To clarify this point, I would say that as a society, we like doing the things that lead to single parenthood, not the single parenthood for single parenthood’s sake.
Good point. I also think that single parenthood is more often the choice of the person who left the kid than the choice of the one who is raising the kid. Most single parents didn’t set out to be single parents and probably didn’t think they would be, but at some point the other party decided they didn’t want to be a parent anymore.
Nevertheless, we continue to have kids despite knowing this is a likely possibility.
Excellent point. Even sven, awaiting your rebuttal.
“We’re capable, strong, and independent - now give us free stuff.”
Which was also my battle cry when I was a moody teenager.
I agree with your basic point that it would be nice if we were open about tax rates. However, phasing out benefits for high income people is kind of the other side of progressive taxation. As someone who seldom gets these breaks, my objection is less to the complexity of the tax code than to the bait and switch nature of the news stories - where I usually find some cool new break doesn’t apply to me. On the other hand, it probably makes more sense to give the benefits to those who need it more than I do.
Tax credits are regressive, in that they reduce the amount I pay at the highest bracket, and will be less beneficial to those in lower brackets. If we want to improve the lot of single mothers (remember them) at the low end, they aren’t the way to go. having a direct benefit in addition to an FSA might be politically more feasible.
And I continue to refuse to say any of these things will be break even. However, the actual return would take quite a bit of complex modeling to predict.
I’m not convinced that’s Sven’s argument (I’m not convinced it isn’t, however, either).
I think there is a component of “if we changed our attitudes, we could support single mothers better.” i.e. daycare coops really don’t take much in terms of government support - they may take some regulatory change. But they take a huge change in the culture - people who use daycare coops have to be willing to let the community help raise their child. A coop isn’t a selfish thing where you can demand that community standards change for your kid. Put your kid in a religious daycare coop - and they’ll likely pray before meals and color pictures of Jesus. Same with coop housing - it doesn’t take a lot of governmental money - maybe some regulatory change - but it does take people who are willing to live together and make compromises in order to get the benefits. And both those things take investment in time and money from someone willing to invest - often that’s a non-profit stepping up to get it off the ground - providing the organization, guidance and initial funding - with the idea that it becomes self supporting over time.
I have a friend who works for affordable housing for such a non-profit. And affordable housing often targets single mothers - who need it. The organizations do exist, but they are not sufficient for the need - and often are fighting an uphill battle for both funding - and against their own clients who don’t want to make the compromises necessary. However, I think the best way to tackle these issues is grassroots and non-profit based. Because this is the sort of thing that needs to grow from the bottom - not be pushed down from the top. Pushed down from the top and you get the combination of “I don’t want my tax dollars spent there” and “I don’t want the government telling me what daycare to put my kids in or where to live.”
A good model for this sort of non-profit is Habitat for Humanity, by the way. Which doesn’t deal specifically with single mothers - but gets equity in terms of effort from its clients which sets up future success. A bad model for this is the “Extreme Makeover” model - where people are handed a house they can’t afford to maintain and live in - and have no real investment in.
Why is it that in 1970 the number of out of wed lock children was about 10% and in 1993 it was a little over 30%? Link (look for out of wedlock births). Another graph on the same page also shows that in the same time frame single parents went from ~5% to ~15%.
Apparently human nature changed quite a bit in ~ 30 years.
So, we know that in the past single parenthood was 1/3rd as likely. Obviously something changed. Can we change it so that the rate is lower? If we can, should we?
I think the big thing we ought to look at is planned single parenthood versus unplanned. My guess is that the problems in unplanned single parenthood families are much greater than from planned. The planned single parent situations are most likely (WAG) to have a parent who can afford the child and provide for that child’s needs.
My second WAG is that unplanned single parenthood situations probably have a higher likely hood to happen in low income areas, which makes the situation even tougher on the kids.
