The Two-Parent Privilege – Part 6

Have increased government welfare benefits led to an increase in single-parenthood?

Continuing this essay series on the benefits to children of two-parent families, this essay will explore the question as to whether increased government welfare benefits have led to an increase in single-parenthood.

Thomas Sowell, in his book Black Rednecks and White Liberals, explains the impact of “redneck culture” in the South (a culture brought to America by Ulster Scots). As Arthur Herman explains in his book How the Scots Invented the Modern World, “The term used to describe them was rednecks, a Scots border term meaning Presbyterians. Another was cracker, from the Scots word craik for ‘talk,’ meaning a loud talker or braggart. Both words became permanent parts of the American language, and a permanent part of the identity of the Deep South the Ulster Scots created,” which included Southern blacks following the Civil War.  As Sowell explains his summary of the history of the black population in America:

The history of the black population of the United States might be summed up in broad outlines as follows: Sold into slavery by African leaders, at a time when slavery was widely accepted in all civilizations, blacks entered a particular segment of American society and culture at the bottom, acquiring only the rudiments of Western civilization—not including literacy, in most cases—and a way of life influenced by a peculiar redneck culture. Freed after the Civil War but poverty-stricken, illiterate, unskilled and unacculturated to the demanding way of life in a free republic with a market economy, blacks began their history as a free people at the bottom of American society. One sign of their lack of preparation for life as a free people was a rate of mortality among blacks in the aftermath of emancipation that was greater than it had been under slavery. This was just one sign of a more general lag in adjusting to the norms of the society around them. The small enclaves of New England culture transplanted among blacks—via Oberlin College and Dunbar High School, as well as in black colleges established in the South by New Englanders—did not promote pride in the existing black redneck culture. On the contrary, the clear message in these enclaves was that the way most blacks talked, the way they behaved, and the whole set of redneck values they inherited, were all wrong and were things to be overcome. The wholly disproportionate number of black leaders and high achievers who came out of these small enclaves is further evidence in the case of “pride” versus “self-hate.” Among both blacks and white liberals, there were those who thought that cultural changes among blacks were unnecessary, that there could be progress without internal cultural change, effects without causes. In the post-1960s world, such views gained the ascendancy—and those who held these views often wondered why it was so hard to raise ghetto blacks out of poverty and social disintegration. Their answer was usually a call for more welfare state programs, more “pride” and “self-esteem,” more steeping in the history of black achievement or white injustice. The actual track record of this approach, compared to the opposite approach in the New England enclaves, received virtually no attention. Fortunately, in the decades before this mindset became fixed, most blacks had become better educated and had lifted themselves out of poverty at a rate higher than that after the civil rights revolution of the 1960s. For example, more blacks rose into professional and other higher level occupations in the years preceding the Civil Rights Act of 1964 than in the years following its enactment. This factual history served no one’s political agenda and has since been replaced by a fictional history that does. The economic advancement of blacks has been widely portrayed as due to the civil rights movement, and to political leaders—black and white—who have proclaimed themselves champions of black Americans. Since no one has as large a vested interest in opposing this view as its proponents have in perpetuating it, the politically more convenient view has prevailed, along with attributing the continuing economic and social gaps between blacks and whites to the sins and shortcomings of the latter.

Indeed, marriage rates among women were relatively stable starting from the 1880’s through the 1960’s, when federal welfare programs expanded dramatically, at which point the marriage rates for all racial groups declined, with the rates declining the most among black women.

As Thomas Sowell writes in Social Justice Fallacies:

[T]he poverty rate among black American families as a whole has long been higher than the poverty rate among white American families as a whole. But, over a span of more than a quarter of a century since 1994, in no year has the annual poverty rate of black married-couple families been as high as 10 percent. And in no year in more than half a century since 1959 has the national poverty rate of Americans as a whole been as low as 10 percent. If black family poverty is caused by “systemic racism,” do racists make an exception for blacks who are married? Do racists either know or care whether blacks are married? By contrast, single-parent families have much higher poverty rates than married-couple families— whether they are black or white. White, female-headed, single-parent families have had a poverty rate more than double the poverty rate of black married-couple families in every year from 1994 to 2020, the latest year for which data are currently available … Male-headed, single-parent families are rarer than female-headed, single-parent families, among both blacks and whites. White, male-headed, single-parent families have had a lower rate of poverty than white, female-headed, single-parent families. Nevertheless, white, male-headed, single-parent families have also had a higher poverty rate than black married-couple families, in every year from 2003 to 2020 … As with other disparities, differences between races are not necessarily racial differences, either in the sense of being caused by genes or being caused by racial discrimination. Some behavioral patterns produce similar outcomes in groups that differ by race, so that these disparities in outcomes can reflect disparities in behavior— for whatever reasons— without implying either genetic determinism or societal discrimination. Internationally, in the twenty-first century, there are a number of European nations where at least 40 percent of the births are to unmarried women— and these nations have no “legacy of slavery.” But they have expanded welfare states … The higher incidence of children being born to unmarried women among black Americans is among many other things attributed to a “legacy of slavery.” But, for more than a hundred years after the end of slavery, most black children were born to women who were married, and the children were raised in two-parent homes. Daniel Patrick Moynihan became alarmed, back in the 1960s, because 23.6 percent of black children were born to single mothers in 1963— and that was up from 16.8 percent in 1940. Although these rates for black Americans were much higher than for white Americans, the rate of births to unmarried women among whites also rose suddenly and sharply in the 1960s, after having been— for decades— only a small fraction of what it became after 1960. For neither blacks nor whites does this pattern suggest a “legacy of slavery,” when this upturn in births to unmarried women began for both races with the huge expansion of the welfare state in the 1960s. This new pattern has now persisted for more than half a century. In 2008, births to unmarried women among white Americans reached almost 30 percent.

