaited equity.
Regardless of what you think about the institution of marriage, there's no justification for forcing children to pay an economic penalty for their parents' decision to divorce or remain unmarried. And a parent's decision not to tie the knot shouldn't be an economic shackle on the next generation.
While our concept of the family has grown and diversified since the days of Mrs. Cleaver, for households striving toward advancement, our labor market and social policy remain stuck in the past.
This article originally appeared in In These Times.
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18 Comments so far
Show All"Lost in a Roman wilderness of pain...and all the children are insane..."
--some dead hippy
This is all very OLD news. Until the 1960s all of American society, including corporate America operated under a traditional cultural paradigm where, despite the brief interlude of "Rosie the Riveter" during WWII, men were still expected to be the sole bread winners supporting their stay-at-home wives who, in turn, were expected to raise the children in person when the kids weren't in school.
The Women's Libbers in the '60s and early '70s wanted to be able to have their careers in any working-class or professional class field they wanted and corporate America sat back, watched and bided their time. Along came the birth control pill in the '60s and millions of women opted first for careers and later for family--gradually pushing the age at which most of them had children back into their late 30s when it used to be common up until then for women to marry right out of high school and have children in their late teens and early 20s.
Male high school graduates until the early '70s could still afford to support a family on one salary because they could take one of the many still abundant low-skilled entry-level factory jobs and work overtime as they worked their way up the union pay scale.
But, as soon as enough women had entered working-class and professional fields previously dominated by men--competing against men for the same finite pool of jobs--corporate America began using that as an excuse to keep wages versus workers' productivity levels relatively flat from the early 1970s until 2008 when things only got worse. They also consistently kept the vast majority of salaries they paid women for the same job that men did below what the men got. The old '60s & '70s Boomer feminists have never effectively addressed these realities, largely because most of them were products of the upper-middle-class or moved directly from universities into that privileged class out of college and were largely insulated from what women in the lower- and middle-working-class were (and still are) going through.
The "free trade" regime compounded the job competition for good paying jobs by offshoring 20 million middle-class manufacturing jobs with mostly service wage junk jobs being created in their vacuum, and the torrent of illegal immigration job competition resulting from passage of NAFTA and the WTO combined with the offshored U.S. jobs have ratcheted up the numbers of long-term unemployed, under-employed and under-paid ever since. Then came Clinton's deregulation of the banks, derivatives and telecomm companies. Then came Bush II's fiscally insane tax cuts during wartime and his beginning of the bank handouts that Obama escalated and made ongoing while reneging on his campaign promise to re-negotiate the "free trade" treaties to include labor and environmental protections. Then came Obama's lies about creating substantial numbers of green jobs while he's done NOTHING on substantive job creation of ANY kind, let alone green job creation, which is something the EU, China, India and Japan are ALL ahead of us on--many of them exploiting American-created technology that we won't use even though we have the largest idle manufacturing capacity on the planet. I won't even go into the anti-labor, anti-environmental, "free trade" hypocrisy of corporate welfare queens General Motors and Chrysler. Obama hasn't even halted the State layoffs across the country that will continue for YEARS, but merely slowed them for a while.
Obungle's recent jobs bump last month of roughly 200,000 new non-census jobs probably resulted from the $18 Billion in incentives he got from McCongress to entice small business hires. But earlier this week the numbers of new filings for unemployment benefits were more than twice that figure. Corporate America has it's own "free trade" back, not America's.
All of the above plus 30 years of former welfare dependent Rush Limbaugh indoctrinating white males with "rugged individualism" has led to a contemporary Amurka where it's basically every man, woman and child for themselves. America's churches, synagogues and other religious institutions are failing miserably to point this out, let alone organizing within or across denominations and sects to provide significant help for the growing number of poor, hungry and homeless Americans.
