President Bush, an outspoken supporter of strong marriages, has responded tothis conservative social agenda with several policy initiatives. First, theadministration's new welfare-reform proposal adds a few key words to the fourthgoal of the 1996 welfare-reform act: "to encourage the formation and maintenanceof healthy two-parent married families and responsible fatherhood[emphasis added]." Next, it dedicates $300 million in federal funds to supportmarriage-promotion efforts. Then, the plan encourages states to provide(pared-down) child support and commits the federal government to share in thecosts.
This proposal may soften the opposition from some women's groups to themarriage emphasis. However, the plan only pays lip service to responsiblefatherhood and provides no dedicated federal funds to support such efforts. Thus, responsible-fatherhood groups will have to rely exclusively upon TemporaryAssistance for Needy Families or other state funds, for which there are manycompeting priorities.
Anticipating this new political and policy climate, several fatherhood groupsthat work in predominantly black communities are preparing to expand services toinclude marriage. The most important and innovative groups include the Center forFathers, Families and Workforce Development (CFWD), the National Center forStrategic Nonprofit Planning and Community Leadership (NPCL), and the Institutefor Responsible Fatherhood and Family Revitalization (IRFFR).
CFWD is a community-based responsible-fatherhood program that also providesjob placement and wage- and career-growth services to disadvantaged fathers inBaltimore. The goal is to encourage fathers, whether married or not, to becomemore involved in their children's lives, both emotionally and financially, andto develop a better relationship with the child's mother. NPCL is a nationalintermediary organization that has trained more than 2,500 community-basedpractitioners and agencies that sponsor them. It works, through federally fundeddemonstration projects, to combine child-support enforcement andworkforce-development efforts in support of fragile families, so that fathershave both the means and the commitment to contribute to the support of theirchildren. The organization's recent international conference brought togethermore than 1,200 responsible fatherhood practitioners from the United States andaround the globe. Both organizations are now developing marriage curricula.IRFFR, founded in the 1980s, is perhaps the oldest community-basedresponsible-fatherhood program in the country. These groups, and others withroots in the black community, did not need to be persuaded by the currentpolitical climate that marriage was vital to rebuilding strong black families.
Some observers may accuse them of opportunism or of selling out to theconservative agenda. However, few of these groups opposed marriage in principle,though they did object when the early rhetoric made marriage seem like a panacea-- and when proposals began to surface to make marriage a condition of servicesor bonus payments. The rhetoric has now become more reasonable. The Bushadministration intends to promote "healthy, stable, and happy marriages" andwill target its marriage-promotion efforts at couples who choose to receive suchservices. Like most Americans, black fatherhood groups support this and wish thatall the unwed parents who come to them for help were in a position to benefitfrom such services. As Andrew Billingsley points out in his book ClimbingJacob's Ladder, blacks generally have strong family values; however, theyoften struggle under difficult conditions that make it tough to act on thosevalues. For this reason, Billingsley argues, black communities have had morediverse and complex family systems than whites for as long as blacks have been inthis country.
Unmarried But Not Uninvolved
Fatherhood groups who work in low-income black communities see thisdiversity and complexity every day. They also know that many young unwed parents,especially fathers, simply are unprepared to assume the responsibilities thatwould produce the kind of marriages that increase child well-being. For thisreason, these groups have expanded their services to help fathers make positivecontributions to their children, even while unmarried, and to positionthemselves to assume the responsibilities that would make it possible for them toone day sustain happy marriages. The new services focus on job retention, wageand career growth, and job placement. Besides employment services, groups areproviding legal, educational, team-parenting, substance-abuse, child-support,health, mental-health, spouse-abuse, and other services to meet the needs ofclients and their families. They are also improving their capacity to measureprogram outcomes and diversifying their staff or strengthening existing staff, inhopes that welfare reauthorization would provide additional resources to improvetheir work with fathers and families. These efforts are consistent with the 1996goal of encouraging the formation and maintenance of two-parent families.
But now the Bush administration has raised the standard toemphasize marriage per se. And responsible-fatherhood groups that seek to promotemarriage in predominantly black communities will find it hard to achieve thishigher standard for several reasons. First, there are demographic realities. Thepercentage of black women of childbearing age (say, 15 to 44 years old) who havenever married (41 percent) is just about double the percentage of comparablewhite women. Second, although cohabitation and unwed births have been risingwhile marriage has been declining among all race and ethnic groups, these trendsare far from convergent for whites, blacks, and other groups.
For example, unwed births are more common among cohabiting Puerto Ricanwomen than among black or non-Hispanic white women. However, an unwed first birthhastens the transition to marriage among non-Hispanic white cohabiting women, hasno effect on the transition to marriage among black cohabiting women, and reducesthe prospects of marriage among Puerto Rican cohabiting women.
