Annie Lowrey discussed the research on marriage and poverty in the New York Times magazine on Sunday. Now, my turn.
Being unmarried doesn’t make anybody poor. Being unmarried and having children makes people poor. Being unmarried, with no family supports, a bad education, living in an area with no jobs and having children makes people poor.
So, if you aren’t dating an ambitious, smart man, don’t live in an area with employment options, aren’t supported by middle class parents, and don’t have a college BA, DO NOT HAVE CHILDREN.
The issue isn’t marriage. It’s children. They are extremely expensive. There are no social supports to help you care for them and work at the same time. They require tons and tons of energy, which will mean that you won’t have to time to take classes at the community college or apply for that managerial job at the department store. Every cent that you’ll earn will go to pre-schools and daycare and you won’t be able to invest money in a home or 401K plan.
Schools are closed for the fourth time this month for snow. Everybody else has to go to jobs. What is happening to all those mothers who can’t go to work for the fourth day this month? Many won’t get paid. Others will get fired.
Don’t have children.
Why does marriage help people get out of poverty? Because if you have kids, then you can trade off time watching them. Also, it is cheaper to live together and share expenses for heating and rent. Of course, marriage doesn’t help you, if all the guys that you know are assholes. So, it really makes more sense to start encouraging other group living arrangements — communal housing, family compounds, senior dorms, whatever. Living on your own is terribly inefficient.
So, there. I just solved the problem of poverty. Don’t have kids. Live in communes.
Apt. 11d 
I remember thinking about the “don’t have kids rule” when the news of Bristol Palin’s teen pregnancy was announced during the 2008 election season. Seventeen year olds just *don’t* turn up pregnant in the circles in which I circulate. It just doesn’t happen. I remember being surprised at how commonplace others seemed to think it was, an example of a great cultural divide (even, say, here on this blog, when we discussed the Bristol pregnancy).
Yes, one of the prime rules of ‘tiger” parenting is that children come after the schooling, work, and stability.
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I’ve wondered why communal living hasn’t caught on in bigger ways. I suspect that at least in part, most of the poor unwed mothers do already live communally, with parents, and siblings, aunts and uncles. That kind of communal living actually makes it harder for the extraordinary individual to pull away (because, say, the student loans are expected to support the whole commune).
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Right. There is actually a lot of extended family living going on in the US right now because of economic pressures, and a lot of the people stuck in those situations (either as dependent children or as grandmas supporting single parent daughters and grandkids) hate it. I’m on some forums elsewhere where people struggle terribly with the interpersonal problems that arise from those situations.
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I’m not sure if this poster is real, but she posts frequently, and her stories are internally consistent. Warning: Depressing.
http://forums.catholic.com/showthread.php?t=855345
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Carol Stack’s “All Our Kin” is an ethnography of this. When you do live communally, as most poor single unwed mothers in urban situations do, it is almost impossible to leave without being a selfish asshole who just takes from others and doesn’t give back. A $10,000 inheritance might be enough for one family to make it out, but not when they have to split it among their neighbors who’ve helped them through rough times and kept them alive. Clearly poor people do make poor decisions, but I wouldn’t say they have a monopoly on those. They also have to make the best they can with pretty terrible options. I suppose if they were truly virtuous Americans they would go all “Pilgrim’s Progress” on their families, but that’s harder to do if you weren’t raised to have a strong sense of self-righteousness and superiority.
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It isn’t mentioned in the article, but my impression from other studies, and from life, is that not being married does indeed make men poor (maybe not women), i.e., married men earn more whether or not they have children, indeed independent of any other variable. You will recall that is losing his woman that causes the singer to say, “Take this job and shove it.”
So we might say that for men, marriage is a means to have money; for women, it is a means to have children without becoming poor.
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Right. One of the favorite quotes in our household is, “A married man will do anything for money.” That’s usually said when we are discussing whether or not my husband should do some sort of extra money-making project.
I have no idea how my husband would manage to spend even half his income if he didn’t have a family.
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“I have no idea how my husband would manage to spend even half his income if he didn’t have a family.”
Women, presumably. Certainly that is what I would be spending my money on if I didn’t have a family, and my father in his widowerhood has managed to spend a fair amount on that item.
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The people who talk about men going on strike say some men are perfectly happy living cheap. Get a job that pays enough to live off, maybe a roommate or two, and lots of cheap beer and video games. It sounds somewhat like college except with no classes, no girls, and more xbox. I’m not sure how real this is though.