The children of the Boomers and Gen-Xers won't have it any better than the poor people in their middle 40s now, and their grand children and great grand children will have it MUCH worse. These are all the consequences of 42 years of extremely bad decision making on the part of mostly the tail end of the Greatest Generation, all of the Silent sub-Generation between them & the Boomers and, to a lesser degree, the Gen-Xers. The Baby Boomers are the most materially glutted, selfish, self-indulgent, wasteful and destructive of the lot and our three absolute worst presidents since Calvin Cooledge and Herbert Hoover are all Boomers: Slick Willy Clinton, George Duhhbya Shrublette and Barry Obankerbomber.
Beaver Cleaver: "If you don't come out of the bathroom Puddin' you're gonna get it."
Puddin': "Uh-uhh, if I DO come out of the bathroom I'll get it."
--Leave it to Beaver
All that said, it is much more in the financial interest of an employed or unemployed poor woman to marry a man with a job than it is in the financial interest of an employed poor man to marry a woman unless she earns more money than him. This is because a fertile woman will most likely bear children that will exact additional costs on the family unit, or she already has children from a previous relationship that will exact such costs. Most racist right-wingers in Amurka believe that by keeping the poor downtrodden they will reduce their population. In fact, studies in the U.S and Europe have shown for decades that the better educated any demographic group is, the more they make use of birth control and family planning and the more their birth rates decline. Keeping the poor economically crushed only creates more poor people and worse squalor.
Keep watching those re-runs of Leave it to Beaver and try to remain sane while Amurka continues to become unglued like a steaming herd of gasoline huffing meth-heads cattle herded by fascist wolf-men & wolf-women owned by the biggest bunch of physically and intellectually inbred, cosmetically enhanced swine on the planet.
Many people get married simply to achieve economic stability, which creates so many more problems. Most marriages fail for economic reasons. That's why capitalism is more anti-family than any radical feminist could ever be. Who's actually making it deliberately difficult for families to stay together?
I think the elites really only want affluent people to marry. They'd prefer to have as many poor children born out of wedlock as possible so as to fill the for-profit prisons and the battlefields.
Boy I must have really f'ed up somewhere since my parents have been continuously married since I was born, and I haven't exceeded their incomes. And I've had nothing but trouble finding women I'd want to marry, so I don't know...
That's what the problem is ardent. lol.
There are women that would marry me, but they aren't women I'd want to marry. They just want me because I'm available, employed, and because they have 5 kids and need the help or they're old and desperate.
The more attractive they are, forget it. Our society makes it so that women need to find a provider above all, and therefore men and women end up using each other. It forces women to trade on their sexuality for resources.
Cicero: "Freedom is participation in power."
When did this thread turn into thegreatrockyhill self-pity party? Suck it up, old man. Life is tough and getting tougher, even if you are a white male member of the working-class.
Rocky, Jennifer has similar thoughts about marriage. She wanted to study and work before getting married. Somewhere last year, she posted her description of what she went through, here or on Alternet. Attraction doesn't make a woman happy unless she and her partner are both happy at heart. She could have been a housewife but she chose not to. What you said brings back that painful memory of saving her life twice on the day her last date went up in smoke last year. It was one thing to save her from a potentially abusive partner but I did not realize the mental trauma she had despite her father and I saving her from the assault until I saved her again from attempting to poison herself. It was a long journey for her to regain her self-confidence that one day she would make it to a successful and happy marriage. To this day, she is still single even after turning 29 earlier this year but like you she doesn't take marriage too seriously because she wants to be married to a partner who also believes in true love and not materialism. Not even her parents bother to pressure her into getting married soon. Beauty comes more from the inside than the outside. Take care of yourself and I believe you will find a loving partner when you see to it that you are happy and that both you and your partner can be happy living together at heart.
Let's just put it this way. I'm like an American Idol contestant. My biggest fans are either too young or too old for me. lol.
There's more to life than dating though. I usually don't care most of the time.
Capitalism really has hurt relations between the sexes though imo. Why else do so many women stay with abusive men? He's paying the bills.
I shouldn't say "old and desperate." They're just desperate because no one seems to want them for whatever reason.
in other words the children and grand children of the so called greatest generation have no future.