Given these apparent differences in family formation by race and ethnicity,our research team at Columbia University and Princeton University has been usingdata from a new birth cohort survey to study the likely effects of theadministration's approach on black and nonblack children and families. We assumethat marriage is the best option even for the children of unwed parents, if onlybecause marriages tend to last longer than cohabiting relationships. However, wealso acknowledge the diversity of family systems. In particular, we acknowledgethat in black communities (both here and abroad), father-child contact oftenoccurs through nonresidential, visiting relationships between unwed parents,which are less stable than cohabiting relationships. This means that, unliketraditional models of family formation, unwed parents have four options to choosefrom: no father-child contact, some father-child contact, cohabitation, andmarriage. Moreover, it turns out that Billingsley's metaphor powerfully predictswhat could happen if the Bush administration's marriage initiatives could be usedflexibly to strengthen families, because these options resemble a ladder leadingto more intense and enduring forms of father-child contact.
That is, policies often have unintended effects. Thus, the responses of someunwed parents to policies that promote marriage may fall short of theadministration's ideal but still result in more intense and enduring forms offather-child contact than would have occurred otherwise. For example, throughoutthe past two decades, the fraction of low-skilled men who are either working orlooking for work has shrunk, despite strong economic growth interrupted by briefrecessions. If welfare programs were able to help these men find jobs, somefathers who are not now in regular contact with their children might begin to be.Other fathers who now visit their children might live with them. And still otherfathers who are living with their children (and their children's mother) would bemarried. Moreover, such a policy might have large effects on family formation andfather-child contact for black unwed parents and, to a lesser extent, for nonblack unwed parents. Other policies might have the same effects on familyformation and father-child contact for black and nonblack unwed parents.
Strengthening Families As They Exist
Our study shows that fathers' employment benefits black andnonblack children, no matter where their parents begin on the ladder to moreintense and enduring forms of father-child contact. Compared with children whosefathers did not work, children with working fathers were more likely to have somecontact with their fathers, more likely to live with their fathers (and mothersin cohabiting relationships), and more likely to live with their fathers in atraditional married family. Having children with one partner rather than multiple partners also increases the odds of maintaining relationships withchildren, all the way up the ladder, in black and nonblack families alike.However, a mother's work history prior to giving birth increases the odds ofcohabitation and marriage among black unwed parents but has no statisticallysignificant effect on the odds of moving up the ladder for nonblacks. Thus, byproviding employment services (for men as well as women) and an emphasis onpreventing out-of-wedlock births, welfare policy could increase marriage andother forms of father-child contact for blacks and increase (or leave unchanged)the same outcomes for nonblacks.
Other policies would affect these groups or outcomes differently. Highercash benefits increase the odds that black and nonblack fragile families havesome father-child contact and the odds that they cohabit, but have no effect onthe odds that they marry. By contrast, more effective child-support enforcementincreases the odds of marriage among nonblacks but reduces the odds offather-child contact, without affecting the odds of marriage among blacks.
Unfortunately, these promising policy instruments have beensidelined in the current debate. Instead, the administration is placing itsentire emphasis on promoting marriage. Our research suggests such efforts wouldproduce mixed results. They might encourage some unwed mothers to marry. We find,for example, that nonblack unwed mothers with some religious affiliation are morelikely to marry the fathers of their children than those without a religiousaffiliation. Black unwed mothers affiliated with faith communities that holdconservative views on family issues are more likely to marry the fathers of theirchildren than are black unwed mothers with no religious affiliation.
However, great caution is required before black communities would embracesuch approaches -- because the approaches are likely to celebrate the virtues ofmarriage while stigmatizing unwed births, something blacks traditionally have notdone because of historical experience. Although rates have risen in recentdecades, single motherhood has been much more common among black families formore than 100 years. The reasons for this are complex. Some black women becamesingle mothers because they (and the fathers of their children) violated socialand religious prohibitions against nonmarital sex. Others became single mothersbecause they were raped or their husbands were lynched. Still others becamesingle mothers because their husbands migrated north in search of employment butnever returned after job discrimination dashed their hopes.
Often in the painful history of race relations in this country, desertion andvictimization were as likely the causes of single motherhood as was moralfailure. In any individual case, who could know? Who would ask? In response, theblack community developed a tradition of embracing all of its children, even thefair-skinned ones. Under these circumstances, stigmatizing unwed births wasimpossible. Fortunately, in many respects the circumstances have changed.
There is mounting evidence that children are better off if theygrow up in healthy, married-couple families. This poses a unique challenge forthe black community, because the substantial retreat from marriage in the blackcommunity has created extraordinarily high rates of childbearing and childrearing among unwed blacks. Marriage proponents would be wise to let thisevidence prick the conscience of the nation with this question: How did we allowchildbirth and child rearing to divorce themselves from marriage? The diverserace and ethnic groups that now constitute America will have different answers --and different strategies for creating or re-creating the most supportive familyarrangements for children.
As they wrestle with this question, each group will be forced toreflect on its past and its future and to develop responses. If the issue isforced by heavily subsidizing marriage, the response that is easiest for whitesbut hardest for blacks will only provide a common threat against which blackswill rally. This will only distract them from the kind of private, searchingdialogue the black community needs to reach into its own soul and find what isbest for all its children, those whose parents marry and those whose parents donot.
