Why does single motherhood “make sense?” Because, according to Naomi Cahn and June Carbone, authors of the article and of a forthcoming book, “Marriage Markets: How Inequality Is Remaking the American Family,” statistics suggest that working-class women (somewhat loosely defined here as white women without a college education) won’t meet anyone who is worth the commitment and are more likely than men to be able to hold a stable job themselves. Those working-class men with better jobs and more stable lives, the authors say, “seem to prefer their freedom.” Further, marriage means a court will assume a father has rights to see his children after the inevitable dissolution of the partnership, and what good could come of that?
There are some unhappy statistics to support the first of these assumptions — as Hanna Rosin has written in her book, “The End of Men,” these are challenging times to be a man in some arenas, and the decrease in secure blue-collar jobs in traditionally male fields, among other things, has left many men at a loss for stability.
But statistics are not advice, and their presentation as a directive amounts to an ugly write-off of a generation of men, especially when accompanied by the truly strange suggestion that fathers should routinely be excluded from children’s lives.
Should working-class women (or, for that matter, all men and women) be able to raise children alone? Absolutely, and the more we tailor policies, school hours and cultural expectations to reflect the fact that many parents are both solo breadwinner and single caregiver, the better off all families will be.
But are the dire statistics in themselves a warning against marriage? No, no more than the anecdotes that I could begin relating — about all of the solid, wonderful men I know without college educations who work alongside their wives to raise families — are an argument in favor of it.
The Slate article is based on what may well be an insightful and well-researched book on inequality and marriage, but for this piece, the authors or editors have chosen the wrong “should” among dozens of options. No parent “should” raise children alone unless it is a real choice, not a choice created by a culture that is determinedly setting so many young people adrift after high school without the wherewithal to envision, plan for or create a better life for themselves.
Presenting the rationale, however logical, behind something that is just slightly more of a “choice” than Henry Ford once offered his customers (any color, as long as it’s black) does give those who make that choice their due. These are not foolish women or bad men. More and more young women are already making the choice to raise children alone, but while that choice may be rational, we as a society should hesitate before embracing it as a way forward or even accepting it as a done deal. In respecting the decision makers, we let both the causes and the costs of the choice off the hook, and risk normalizing a situation that presents real consequences for the overstressed mothers, the uninvolved fathers and the children caught up in their wake.
The hypothetical rationally representative mother who is statistically better off solo should also have a solid grip on the bad news: Individual results may vary. Research suggests that children born outside marriage face elevated risks of falling into poverty, failing in school or suffering emotional and behavioral problems.
It is a cycle that’s even more risky for boys than for girls. As Michael Jindra writes in “Why Working-Class Men Are Falling Behind” on the Blog of the Institute for Family Studies, “with low rates of marriage and high rates of divorce among less-educated Americans, men raised by single parents are unlikely to reap the gains of a lasting marriage themselves,” and more likely to end up — like the men written off in the Slate article — unmoored and disconnected from family life.
That single mother is more likely to be raising sons who will grow into the kind of men her daughters, in turn, won’t marry than a peer who is more successful at putting marriage before the baby carriage.
The real issue is less about partnership than it is about opportunity, economic and otherwise. Every parent — every person — should have the opportunity to feel stable and secure, to find a place in a community, to have an employer that offers supportive policies like paid family and medical leave, to send children to a school that puts technical and white-collar jobs within reach, and to be able to show those children a life beyond one small merry-go-round of struggle and poverty.
Right now, many young working-class women are raising kids alone — alone, and with multiple jobs, a cobbled-together and failure-prone child care structure, and one car accident or medical diagnosis away from catastrophe. They should have more opportunity to do better by themselves, and by their families.
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