From Why the New Child-Tax Credit Won’t Live Up to the Hype by Kay S. Hymowitz. The subheading is The missing element is family stability. The article is written as a caution against expectations of effectiveness of the revised Child Tax Credit.
If the experts are right, the United States is about to perform one of the great policy feats in the nation’s history. Starting in July, under a newly retrofitted Child Tax Credit (CTC), the IRS will begin sending monthly checks of $250 per child ($300 for children under six) to families with adjusted gross incomes under $150,000. Part of the Covid-era American Rescue Plan, the revamped CTC will benefit the large majority of American families with kids, but its biggest impact will be felt by the approximately 10 million children below the poverty line. The prediction is eye-popping: the new law, the consensus has it, will slash child poverty in half.
I share her skepticism but am not particularly interested in that particular CTC argument. We are now at the stage where government essentially functions on an ideological basis without regard to facts, logic, evidence, reason or public sentiment.
What I am interested in, and what this article has in abundance, is data. In this instance about family structure. I think familial structural health is at the core of many of our nominal sociological issues including poverty, crime, education attainment, obesity, etc.
Our conversation about familial structural health is handicapped. We barely are able to talk effectively about single parenthood or divorce. Not because of squeamishness or political correctness (though those are elements of the barrier.) Primarily because we do not have ready descriptive definitions for the multiplicity of family structures that have arisen out of the evolution of values from the 1960s.
Coleman and Moynihan separately raised the alarm about family structure and out of wedlock children in the mid-1960s. The problem has only gotten worse since then. Approximately 40% of births today are to unmarried parents.
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White illegitimacy rates were below 5% for decades until the mid-1960s. They are now at 28%. Black illegitimacy rates hovered around 20-25% until 1965 and then exploded, now being 70%.
Moynihan's report (The Negro Family: The Case For National Action) came out in 1965. Moynihan focused on family structure and out of wedlock births. Coleman's report (Equality of Educational Opportunity) came out in 1966, focusing on possible causes of black-white educational differences.
At the time of the Coleman report, it was assumed that the white-black education outcome gap was due to incomplete desegregation and to funding differentials between black and white schools. Coleman found little statistical evidence that either funding or facility quality were predictive of educational outcomes. The single biggest factor was family. Of funding, facilities, and family, family was the variable most predictive and the most important to address.
Between these two reports a year apart, the governing class were cornered. It is relatively easy to implement policies around school facility and teacher quality and on funding. It is exceptionally difficult, in a freedom-based society, for government to intervene to change social value structures in one part of the population but not others. In fact, it is illegal.
Consequently, in the fifty-six years since these ground-breaking reports, virtually all our public policies to reduce the black-white education gap has been focused on spending and on facilities. The two variables which we know to be least predictive of outcomes. It is striking how bankrupt that approach has been. Our worst performing school districts are now funded at levels up to twice that of most districts on a per pupil basis. And the outcomes are as bad as ever.
We have done a lot to keep families out of poverty, with some success. The bottom quintile of American households by income have an average consumption profile equivalent to that of the middle income quintile in 1975.
What Hymowitz is highlighting is that family structure is as important as it ever was, can be strikingly damaging to children and has gotten worse, not better.
Reading her article reminds me of just what an exceptional blessing it is for children growing up in intact homes. Approximately 50% children are born to married parents and are raised to adulthood in the same family. An additional 15% grow up in two parent families but with a divorce and remarriage at some point in childhood.My doubts owe to something most Americans don’t like talking about: children in the U.S, particularly in lower-income households, are far more likely to grow up in unstable families—with a revolving cast of stepparents, half-siblings, stepsiblings, divorces, separations, and short-term romantic partners—than kids anywhere else. These “complex families,” as they’re sometimes called, can be every bit as damaging to children as poverty itself.
Sound exaggerated? It’s not. True, complex families have been a growing part of American life since the social revolutions of the late 1960s and 1970s, but few outside the small circle of family researchers have understood the extent of this change. Up until 2007, the Census Bureau asked respondents only whether children in the household were living with “one parent” or “two parents.” Two parents could refer to anything from a married couple celebrating their silver anniversary to a mother and a cohabiting partner who might or might not be the child’s father. Thus, the data gave a misleadingly benign impression of family arrangements. In 2014, the bureau began collecting data on multiple-partner fertility—that is, children by more than one partner. With these upgrades, we now have a clearer picture of the role complex families play in American poverty.