The decline in two-parent families in the black community is not the result of slavery.  The most comprehensive study of American black families from Emancipation to 1925 concluded that:

At all moments in time between 1880 and 1925 – that is, from an adult generation born in slavery to an adult generation about to be devastated by the Great Depression of the 1930s and the modernization of southern agriculture afterward – the typical Afro-American family was lower-class in status and headed by two parents … The two-parent household was not limited to better-advantaged Afro-Americans … It was just as common among farm laborers, sharecroppers, tenants, and northern and southern urban unskilled laborers and service workers.  It accompanied the southern blacks in the great migration to the North that has so reshaped the United States in the twentieth century.

The stability of the black family continued until the 1960’s, when the mechanization of agriculture caused large numbers of blacks to move to urban areas, where there was greater unemployment, and a greater reliance on then-expanding welfare programs, regardless of work ethic, due to the lack of available jobs.

Interestingly, in her biography of Frances Perkins, The Woman Behind the New Deal: The Life of Frances Perkins, FDR’s Secretary of Labor and His Moral Conscience, Kirstin Downey writes:

[O]nly 3.8 percent of children in female-headed households were illegitimate in 1930, with most mothers having lost their husbands through death or desertion. Frances believed that women needed and deserved reliable support to raise their children and that child rearing is itself a full-time job. She never guessed that there would later be an explosion of out-of-wedlock births because she had grown up believing the stigma of bearing illegitimate children would far outweigh any economic incentives that were built into the new legislation. Over the next few decades, however, impoverished women found that they could get more money from the government by having more children while households in which a man was a full-time resident got no aid at all. This perverse policy had been intended to encourage men to seek gainful employment and support their families, but it had the side effect of discouraging marriage in the first place, spurring even more illegitimate babies, and removing adult men from households that needed them.

As Richard Reeves of the Brookings Institution writes in his book Of Boys and Men: Why the Modern Male Is Struggling, Why It Matters, and What to Do about It:

Mothers have also received growing support from the welfare system, allowing even those with low or no earnings to be freer of the need for a breadwinning husband. As the British politician and scholar David Willetts writes in his book The Pinch, “A welfare system that was originally designed to compensate men for loss of earnings is slowly and messily redesigned to compensate women for the loss of men.

The bipartisan federal welfare reform legislation signed into law by Democratic President Bill Clinton in 1996, known as the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act of 1996 (PRWORA), was directed in part toward the goal of promoting marriage by adding work requirements to federal welfare benefits. As economist Melissa Kearney writes in her book The Two-Parent Privilege: How Americans Stopped Getting Married and Started Falling Behind:

[T]he PRWORA legislation is quite remarkable in how explicitly it favors marriage. The following excerpt is taken directly from the legislation: “The Congress makes the following findings: (1) Marriage is the foundation of a successful society. (2) Marriage is an essential institution of a successful society which promotes the interests of children. (3) Promotion of responsible fatherhood and motherhood is integral to successful child rearing and the well-being of children. (4) In 1992, only 54 percent of single-parent families with children had a child support order established and, of that 54 percent, only about one-half received the full amount due. Of the cases enforced through the public child support enforcement system, only 18 percent of the caseload has a collection. (5) The number of individuals receiving aid to families with dependent children (in this section referred to as ‘‘AFDC’’) has more than tripled since 1965.”

That federal legislation worked in that regard, as federal welfare reform seems to have at least stabilized the downward trend in marriage rates for lower income women following its enactment:

Sadly, since the enactment of the federal 1996 welfare reform legislation, there has been an increased push to revive ever-expanding welfare benefits.  Indeed, a key part of the 2012 Obama-Biden presidential campaign was the explicit touting of federal government benefits that could be enjoyed by single women throughout their lives.

In the next essay in this series, we’ll explore how, as government benefits programs have expanded and become more attractive as an alternative to work, men who drop out of the workforce have become less attractive to women as marriage partners.