HANG-UPS ARE ALWAYS HEALTHY:

A truth buried in the ruins of Watts (Kay S. Hymowitz, August 10, 2005, LA Times)

It was also 40 years ago that Daniel Patrick Moynihan's report on the black family, "The Negro Family: The Case for National Action," came to public attention. In fact, the two events intersected in ways that complicate our understanding of ghetto problems decades later.

In "The Negro Family," Moynihan, then an assistant secretary of Labor in the Johnson administration, warned that almost a quarter of black children were born to unmarried women — and that this rise in single-mother families was no harmless lifestyle choice. He argued that the married-couple family was "the basic socializing unit" and that its unraveling was the cause of a "tangle of pathology" infecting the ghetto, including high rates of delinquency, joblessness, school failure and male alienation, which he demonstrated in pages of disquieting charts and graphs. [...]

Feminist- and black pride-inspired thinkers of the late 1960s and early '70s went much further than simply accusing Moynihan of racism. They romanticized families headed by mothers as both liberated kinship groups and a vestige of authentic African traditions. They rejected the nuclear family as a white — read: toxic — hang-up.

"One must question the validity of the white, middle-class lifestyle from its very foundation because it has already proven itself to be decadent and unworthy of emulation," wrote Joyce Ladner in her 1972 book, "Tomorrow's Tomorrow." Ladner also edited a tome, titled "The Death of White Sociology," filled with essays by top black scholars who jeered at the social science that undergirded Moynihan's research.

As it happens, both sides got to put their theories to the test. By 1980, the out-of-wedlock birthrate among blacks rose to 56%. By 2000, more than two-thirds of black children were born to unmarried women; in inner-city areas such as Harlem or Watts, where the number was closer to 90%, marriage had become virtually extinct.

And how did the ghetto fare as a nuclear-family-free zone? Well, poverty, welfare dependency, crime, drug addiction, school failure all escalated. By the early 1980s, the condition of the ghetto was so critical that experts began to talk about an "underclass" whose characteristics, lo and behold, closely resembled Moynihan's "tangle of pathology."

Finally, by the middle of the 1990s, social scientists reached a consensus: Growing up with a single mother puts children at significant risk of poverty, school failure, teen pregnancy and a host of other ills.

Moynihan hadn't been racist; like prophets throughout history, he had the misfortune of simply being right.

Of course, he had the advantage that the experiment undergirding his conclusion had been running for a couple thousand years.

MORE:
Just say "I do": The Bush administration's Wade Horn pushes marriage as an important weapon in the war on poverty (Russ Pulliam, World)

"Fight poverty. Stay married."

That could be a Wade Horn bumper sticker.

Mr. Horn is one of the chief architects of the George W. Bush administration strategy of making the two-parent family central to the battle against poverty. With a Ph.D. in child psychology Mr. Horn is not inclined to a bumper-sticker approach to family issues. He acknowledges the exceptions and tries not to be simplistic. Yet as a general rule, children need a father and mother as a parenting team, he says, and government shouldn't be afraid to wrap its policies around that kind of wisdom.

Mr. Horn's task is to help the Bush administration take a step-by-step approach to stamping family-friendly policies on federal social programs.

His title, like much of the federal government, is bloated: "Assistant Secretary for Children and Families with the Administration for Children and Families in the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services."

But his message is compact: "Government sends a signal to the culture. It has enormous impact in the kinds of messages it sends out," he said. "When government is afraid to use the word marriage it sends a message that marriage is no longer something we should value. Just recapturing the word is valuable."

Posted by Orrin Judd at August 10, 2005 9:23 AM