Poverty & Family Cohesion

I have very much appreciated Greg's poverty- and inequality-related posts over the last several days, including that he has shared with us today.  I do want to sound one cautionary note, however, concerning the observations made by Ari Fleischer to which Greg calls our attention this morning.  I allude to the direction of causality in places where poverty and family composition are corrolated. 

It is widely observed in the social science literature that people experience much greater difficuly in forming and maintaining stable families when they are in dire poverty.  It is also widely observed that 'cultures' of child-bearing outside of stable family structures tend to develop in desperately poor communities.  Even apart from the social science literature, many of us hear anecdotally or directly experience the near truism that one of the primary sources of marriage- and family-imperiling stress in contemporary society is 'money trouble.'  And it is not difficult to imagine why families in which one or two parents must work very long hours, often at multiple low-wage fast-food or retail jobs, tend to be families in which children have little time with or guidance from their parents.  This is precisely why many of our peer nations in Europe and East Asia not only work to ensure that the national income is distributed more equitably, but also mandate and/or directly subsidize generous family leave provisions in their labor laws.

Against this backdrop, Mr. Fleischer's column could have been titled 'Want to Fight the Breakdown of the Family? Then Fight Income Inequality' at least as plausibly as it is presently titled.  And the paragraph quoted by Greg could just as well have read thus:

If President Obama wants to address 'the breakdown of the family,' he should focus more on redistributing income and thereby on fighting a major cause of family insecurity: poverty. . . According to Census Bureau information analyzed by the Beverly LaHaye Institute, among families living in poverty, just 7.5% were headed by two married parents. By contrast, 33.9% of impoverished  families are headed by a single mother.

I suspect that there's a good bit of symbiosis at work in these correlations.  Poverty renders family stability much more difficult to maintain, and unstable families in turn render poverty more difficult to escape.  When it comes to public policy, however, I suspect that it is much more difficult for a government directly to effect more familial stability in impoverished communities than it is to improve employment rates, incomes, family leave provisions and educational opportunities.  That, then, might be the best way to improve family stability.  

Robert Hockett