Slee
You should really look at single pregnancies. Today a lot fewer women are going to get married just because they are pregnant than back then. I believe the divorce rate for younger people today is a lot lower than it used to be - perhaps this is a reason for that?
That sounds reasonable, and we should work as hard as we can to cut the number of unplanned pregnancies.
Also reasonable. I suspect that raising income and providing jobs would do a lot to cut this.
I think that raising income at entry level would involve raising the minimum wage, and I’m not sure that is possible in this political climate. Even if this was possible, I still think decent childcare will still be a problem.
Providing access to decent birth control is hardly possible in the current political climate. If moralists want to punish unwed people for having sex, then they’ll be against birth control, since that just encourages it, and will also be against decent support for the kids, since that doesn’t punish the mother enough. It is the only attitude which makes their positions self-consistent.
If raising income reduces the number of children, fewer children will be chasing the supply of childcare providers, which might moderate the price, and on the other hand the cost of childcare will be more affordable for those who need it. But decent childcare will still be a problem.
The number of children per provider will always have to be small, and if you divide the salary and benefits of that provider by the number of children, you will always get a fairly big number, especially if the parent has a salary roughly comparable to that of the provider. That explains why so much childcare is done by women who’d have to watch their kids anyway, or by grandparents who aren’t working.
Given that in the current political climate we supposedly can’t afford our schools where there are 20 - 30 kids per teacher, it is not surprising we wouldn’t be able to afford the case where there are 4. But in terms of productivity, we are losing out in a system where one parent watches one or two kids instead of 4 or 5.
(And yes I’m ignoring the non-monetary benefits of stay-at-home moms, since that option has even less chance of being funded.)
I would say that as a society we consider bad marriages–and that spectrum runs from “personally unfulfilled” to “living in a nightmare of abuse”–to be a greater evil than single parenthood.
This is not necessarily a bad thing: it’s certainly a positive for people in abusive situations, and we don’t have any studies to compare the outcomes of single parents to the outcome of angry miserable parents chained to each other for 50 years because of mutual financial and social interdependence, the kind of crappy, grinding marriages that would be dissolved 90% of the time today.
And I think this group includes unwed births, because those would have been the shotgun weddings of 40 years ago: again, we’ve decided a miserable marriage to someone you barely know and trust less is worse than single parenthood. That was not the consensus 40 years ago.
As a married stay at home mom to 2 under 2, I don’t know how people do it effectively alone. It’s damn hard and I was an elementary teacher.
In lower income, urban areas, single-parent homes (without adequate support systems) are much, much more prevalent, and therefore I think the only way this has a chance of improving is to deal with the cyclical nature of impoverished family systems head on…with the kids. Counseling and education. Social services. More counseling. (which will never happen).
My bolding.
No, he’s not.
He’s suggesting that we give greater support to single-parent families, but he never said ‘and that only means those who chose this way.’ And he never said that was aimed at encouraging single-parent families.
Maybe I missed it, but did anyone yet point out that ‘babies born to unmarried women’ does not = ‘babies born to single parents,’ at least in any realistic way? The parents live together and raise the child together and the father is the acknowleged father - it’s not as if only married men are liable to child support - but these happen to not be married.
It’s disingenous to count all ‘unmarried’ mothers in the last twenty years or so as ‘single mothers with no or very little input from the father.’
Anyway…
After-hours and before hours care (‘breakfast clubs’ and ‘afterschool clubs’) at school makes a huge difference to all sorts of families and children. It’s even better when that care actually accommodates typical working hours.
Lots of British schools have this, but not in an ideal way; it often stops at 5 or so, just enough earlier than normal work stopping times that working parents still have to pay for a childcarer to collect the kids and look after them for the extra hour or so. But some afterschool clubs run later, and more and more jobs now allow finishing earlier some days if not others.
For some jobs, asking them to adapt to 8.30-4.30 on at least some days of the week is feasible, whereas asking them to adapt to 9.30-2-30 isn’t.
