Kim Jong Il, You Betcha

A friend imagined a conversation between the Governor of Alaska and the Dear Leader of North Korea.

Well gosh darn it Mr. Kim Jong, you betcha we're still all riled up about them POW's we left back there and the veterans and American people are just gonna say we've had it with all the evil regimes and nucular weapons bein' the end all and the be all and now you're dealin' with a couple of mavericks. In my country we have a sayin' about pit bulls and hockey, now I don't know if you have hockey over there in Asia but here in America, Joe Six-pack loves his hockey. You know, I was on vacation in Seattle once, and I'm pretty sure I could see parts of Asia, lookin' out across the ocean there, so don't think you can sneak up on us, 'cause there are Americans in Seattle lookin' up at the skies just waitin' for one of your jets or one of those doggone missiles, and the American people are just gonna say no more. No more, you know, of the evil regimes and the nucular weapons and them WMD's. You're dealin' with a Maverick now in John McCain and he knows how to win a war, you betcha.

The Lost Generation of Black Family Research Since the Moynihan Report

My family class spent the past month reading research about black families. A student said today that she felt bad writing her paper on the subject, because it seemed like just bashing black families, especially black men. While we have read some encouraging news, especially about the achievement of the married black middle class, most of what we have read is a long litany of decline.

This got me reflecting about what might have been. In 1965, when Daniel Patrick Moynihan produced The Negro Family: The Case for National Action, he pointed out that the black illegitimacy rate had reached 25%, compared to a white rate of about a quarter of that. Moynihan argued that, now that the foundations of legal segregation had been demolished, it was time to work on the other social facts that threatened to hold back African Americans in the future. High on his list was family structure, something few others noticed at the time.

As anyone who has studied black families knows, Moynihan was subjected to a firestorm of criticism for suggesting that there was anything amiss with black family life. The phrase "blaming the victim" was invented to excoriate this report. As a result, it became taboo to study black families for a generation. The work written until the late '80s tended to praise the strengths of black families and hail their alternative cultural arrangements.

Then the empirical struck back. The conditions of black families, and other families, had gotten so bad that political correctness could not fend off reality. A flood of studies followed, which quickly discovered that during the lost generation, the black illegitimacy rate had gone from a scary 25% to a disasterous 70%.

In those lost decades it would have been very unpleasant to point out that things were getting much worse for black families, mostly due to the choices of black people themselves. This would have seemed like "bashing." But if we had been willing to research the facts and face the hard truth, perhaps the movement to restore black marriage might have started sooner. Perhaps we could have halted the decline before fatherlessness became the norm for African American children.

Black Teen Moms of the '60s Have Less Sympathy for Black Teen Moms Today

Katrina Bell McDonald and Elizabeth M. Armstrong of Johns Hopkins University went to a group of women who had been studied in a 1960s teen mothers study, and resurveyed at intervals since then. In 1996, on the eve of the current era of welfare reform, they asked these women, now in their 40s, to compare their experiences with those of teen mothers today - some of whom were their own daughters. In fact, 77% were already grandmothers, and 18% lived with their grandchildren.

The consensus of the women interviewed was that black teen moms don’t get the support today that these teen moms got in the ‘60s because teen pregnancy has been normalized in the poor black community. The community doesn’t rally 'round today they way they did then, because having babies seems less like a crisis for the family and more like a choice by the mothers. The older generation particularly disapproved of underclass culture; the former teen moms do not see themselves as having been part of the underclass. They think teen moms today (just pre-welfare reform) had become welfare-dependent in a way that ‘60s teen moms were not, when welfare offered less.

Like many grandparents, the women studied here thought that kids today are worse than they had been, so they have less sympathy for the younger generation's self-induced crisis. The former teen moms liked welfare reform because they thought it would make today’s teen moms more self-reliant.

Paradoxically, this self-reliance would, I think, make the former teen moms more willing to help.

Unexpected Black Drug Use Finding

A student just brought an old study by Cheryl Amey and Stan Albrecht to my attention.

They found that

“Although both white and Latino adolescents from two-biological-parent families are less likely to use drugs than their counterparts from differently structured families, Black youths who come from similar two-parent families are among the most likely users of both alcohol and marijuana.”

Amey and Albrecht don't have a good explanation for this, and neither do I. My best guess is that the black two-parent families have fewer married parents than the white and Latino two-parent families. The black marriage rate is so low that it is common in studies like this to conflate married and cohabiting black parents. Cohabitors, especially cohabiting fathers, are less likely to discipline kids strictly than married fathers are.