When it comes to multi-partner fertility and complex families, the U.S. is truly number one. More than one in six American kids live with a step- or half-sibling by age four. Middle-class readers might assume that this has to do with divorce and remarriage, but for most children, instability begins with cohabiting or single parents. Family complexity is especially common among single—or never-married—men and women, regardless of whether they were cohabiting at the time of first birth. Half the children born to cohabiting but unmarried parents will see them break up by their third birthday, compared with only 11 percent of kids born to married parents. About 21 percent of married parents report having a child with another partner, but 59 percent of unmarried couples have at least one child with another partner. Sixty percent of single parents go on to have a second child with another partner within ten years of the first birth.
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Hymowitz puts some parameters on the issue.
She elaborates on some of the second order consequences of these varying structures:Child poverty closely tracks nonmarital childbearing and multi-partner fertility. About 58 percent of poor children live in households headed by unmarried mothers; 60 percent of the firstborn children of those mothers will have at least one half-sibling by age ten. Meantime, middle-class and wealthy kids are almost always born to married parents, whose divorce rates have declined markedly over the past decades. Their chances of growing up with the two parents who carried them home from the maternity ward are fairly high. However, those middle-class children whose married parents do divorce are at high risk of downward mobility; in fact, 28 percent of poor adults spent at least some of their childhoods in a two-parent middle-class family. As adults, they are at a higher risk of becoming single parents themselves and having children with two or more partners. In short, multiple-partner fertility, family instability, and poverty all appear to be passed into future generations.
Predictably, the complex-family income gap parallels an education gap. Men with bachelor’s or graduate degrees are considerably more likely to be living with their biological children than less educated men. In one study, 64 percent of male participants with a high school degree or less had a child with more than one partner (almost three-fourths of those births were nonmarital), compared with 36 percent of men with some college. (Interestingly, men having children with more than one partner are neither more nor less likely to be employed than men having children with just one partner.) Men who have spent time in prison are two times as likely to have children by multiple partners.
Along with education and income, race is also part of the complex-family divide; blacks are twice as likely as whites to have children with two or more partners (29.6 percent vs. 14.7 percent). Half of all black children live with a single parent, compared with 28 percent of Hispanics, 18 percent of whites, and 9 percent of Asians. Black men are also more likely to live with a partner’s minor children (16.4 percent) than with their biological child (9.9 percent). Black children are more likely to see their married parents divorce than kids of other demographic groups, which may help explain a troubling trend in the downward mobility of black men.
Researchers studying children who are coping with family turmoil of this sort see behavioral problems identical to those they find when they study poor children. Several studies have found that children in elementary school who have experienced two “transitions”—a separation, a re-partnering, the introduction of stepsiblings—are not only more impulsive and aggressive than kids who experience no family disruptions; they also have lower grades and achievement scores. The family-go-round, to use sociologist Andrew Cherlin’s phrase, has been associated with lower verbal ability, attention-deficit problems, and poorer overall school readiness. Multiple-partner fertility was “robustly related” to delinquency and other behavior problems at age nine, regardless of whether a mother was married at that time. In later childhood and adolescence, having a parent with children from multiple partners correlates with early sexual activity and pregnancy. Studies have found a “dose effect” for transitions—that is, the more transitions a child experiences, the more the child’s risk grows. More surprisingly, perhaps, studies show that kids react to new stepsiblings in the household by becoming more aggressive—and that’s apart from the effect of the mother’s or father’s new partner. A child whose parents have divorced and whose mother remarries may be at higher risk of negative outcomes, but a child whose mother has another child after remarrying is at higher risk still.
It is almost as if children, suffering familial structural turmoil in childhood, bare some form of social-PTSD, an amalgam of trauma, maladaptive social strategies and perhaps an inherent loss of trust. And perhaps even a permanently dented capacity to rebuild trust.
Given how critical trust is as a social solvent and facilitator for high productivity, individual and societal, if familial structural instability is undermining children's capacity to trust, it is permanently relegating those children to less desirable life outcomes and lowering overall social prosperity.
I have always argued that what passes in the US as arguments about race and racism are really mostly unacknowledged arguments about culture and class. It is hard not to see Hymowitz's article as a confirmation of that thesis.
And it also highlights why we have been so challenged to navigate policies in this arena. We are all free citizens to form and raise families free from government interference except in criminal conduct. We have no cultural orientation that accords authority to the state to intervene in private family structure and status.
However, it is harder and harder to ignore that differences in outcomes are not about funding or systemic racism. We relaxed immigration restrictions in the mid-1960s, opening it up to the whole world rather than primarily Europe. We now have massive experience and data that allows us to hone in on what makes different ethnic groups successful or not. And it usually has nothing to do with race per se. For every socio-econometrically challenged group such as the African Somalis, we have the hugely successful African Nigerians. For every socio-econometrically challenged group such as the Asian Hmong, we have the hugely successful Asian Koreans. And so on.
Race is not a particularly meaningful predictor of outcomes. It is behaviors and cultural values (both family and social) which are far more predictive of outcomes among immigrants.
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