Obviously, this is only for school-aged kids, but it’s the most cost-effective means of providing afterschool childcare. The facilities are there, the kids are there, their friends are there, some of the staff will be the same - the teachers don’t do the afterschool care - it’s separate - but the teaching support staff often work the afterschool club too - and it’s as convenient to home as any school will be.
The timing of the end of the afterschool club session is flexible, so that parents don’t have to sit drumming their fingers on the steering wheel waiting for the session to end if their work happens to finish earlier.
This kind of thing is so obvious when it’s already been implemented that it’s hard to imagine life without it. What, you mean they had all these childcare facilities lying empty and all these people wanting childcare facilities and never thought to match up the two? :smack:
We are not going to encourage and enable single-parenthood by seeking to make it less harmful for the children involved. People are already raising kids as single parents. In droves. Despite the very real ways it makes life difficult.
It’s as if half of people were walking through a field of glass barefoot. If we offered them medical services at the end, would that encourage more people to walk through the field of glass barefoot? Probably not. Walking through a field of glass (or raising a kid on your own) objectively sucks. If people are doing it, they clearly have some good reason to. What we can do is reduce the harm.
I think people are caught up on this idea that we are living in the default, god-given society and any changes must mean you are taking something away from someone else. This is not true. We are living in a society that was shaped by certain social forces- and as far as family these social forces have changed dramatically.
If the city has the choice to repave the road to either Bob’s house or the Anne’s house, it doesn’t really matter which house they choose. If Bob’s house used to be the hotspot, but now everyone is going to Anne’s house, it might make more sense to repave Anne’s road instead.
For all the talk of the free market, and letting people make individual choices, it’s surprising how many people are willing to say we should do what we can to make it harder and more unpleasant for people to raise their children in the way they are apparently choosing to raise them.
As for mud huts- obviously you want to do the best with what you have, and offer your kid the best you have to offer. But at the same time, you do what you can with what you’ve got. If you’ve got love, security, and basic human needs down, you’re probably going to do okay.
I agree that we aren’t living in the default god-given society–but we are living in a society created by the free choices of its members, each acting in their own best interests. When an outside force (ie, you) comes in to change things, you are stomping on all of that freedom and choice.* I’m not worried that your ideas take something away from someone else–I believe your whole mode of thinking takes something away from everyone else.
*which isn’t to say that that is never justified–I think the civil rights movement was a great example of positive stomping.
checks passport
How the hell am I an “outsider force”? I’m a member of this society, and my point of view has as much of a place here as anyone else’s. We live in a free-market democracy and thus I actually cannot “stomp all over your rights.” All I can do is put my ideas out in the marketplace of ideas and see if people find them convincing enough to act on them. They will live or die by “free choice.” So what are you so scared of?
Social policy/tendencies tends to lag a generation behind social changes. The first generation off the farm will likely have 10 kids like the would on the farm. It’s the next generation that realizes the 10 kid thing is not efficient and decides to have 2 or 3 instead.
We are at a point where the society has not caught up with it’s changes. This is evident by the fact that:
- Many people are raising children alone.
- Raising children alone is usually detrimental to both children and parents.
So yeah, the market will take care of it eventually. But why the hell should we sit on our hands and gaze at our navels waiting for that to happen. Someone has to come up with these ideas, why not us now?
This just seems at odd with what you’re saying about how it’s detrimental to raise children alone. So which is it–are kids OK with the basics or does it take a lot of resources to raise a kid?
I think you might be confusing tax deductions with tax credits.
I thought Even Sven’sargument is that its so hard to bea single parent these days is because our society (indeed most of human society was built around the notion of a nuclear family. And while I can’t see any system that would actually be easier to be a single parent than a married couple, I can envision a society that makes it easier for single parents without making it more difficult for married couples (i.e. no significant subsidization of single parents by married couples). Cuz, lets face it, all the things we are tlaking about that would help single parents would probably help married aprents as well.