My Welfare Reform Plan

In response to an earlier post on welfare reform, I got a thoughtful question from Ari at NYU. I started to write back to him directly, but the thought his question inspired led me to develop a new post in the ongoing GC dialogue.

At this point I am inclined to abolish welfare altogether. The Earned Income Tax Credit is really a much more effective and politically feasible kind of poor support. If we expanded EITC, provided basic medical care for poor people, and some supplements for child care, we could eliminate welfare for able-bodied people, period. The truly disabled could be absorbed into Supplemental Security Income. The lazy would sponge off their mothers.

Your question, though, was about fathers. I think the crucial failing of all father-involvement programs thus far, especially those aimed at black fathers, has been that they are unwilling to push marriage. They cite the low employment rate, high rate of committing crimes and getting caught, and other obstacles to poor fathers marrying and supporting their families. The most important fact about marriage and fatherhood for men, though, is that it tends to change them into productive people. Waiting for men to get responsible first, then having them marry, will not work with many men, especially those already on the track to poverty. Simply being willing to say it, to use the bully pulpit in every way to push parents to marry for the sake of their children, would help change the climate.

There are many couples with children who are waiting until they save enough money to have a wedding. This is sick. See my posts on "Marry Your Baby Daddy."

If we are to keep welfare, the next strongest step down, I think, would be temporary sterilization of the mother and father for as long as they receive welfare. The "temporary" is the crucial word here - Norplant works, and was only squeezed out for political reasons. A male equivalent could easily be developed. Getting welfare would depend on identifying the father, who would also be subject to temporary sterilization. If she was unwilling to identify the father, or he was unwilling to cooperate, she could only get, say, half the benefits. Equally important in this plan is that it only applies to people on welfare. If you are not asking the taxpayers to foot the bill, you can pursue any foolish plan you want, just as you can now.

At this point we come to the chasm of the politically feasible. The basic fact is that you can't make people think and live like the bourgeoisie. If they don't live their lives by planning ahead, deferring gratification, working now to reap benefits later, then showing them the benefits they could get later from planning ahead now are mostly to no avail. The part of welfare reform that works is that you have to get a job or lose your benefits now. The part of welfare reform that would work with the middle-class welfare reformers, but will not work so well with most welfare recipients, is the lifetime limit on getting welfare. They take what they can get today, and worry about tomorrow tomorrow. They are survivors, not planners. If they were planners, most wouldn't be on welfare in the first place.

Given this fact, one good thing we can do is de-racialize the welfare discussion. Most people on welfare are white. This is always a surprise to my students. And most black people are not on welfare, or even poor. This goes double for other non-white ethnic groups. This is also often a surprise to my students. As Promises I Can Keep makes clear, young welfare moms of all races reason in similar ways. The main obstacle to disconnecting the welfare and race discussions is the way-low black marriage rate. As I have pushed here often, the forces trying to improve the lives of African Americans have to be willing to push for marriage. Marriage is good for all races of kids and couples. I am convinced that if the marriage rates for all races and ethnic groups were the same, almost all other ethnic differences in social problems would disappear.

Finally, I should say that the current welfare reform is pretty good. It has led to massive reductions of the welfare rolls from women who could work, many of whom were already working. It is hard to extend to men because most of them aren't on welfare. Many are sponging off women who are on welfare, but there really isn't any way in a free country to touch them if the women let them sponge. Things are already getting better on the welfare front.

Where Poor Young Fathers Come From

A study of very young men, 16 - 22, at a health clinic in Philadelphia compared the ones who had fathered children with the ones who had not. None of these guys were married; only a couple (out of 91) were virgins. The average age for first intercourse was about the same - 13 vs. 14. The key difference was that the guys who did not have children had had father figures - 82% vs. 50% - and they themselves had a plan for their lives.

One striking difference between the two groups was how they approached sex. The non-fathers had sex much less often, and were much more likely to use contraceptives when they did. Among the fathers, 70% reported having intercourse more than once a month (the highest frequency category they could choose), and 55% reported that they never used contraceptives. No wonder they had babies. One wonders about the women they had these babies with, since nearly half of the fathers (45%) said up front that they did not expect to support their children.

Roxanne H. Fisher, R.I.P.

