Government can’t rear children. It can’t supply the love, skills or social controls that most good parents provide. If girls become mothers before they’re ready and boys won’t be responsible fathers, children will suffer. Period. ““The success of the public safety net . . . depends on the success of the private safety net,’’ writes social critic Richard Neely in a recent book, ““and the private safety net is the family.’'*
Widespread family breakdown dooms programs that might aid small numbers of needy families. Caregivers, social workers and teachers are overwhelmed. Costs soar, and as they do, public compassion and supportcollapse. On welfare, we long ago passed this threshold. In 1994, about 5 million families with 9 million children received Aid to Families With Dependent Children (AFDC). The cost was about $26 billion; food stamps and Medicaid add about $36 billion more.
There’s the dilemma. Despite high spending, benefits for typical welfare families are meager. A family of three receives about $8,000 in AFDC and food-stamp benefits, says Sharon Parrott of the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities; the value of Medicaid adds about $4,500. Raising these benefits would reward a family lifestyle (single parenthood) that clearly hurts children. But reducing the benefits – as Republicans would – also penalizes children, unless reform also deters out-of-wedlock birth.
What Republicans offer is tough love as social policy. Unwed mothers under 18 couldn’t receive an AFDC benefit, though they could still get food stamps and Medicaid. No one could receive AFDC for more than five years, though (again) Medicaid and food stamps could continue indefinitely. Legal immigrants wouldn’t be eligible for any benefits; their sponsors would be expected to provide support. (Illegal immigrants are already ineligible for most benefits.) States would receive block grants to craft programs within these rules. Programs would have to be strict because the block grants would be frozen for five years.
The key test of whether this works is not how many present AFDC mothers go to work – the debate’s misguided focus – but the future rate of out-of-wedlock births, especially among teenagers. People ultimately leave welfare, because children grow up. Welfare rolls don’t decline because new mothers constantly arrive. About 40 percent of them have their first baby as a teen; half of teen mothers go on AFDC within four years of giving birth. Once a young girl becomes an unwed mother, almost all her choices are bad. Going to work may increase her income and even self-esteem; but it also reduces her time with her child.
The virtue of the Republican bill is that it loudly says that society disapproves – not in words, but in deeds. It treats these mothers harshly; it stigmatizes them. Fathers are also tarred: child-support requirements are toughened and, in theory, so is enforcement. (The Clinton administration pushed hard for this.) Unfortunately, the message may miss its intended audience. Even attentive, middle-class parents have trouble controlling adolescent children; government may be unable to reach impoverished teenagers, many already in single-parent homes.
Teens are ““conformists, but kids with little parental supervision are especially vulnerable to their friends,’’ writes Kay Hymowitz in City Journal magazine after interviewing 30 unwed teen mothers. Having a baby ““symbolizes maturity’’ to many girls, she says; to boys, it’s a sexual trophy of ““early manhood.’’ A nurse tells Hymowitz: ““A lot of kids, and I mean boys and girls, are thrilled with having a baby. They love to dress them up and show them off. . . . [When] the baby begins to move around and be a separate person trying to go his own way, they lose interest . . . A lot of relationships end.''
By itself, welfare didn’t cause the surge of out-of-wedlock births. (In 1960 these were 2 percent of white births and 22 percent of black births; by 1991 they were 22 and 68 percent.) But welfare enabled young mothers to live independently and young fathers to abdicate. It condoned irresponsibility in a moral climate that exalted sexual freedom and, until recently, denied the adverse social impact of family breakdown. At some point, social norms changed. ““Illegitimacy’’ became acceptable.
No one knows whether the Republicans’ ““reform’’ can deflect this destructive trend. Claims either way are hollow. But the conventional wisdom about families has shifted, and it’s plausible that if these new ideas are reinforced by stricter welfare rules, even poor teenagers will respond. Again, social norms change. Besides, what’s the choice? The existing approach has failed, and the public has no appetite for vast new social programs even if there were evidence they work (and there isn’t).
It is not that two parents are always better than one. But the odds favor couples, as a study by sociologists Sara McLanahan and Gary Sandefur confirms. ““Compared with teenagers of similar background who grow up with both parents at home,’’ they report, ““adolescents who have lived apart from one [parent] . . . are twice as likely to drop out of high school, twice as likely to have a child before age 20, and one and a half times as likely’’ to be out of school and out of work in their early 20s.**
Good parents can’t guarantee children’s well-being; but they help. Hymowitz confirms this in interviews with young women who hadn’t had babies. Invariably, they came from two-parent families. Girls who grew up with fathers were more self-confident around boys. The only cure for family breakdown is family. If tough love doesn’t work, there may be no love at all.
*““Tragedies of Our Own Making: How Private Choices Have Created Public Bankruptcy.’’ University of Illinois Press, 1994. **““Growing Up With a Single Parent.’’ Harvard University Press, 1994.
