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.