My friend Roxanne died last week, losing a long fight with breast cancer at 47. I am coming home from her memorial service. Roxanne was not a famous person. She was a plant biology professor with a love for ferns at Chatham University, where the memorial service was held. Many students and colleagues came to the service. She was a devoted wife and mother, and many members of her extended family were there. And she had a genius for friendship, knowing and connecting people across many decades and towns who came from all over. Like me.

Yesterday's service was actually the fourth. When the news of her passing reached Chatham, many classes stopped and the college community had a spontaneous gathering and mourning. The next day the block party in her neighborhood turned into a spontaneous appreciation of Roxanne. The formal funeral at the little country church in her home town brought out her family and old neighbors.

The theme of all of these memorials was that Roxanne Fisher was a decent, nurturing, teaching woman who stayed tied to the people in her life, and brought them together with one another. Two of her colleagues, themselves fighting breast cancer, spoke of how important it was to them to have Roxanne as a model, working and caring and trying new things to the end.

The core fact of Roxanne's death is just a sad, hard loss. But all the life around her memory is a triumph.

Oh, No - Penguins in My Whisk!

I am visiting with my sister, the mother of the famous twins who have appeared in these posts. She was cooking as we were chatting. She reached into a drawer for the next tool. "Oh no," she cried, "there are penguins in my whisk! The terrible people I live with have put penguins in my whisk!" And laughed an experienced mother's laugh.

I helpfully removed the small plastic penguins from their whisk-prison, and the cooking proceeded.

Marriage is the Solution to the Black Fathers Problem

In the concluding practical chapters to Clayton, Mincy, and Blankenhorn's Black Fathers, two leaders in promoting involved fatherhood and black marriage offer some useful conclusions.

Wade Horn gives an overview of programs that aim to involve poor black fathers in their children's lives. The bad news is that it is hard to find these fathers - half the mothers don't even know where they are - and it is even harder to keep them in the program, which they regard as a trick to get them to pay child support. Peer support programs don't work well, since their peers are not reliable, either. Improving visitation doesn't help, since they don't have much authority with the children. Getting absent fathers to cohabit doesn't help, because they are likely to disappear, which is even worse for kids, and 2/3rds of the kids in the house are not theirs, anyway. Horn concludes that fatherhood programs need to do what they have been afraid to do: promote marriage.

Which leads to the main conclusion of Enola Baird, a crusader for black marriage. She goes so far as to say that marriage was the great right that slaves gained with freedom. Marriage is the foundation of successful black families - as it is for other families.

Closing the marriage gap would do the most to close the racial gap. Then we would not need a conference on the problems of black fathers.

In Child Poverty, The Marriage Gap is Even Bigger Than the Race Gap

So says Maggie Gallagher in her fine chapter in Clayton, Mincy, and Blankenhorn's Black Fathers.

The black/white gap in child poverty is huge: 70% of black kids are poor, vs. only 25% of white kids. But the unmarried/married gap in child poverty is even greater: 81% of kids with unmarried parents are poor, vs. only 22% of kids with married parents.

How are these two rates connected? African Americans are much less likely to marry than whites, or any other racial ethnic group. Worse, poor black men are two to three times more likely to father children than other poor men are.

If the black and white marriage rates were the same, most of the racial poverty gap would disappear. The marital poverty gap, on the other hand, is not likely to close.

William Julius Wilson's Mexican Problem

William Julius Wilson has been arguing for years that the low black marriage rate, and all the bad things that follow from it, is mostly because low-skilled, family supporting jobs disappeared from the northern cities at the just the time that African Americans migrated there in great numbers. Not having jobs that would support families, black men did not marry, and black women did not marry them. Wilson has never had a good explanation for why poor black women kept having children with men who could not support the children. Still, his structural account of why the black experience would be different from that of other immigrants has been a powerful answer to more cultural explanations.

In a more recent study, in Clayton, Mincy, and Blankenhorn's Black Fathers, Wilson extends his long-running studies of poor people in Chicago. Now he give comparative work and marriage rates not only for black and white men, but also Mexicans. This poses a problem for his basic argument about the black marriage rate. The Mexican immigrants are no better educated than the black natives in the poor parts of Chicago, and so have no better access to family-supporting jobs. Yet Mexican men are more likely to respond to their girlfriends' pregnancy by proposing and seeking some kind of job. Most poor black fathers, by contrast, do not pursue marriage. Indeed, Wilson reports that what all the poor mothers want from the fathers of their children is that they support the family and be faithful; the black men regard this desire as unreasonable.