I do know several single men in their late 20s/early 30s at various income levels who don’t date a lot and either save a fair bit of money or basically blow is on overpriced toys/fun. All of them I’d describe as ‘hasn’t met the right person yet’ though, so not really the same thing.
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MichaelB said:
“The people who talk about men going on strike say some men are perfectly happy living cheap. Get a job that pays enough to live off, maybe a roommate or two, and lots of cheap beer and video games. It sounds somewhat like college except with no classes, no girls, and more xbox. I’m not sure how real this is though.”
I suspect that might be fun in ones 20s, tolerable in ones early 30s, but eventually very sad and lonely, unless one actively dislikes being around people.
As I have discovered whenever I’m left to my own devices, there’s only so much internet.
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It’s a challenge to leave your hometown (if it has few jobs) as your community and family support are there. You’d be walking away to try something with no support (even if it isn’t financial, the emotional support is huge).
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At first, I was thinking about the children “problem” and thinking of why girls, like Bristol Palin, or the girl profiled in the NYtimes profile on the poor in West Virginia have children, and how we could encourage them not to. Reading Palin’s interviews shows the mindset of the immature behavior — sinning occasionally, better than sinning consistently (by planning birth control), once you’ve sinned, why not sin again, with the context that having sex is sinning). Single dose birth control is potential help to some of those issues. Then, there’s the requirement to have the baby if you find yourself pregnant. And the powerful force of baby love How does society work against those forces in the context of our pluralistic society? In the olden days, threats of hell and damnation and virtual death were sufficient to balance the powerful forces (along with forced marriages). None of those ideas are going to come back.
But then, I thought, when is it OK to have a baby? I wouldn’t recommend my own choices — wait until you are married, solidly ensconced in the 5%, own a house, have no debt, and secure jobs (oh, and that didn’t happen until you are an officially older mother) to anyone else. The set of requirements might never come for most and, choosing to be an older mother is a real risk of never having children.
So what are the requirements? 1) marriage 2) an income of what, 50K? 3) savings?
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“..if you aren’t dating an ambitious, smart man, don’t live in an area with employment options, aren’t supported by middle class parents, and don’t have a college BA, DO NOT HAVE CHILDREN…”
You’re basically telling the bottom 40 per cent of women by income to die childless. Maybe that’s what you want? But I’m pretty sure it’s not what they want. One of the janitors in my office is 35, has followed your advice, and told me in the lunch room how much he envies me and others with families.
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Yup.
This argument is eugenics, pretty much.
My solution for you (and it’s just about as practical!) is not to live in the US, but move to a more social democratic economy which does not punish people so continually.
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Rather than tell people not to have children, I think we should fight for more support. I know that seems crazy, but there is movement in that direction. Obamacare helps a little. There is some talk about paid maternity leave and more help with childcare. It might be a while before that happens, but I’d like to see us talk about that more rather than say, “Hey, don’t have kids.”
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Obamacare is going to keep the poor poor, because it won’t be worth it to work more or harder.
http://www.businessinsider.com/cbo-report-obamacare-discouraging-work-2014-2
The mechanics of the ACA are going to work to increase inequality, as there will be more and more a chasm between the subsidy-eligible lower middle class and the upper middle class income level where it makes sense to work more and harder. The middle middle class is going to be eroded by the ACA.
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That’s not remotely true or supported by your linked article.
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I just linked the article as a cite for the number of people who are going to stop working. The rest of the analysis is my own. The ACA is going to be a huge engine for inequality, as it makes a second income very expensive for households who are just on the margins of being subsidized or having to pay for insurance. Millions of those families will choose to drop the second income, which will whittle away further at the middle middle class. Meanwhile, the ACA discourages employers from having low-income full-time employees, which further increases inequality. Meanwhile, a lot of the ACA coverage is terrible. The premiums are large and the deductibles are often enormous (into low five figures for families)–families can easily go into bankruptcy just trying to cover ACA deductibles if they have any major medical emergency. So, on the one hand, it’s terrible as insurance, and on the other hand, it’s terrible for the economy, and it’s terrible for the middle-middle class. This is lose-lose-lose.
I don’t understand making equality and the middle class the end-all-be-all of human flourishing and then not seeing how pernicious the ACA is for increasing inequality and for destroying the middle class. Look at what the ACA is and how it works as opposed to what people dreamed of it being. It is not that dream.