Cicero: "Freedom is participation in power."
No, the children of the Boomers and Gen-Xers will have a long decline as a future. They'll be living in the ruins of our crashed empire. The grand children of the Boomers and Xers will inhabit a true nightmare where the even the ruins have been mostly looted or used up, peak oil will have long passed and hundreds of millions around the world will be dying from lack of access to clean fresh water. Their contempt for their elders will soar because as generational cohorts we didn't just let it happen, we participated in every sense in ripping off or destroying the natural resources untold numbers of future generations will need and be forced to try to survive without.
Upward mobility also comes from "work hard, live cheap and save your money. During 15 years of marriage that is exactly what we did, them shared a 2 flat for another 5 years. In the dead of winter, water left next to the bed would freeze but we were comfy in a down comforter and wool hats. We had only one car, the smallest Toyota available. When we moved out of our apt after 11 years, the new tenants left in 3 days saying it was "uninhabitable". We had made it "habitable" with lots of shelving, paint and plants. We had also built a bank account, despite relatively low earnings.
I don't like making generalizations because there are far too many exceptions to any rule, but it cannot be ignored that some poor people buy into the "I want it and I want it now" and "You deserve a break today" mentality that infantilizes people and turns them into consumers at the trough. I was doing some work with a shelter that let people stay a while after getting work so they could save money but said nothing when a young woman blew her first paycheck on a $500 tv (1990 price)
Cassandra, that's just bootstrap, blaming-the-victim talk.
She is not blaming the victim completely but the commercials and other advertisements can often be seductive and misleading in nature thereby duping people. I know I've been a dupe several times like that before. The power of capitalism is that we're tempted to take money for granted and that might be what Cassandra is referring to.
"When did this thread turn into thegreatrockyhill self-pity party? Suck it up, old man. Life is tough and getting tougher, even if you are a white male member of the working-class."
Hey, metal. GO FUCK OFF! Nobody asked you. I just answered a question. Everybody else talks about their lives here, you included. Don't read my posts if you don't like what I have to say. Lord knows I gloss over all the shit you regurgitate out of whatever books you read.
Most Americans are struggling, me included. We're all in this together. I'm a real working person, not some sheltered academic or some rich kid who's part of a scene. Nor am I some asshole that likes being a gross cariciature of a Leftist in order to feed the right-wing.
This article and commentary are the result of the forces at the top succeeding in the chaos at the bottom of the pyramid. (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l37RhdFGVsM)
Wow, Metal, at 11:32 a.m. today you were really angry. Wasn't Harding the worst before GW? I'm not sure about the Obama thing, but he's getting close. I always thought that Harding and his Teapot Dome was the worst but then along came Bush/Cheney. At least Harding had the good sense to die in office.
I'm not so sure that the Boomers are the cause of all of this. I reallly think it was winning WW II, and being the only industralized country left standing. Somehow , the myth of America seemed to spring up then , although I think it's over now.
Since "we' won the big war and had the only economy working, of course we became a world power. We could also do kind things, like the Marshall Plan, the GI Bill and getting people into real homes with real loans. Oh, there weren't any credit cards yet, were there.
Personally, I think that big war win did us in. Always resting on those past laurels, while the rest of the world, like China and India are pasing us by and we still keep saying "we're the best." The best at what is the question, although we all know that the answer is making war.
I hate to see people blaming one generation or the other, because, after all, the real enemy is corporate Amercia. if it's not race or religion or gender that we're all fighting over, then it's each other one on one.
If we can't all get along as a populace, then those corporate persons have won. They might have all the money at the moment, but who knows what the future will bring. If we have more environmental calamities, then those with real skills like carpenters, cooks, well builders, farmers, gardeners, tailors, mechanics etc. will be the real winners. Eventually, the "builders" will trump the gamblers.
Skills and self sufficiency will triumph. The" solidarity" family of workers and neighborhoods is the family that ever person should strive to belong to, and if things go really bad, then who knows, maybe we can all hire those skillless Wall Streeters and CEOs for houseboys.