When Wilson was comparing poor African Americans in the city today with poor Italians, Poles, Jews, etc. of yesteryear, his structural argument (work disappeared) could be persuasive. Now, though, when poor African Americans and poor Mexicans in the same city at the same time report quite different marriage rates, and therefore quite different male employment rates, his structural argument clearly has a cultural hole in it.

Men Earn More If They Think Men Should Work

This headline sounds like a truism, doesn't it? Yet the researchers I will be arguing with, Timothy Judge and Beth Livingston of the University of Florida, think there is another reason: sexism.

Judge and Livington looked at the relationship between what people think about men working and women taking care of the home - what they call "traditional gender orientation" - and how much they earn at their jobs. The big finding, which has been getting some play in the press, is that women who have traditional views of women in the home make less than more egalitarian women. Men with the traditional view make quite a bit more than egalitarian men do, with the traditional men averaging $34,000 per year, versus $23,000 annually for the egalitarian men.

The researchers believe that someone must be unfairly paying men with traditional views more:

This implies that traditional men are rewarded in the workplace for seeking to preserve the social order, whereas traditional women seeking to do the same are not necessarily penalized.

I think there is a major flaw in the question they asked, and a simpler explanation for the income gaps. The flaw is that they asked about the ideal division of labor between men and women, rather than between husbands and wives. The way the question is framed, however, implies that what they really mean is men and women in a married (or at least cohabiting) household. Neither do they make clear whether there is a difference between the single and married people in their responses - which there should be if the question is implicitly about married people's behavior.

The simpler explanation of their findings, I think, is that men who are husbands and fathers are more likely to think that it is their job to earn more for their families, so they seek industries, jobs, and assignments that maximize what they take home to their families. Men who are not husbands and fathers, or who do not think it is their job to earn more for their families, will not seek higher paying jobs if it means working harder, longer, or further from home. Likewise, women who are wives and mothers are more likely to forgo some earning opportunities in order to spend more time with their families, either breaking up their careers for small-child-related spells or investing less in their careers all along. Either way, married moms acting the way married moms usually do are likely, on average, to be making less than other women.

88% Happy in Their Marriages

Parade magazine published its marriage poll this week. I am grateful to anyone who does family life polling, and I know Parade magazine has a greater readership than all the sociology journals on earth combined. The results of the Parade survey are very heartening. The great majority of married people are happy in their marriages. 71% are deeply in love, 73% are happy with the companionship of their marriage. Three quarters found their sex lives fulfilling. Over half would definitely marry the same person again. Half said they were loving and joyful - beat that with any other institution.

My only gripe with the Parade survey is that they don't lead with the good news. They lead with political adultery. The pull quotes all suggest scary mysteries. The highlighted stats all have a prominent zinger.

The good news about marriage is that most of the news is good. Sing it.

The Starting Point of the Creation/Evolution Discussion

Gallup has been asking representative samples of Americans since 1982 which of these three options comes closest to their own view:

God created man pretty much in his present form at one time within the last 10,000 years. [Creationist view]

Man has developed over millions of years from less advanced forms of life, but God guided this process, including man's creation. [Theistic evolution]

Man has developed over millions of years from less advanced forms of life. God had no part in this process. [Naturalistic Evolution]

Think of how you would answer this question.

Then estimate what percentage of Americans would choose each of these options.



The actual responses of American have remained pretty stable over the past quarter century. Here are the typical percentages:

Creationist view 47%

Theistic evolution 40%

Naturalistic Evolution 9%

Most people are surprised at this distribution. Most educated people, in particular, have a hard time accepting the idea that half of Americans would take the young-earth creationist position over other views.

I am impressed at how large the middle position, the theistic evolution position, is. If you force people to choose between creation and evolution, most people in a religious country will choose creation. If you give people a middle option, a sizable number will choose that. The constituency for naturalistic evolution, by contrast, is the same size as the constituency for "no religion."

Creation Museum Fun

I am giving a talk to the Centre College parents today about the Creation Museum controversy. I have blogged about the museum before. Today I just want to give you a few fun pictures:

A fine student riding the little Triceratops with a saddle.

A parody (sadly, not a real place).

A picture the museum can create for all visitors, using a green screen.