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Your analysis is obvious nonsense. First, it completely ignores the subsidy, which is on net a transfer from the relatively wealthy to the relatively poor. (And also pretty obviously what is causing the well-funded campaign against Obamacare.) Second, the talk of “being on the margins of being subsidized” not wanting to work to get a subsidy ignores that sliding scale for the subsidies. Third, there is still no reason to believe that the ACA will cut employment aside from people choosing not work because they now have insurance. Fourth, the out of pocket maximums are indeed high for the bronze plan, but you can avoid that by getting a silver plan. And this isn’t just a problem with ACA plans. My own plan has no limit and costs quite a bit more than the subsidized plans.
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I thought there was some sarcasm there — children can’t just be a luxury for the privileged few, and i didn’t think that was Laura’s position.
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I was just annoyed at the entire discussion, which I find really simplistic and silly. Poverty is caused by many variables – geography, poor education, lack of networks, and, yes, children. If you’re a single woman with kids without an education or connections or job opportunities, you’re screwed. So, instead of comparing single women with kids to married women with kids, let’s focus on single childless women. They are doing much better than their cohort that has kids, married or unmarried.
If I was living in similar conditions, the only variable that I had some control over is the children variable. It is far better to remain single and childless, than to be married to a problematic person and have kids. It would be better to pool resources with a sister or a cousin. Yes, of course, government should be doing more to enable to people to reach their potential AND have kids, but change isn’t going to happen over night.
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It would be better to remain single and childless if you knew or had hopes of being not poor in the reasonably distant future. If you don’t have hope of becoming not poor, I’d think you might be better off with the child in the long run. Being old and poor and alone would be a very risky way to end out a life.
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And isn’t it again cruel to have to take into account whether or not to have children when deciding your future? (barring the .00008% outliers, whatever the percentage is, of those who may “game” the welfare system). I mean, it isn’t like a decision about becoming a teacher vs. becoming a mechanic.
Like Laura mentioned above, it’s the social safety net that’s missing – that’s what the discussion should be about, not about discouraging people to not have kids.
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Isn’t this not even true across the board, because in some settings poor single women with kids do better than childless women? Isn’t that the whole message of “Promises I can Keep,” which I believe you read and recommended on this blog?
Also, there has been research on childrearing habits of poor women (e.g. see my comment above), and poor women DO combine resources to raise families. It sounds tone deaf to suggest a “solution” to a problem which people have already been doing for decades, with not a lot of success in changing overarching outcomes.
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Yes, that was in “Promises I Can Keep”—poor single women with children do better in the long run than poor single women without children. That’s counter-intuitive to middle class people who tend to assume that ‘no children’ means greater access to education and career opportunities, but access to education determines career opportunities, and access to education is determined by one’s prior educational opportunities (including interventions for the learning disabled, as opposed to “this person is uneducable because he or she is poor”) and income.
It’s not just children providing the inspiration to overcome obstacles, it’s also the greater access to help from one’s community (and even the larger community) for women with children. In my demographic, childless women are on their own in more than one way. Also a feature of my demographic—having children is the marker of adulthood for women.
That children provide joy and meaning to parents regardless of the income of the parents seems to be an unpopular opinion. Doesn’t make it any less true.
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Yes, I figured as much. A sort of Modest Proposal kind of thing. 🙂
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Yes, but being single and childless means that you’ll be less poor, than if you’re single and had kids. I would rather be less poor and alone, I think. And maybe if you didn’t have kids, you wouldn’t even be poor at all.
The kids penalty doesn’t end when you’re kids are grown up. In those circumstances, you might be forced to raise their grandkids and then you would be really poor and old and be changing diapers at 3 am. (That’s a cousin’s situation.)
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I would rather be less poor and alone, I think.
I think that way, but probably because I was raised very middle class. Looking at birthrates and wealth and economic development, it seems that poor people have lots of kids and that at least part of the reason they do so is that children provide a greater likelihood of some small security than the other options. Or at least, that’s one common way of looking at the evidence.
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I’m not sure that people have kids to provide for some economic security. I seriously doubt that my boys will be supporting us in the future. In fact, we may have to support one of our kids for the rest of our lives. I think people, both rich and poor, have children, because when they aren’t vomiting on you, kids are rather fun.
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one of the golden moments of our toddler days was when our #1 son, to whom my wife was giving a raspberry, peed in her hear. Vomit, maybe not so much.
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ear, ear
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