I have two links to articles about the number of unmarried women with kids. Of course, it’s a problem that is confined to certain demographics. These articles don’t add much that’s terribly new. They have some nice charts, and I like charts. But I new things, too. I want some new ideas here.
I’m looking for some policy ideas about what we can do for low-income women without a high school degree that have children. Do we wag our fingers and tell them that should hold out for a good man, before they make babies? Do we accept that this situation isn’t getting better and increase childcare subsidies? Do we target the men and provide them with job training, so they can become marriage material? Of course, my solution is always education related, but I’m curious what other people think.
Apt. 11d 
“I’m looking for some policy ideas about what we can do for low-income women without a high school degree that have children.”
Haven’t we done enough? And isn’t the stuff we’ve done already at least 50% of the reason there are so many single-parent families today?
(One possible factor that I don’t think anybody has mentioned is that it’s now possible to have a rock solid proof of paternity. In the past, one of the dangers of unwed parenting is that it was virtually impossible to demonstrate that some guy was actually the father of your kid, but with today’s relatively inexpensive DNA testing, you can prove it beyond a shadow of a doubt without marrying him.)
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Not sure of the outcome you’re looking for, Laura. If the implication is that these women really shouldn’t be having kids, then I’d suggest something like, “Free Norplant for all 16-year-olds, gettable without parental consent.” If the implication is that their kids have less-positive outcomes because they’re hard to raise alone, then I’d say let’s make it easier to raise kids. How about year-round school (including free preschool) with days off that coincide with work holidays?
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There’s no implications here. Just pointing out the nice charts, but they are also charts that I’ve seen a hundred times before. Clearly, there’s a feedback loop going on between education, income, and childbirth status. There’s no question that kids make it harder to get one’s self out of poverty. Personally, I think we need to reduce the childbirth penalty, but the costs are too high to make it politicallly feasible.
I still think that there have to be some cool ideas that could make a dent in the problem. Maybe a cooperative living situation with a built-in GED program, life skills, and job training. A one-year school where the women take turns working at a daycare, doing janitorial work, and serving food in a common room.
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A one-year school where the women take turns working at a daycare, doing janitorial work, and serving food in a common room.
Make it much longer than a year and you have the truly evil system that existed in Ireland for many, many years.
I remember reading someone a while ago (either Tyler Cowen, or someone he was talking about, I think) arguing that for many lower-class young women, having a kid was completely rational, given their situation. Few of them could expect to rise out of the situation even w/o the kid, and, as many parents will tell you, having a kid is a source of someone to love and who loves them, most likely filling those roles more than anyone else in their lives. (The question was posed: would _you_ exchange one of _your_ kids for a very uncertain chance to move up a bit on the social scale? If not, why should these young women?) I’m not at all sure I buy this argument, but I’ve thought a bit differently about the rationality show in these cases after that. If nothing else, it made me think the the “problem” is not one that lends itself to easy fixes.
And, of course, there’s no solution that gives fully happy results. I expect that “harm minimalization” for those who end up in bad situations is always going to be a necessary part of any policy. But for this to work, it has to be done humanely, and w/o as much moralizing or cluck-clucking as some would like.
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Is this actually something you would have wanted to participate in? When I see these kinds of suggestions (cooperatives etc), I always wonder who would actually join up? I never would have and I don’t really know anyone who would find such a living situation attractive. Kibbutz etc are few in number because most people don’t want to live that way, even temporarily.
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re: communes and coops. See, I love those ideas. Yes, I would gladly live in a commune. I always had roomates in college. At the Univ of Chicago, I had five roommates. Loved it. It must be a personality-thing.
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I think being the caretaker of young children significantly reduces your economic value because taking care of young children is nearly a full time job. If you have other economic value, you can pay other people to take care of the children. I’m trying to figure out in what way I’d think of children as a penalty that the government should step in to support — and most of my goals are supports for the children, because, once they are born, they are vulnerable citizens of the state. Those supports include food, shelter, and education. Some of those supports are best served by supporting their caretakers (but not always).
I don’t think there are any cool ideas that would make a significant dent in the problem and also worry that many interventions exacerbate rather than mitigate the issues. I think the main intervention I’d want to try is those that help children avoid becoming mothers before they are ready to support those children — norplant is good, as are other methods of voluntarily controlling fertility, and, second, we need to have supports in place to help teen girls see their lives as valuable, so that becoming a caretaker is seen as a burden, not a benefit, in comparison to their current lives.
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Do we really want to make becoming a caretaker be seen as a burden?
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“A one-year school where the women take turns working at a daycare, doing janitorial work, and serving food in a common room.”
Sounds a little bit too much like the homes for unwed mothers to sound like it’d be a good thing over all, though the lack of compulsion would make the situation different. My guess is those kinds of ideas fail because it takes a pretty extraordinary person to really learn something (say, like algebra, or computer programming) while caring for an infant.
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IMO we don’t give these girls many options. In essence they are choosing motherhood over the other roles available to them. Even if they’re not aware of how hard it’s going to be, in this country if you get pregnant, take the pregnancy to term, and keep the kid – then you want the kid. It’s really a question of how to make the other options equally compelling. I know I sound like a broken record but this is about getting them good jobs with a future, even if they aren’t college material.
(Kinda sounds like the “I ran up a bunch of college debt because I didn’t have any other good options” conversation, doesn’t it? This is what it looks like when the economy craters – working-class edition.)
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Promote birth control options widely and make it free for anyone under 18 or in low income groups at any age. Widespread and public discussion of the value of practising safe sex. Access to abortion.
Begin in late grade school or early middle school to have students work on real-world issues of normal life. Learn to budget and how to deal with the real world, including its many problems.
Hire more social workers to liase with middle and high school counsellors, targeting at-risk youth for interventions. Help them to apply for funding, training, housing.
Know that people are still going to make stupid choices, especially when they’re stressed, fearful and needy. Know that for all you do and all the help that you offer, it still won’t be enough to get people to fix their problems, at least not sometimes.
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The problem with targeting the men is that even if we are successful then the women aren’t really getting anything more than a child support check and (hopefully) a more involved father. Encouraging nineteen year-olds to marry isn’t going to create positive outcomes. I was a father at 19. If I had married my daughter’s mother it would have just ended in divorce. I paid my child support and tried to be a good dad but her mother’s success in life was beyond my ability to really do much about.
Instead she benefited from two things: 1) There was a state program that provided free child care while she was in college. She used this to get a 2-year degree as a medical assistant, a field she still works in. 2) Afterward we used something called the CEP program which was after-school care through the YMCA. Great program for our daughter and it was much more affordable. It allowed her mother to work a full-time job and not spend a huge part of her salary (plus child support) on child care.
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Good to hear stories where a government intervention made a difference. Both your 1&2 are childcare, which seem like a potential positive intervention, for both the child and the mother, and one that doesn’t seem to provide perverse incentives (like money).
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PS: child support and parenting support can’t be considered negligible (i.e. targeting the fathers). I guess the issue is that targeting the fathers doesn’t help if they have neither of those things to give. Coerced marriage can’t really be part of the public policy solution, so it’s not worth spending much time arguing about that as a matter of public policy. I guess we could argue about public policy that provides disincentives to marriage (i.e. support that is only available as long as the mother remains unmarried).
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