The Black Church Improves the Marriage Rate

Brad Wilcox has a report in the Institute for American Values series on black families, about the effect of religion on urban families. Churches are the main institutional anchors of the code of decency in the city, he conclude, and thus are vital to promoting marriage. All families are more likely to marry if they are religious. This is especially notable for black families.

Among parents in all ethnic groups (black, Latino, white), the married are much more likely to be regular church-goers, typically by 20 percentage points. For example, among black mothers, 63% of the married women are regular church goers, vs. 40% among the single mothers. The comparable numbers for Latina mothers are 50 and 33; for white mothers, 42 and 21. Men show similar gaps, though with lower rates of church going than women.

African Americans are the most religious large ethnic group in America. They are also the least married.

Church can't entirely close the ethnic marriage gap. Even religious African Americans with kids are still less likely to marry than comparable people in other ethnic groups. But religious institutions do help close the gap.

Married Black Men Earn More For Their Families

Claudia Sitgraves has produced an interesting research summary on "The Benefits of Marriage for African American Men" for the Institute for American Values. She reports that married black men work more than single black men, and make more, too -- 14 - 18% more in earnings. This is not so surprising - married men usually work more, and harder, and thus earn more than single men in all groups.

The surprising finding came from a longitudinal study (by the late Steve Nock) the followed black men through various stages of the life cycle. He found that the married men started earning more than most single men, as expected. He also found that those single men who nonetheless started earning at high levels were less likely to marry than their lower-earning single counterparts. The conventional wisdom is that higher-earning single men are better marriage prospects. It may be the case the higher-earning single black men are so sought after that they can reap the benefits of marriage without marrying.

This finding is a little disheartening for marriage proponents. It is worth following up.

How Bad is Bad for Poor Black Families?

A survey by the poverty program firm Maximus in New Orleans studied food stamp families, both the women receiving food stamps for their children and the men who fathered the kids. This was a study of poor families, but since 80% were black (at a time, pre-Katrina, when the city was 67% black), this is mostly a study of poor black families. Indeed, this is a good picture of some of the worst-off black families in the whole country -- poor, unmarried parents, who were poor even in a poor city in a poor state.

Ronald Mincy and Hillard Pouncy, two veteran black family researchers, analyzed the data hoping to find a "magic moment" when policy makers could promote marriage. What they discovered, though, was that most of the relationships were over even before the child was born. 70% of the women already had a child before the focal child of the study, and half of the fathers of child #1 were not the same as the father of child #2. Not surprisingly, the more children a man had by different women, the less he was likely to invest in any of them. Somewhat surprisingly, men with part-time jobs were less likely than men with full-time jobs to have their children stay with them even sometimes; it is likely, though, that the part-timers are living with other women, possibly with other children, and don't want his other kids in the house.

The main reason that the couples gave for not marrying was that they didn't have enough money -- though most of the women, and nearly all of the men, were working (sometimes under the table). Probing further into why the parents didn't marry, 2/3rds of the women and (somewhat surprisingly) 2/3rds of the men said they didn't think the other parent would be faithful.

Without marriage, half the men had drifted into a sometime involvement with their child, and another quarter had disappeared altogether. Even the "involved fathers" thought "supporting their children" meant giving money and gifts sometimes, on an irregular and informal schedule.

This study of the poor of pre-Katrina New Orleans is just one case study. It does, though, give us some baseline numbers of how bad the family situation is of the worst-off black families in America.

1000 Posts

The Gruntled Center has exhibited 1000 posts in its three-plus year run, and counting. That is 224 thousand page views. The most popular post: Palin's Religion.

Just thought you should know. Many more where that came from.

Black Marriage Research 1

This week in my Family Life class we are working through the fine series of black family studies done for the Institute for American Values over the past few years. Their major report, The Consequences of Marriage for African Americans: A Comprehensive Literature Review, is our starting point. It will not surprise readers of this blog that they found that marriage is beneficial to African Americans in many ways. In several comparisons between black and white marriages, whites tend to benefit more, especially white women. The researchers also found suggestions that black marriages are less happy and more conflict-ridden than white marriages.

This led me to wish for one control that the authors of this review of existing literature couldn't ask, since it wasn't in the original studies: social class. African Americans are, as a group poorer than white Americans. Poorer people, as as rule, have less happy and more conflict-ridden marriages. In reading the rest of these studies, therefore, we will be looking out for studies of the quality and benefits of black marriages controlling for class.