Marriage is now a hot topic in Washington policy circles. Ensuring that more children are born and raised within marriage is, in my view, a worthy objective. Marriage as a value has begun to disappear from the cultural lexicon, and affirmative efforts to underscore its importance, especially to children, should not be dismissed. But this begs the question of what states or the federal government realistically can do to promote it.
The problem is not that people don't marry. Ninety percent of all Americanwomen are married by the age of 45. The problem is early childbearing. Until theyare in their mid-twenties, more women have had babies than have married. Afterthe mid-twenties, the numbers reverse. The issue, then, is timing. We don't needto encourage more people to marry unless our goal is to reach 100 percent married(which, incidentally, would require that we legalize same-sex marriages). What weneed instead is to stop people from having babies before they get married. Mostof these births are unintended and most are the result of early unprotected sex.
The place to start, obviously, is with teenagers. Although only 30 percent ofall out-of-wedlock births are to teens, half of first out-of-wedlock births are to women under the age of 20. Having had a first baby outside marriage, these teens often drop out of school, go on welfare, and have additional children in their twenties without marrying. In other words, the problem isn't limited to teens but it typically begins in the teenage years. And these families started by a teen mother are the ones most at risk of long-term poverty and a host of other problems.
Will more marriage solve this problem? Hardly. Marriages among teenagers arenotoriously unstable. In addition, once a woman has become a single mother, herchances of marrying anyone other than the father of her child are greatlyreduced. New research by Daniel Lichter shows that this failure to marry ismostly a result of the presence of children rather than the characteristics ofthe mothers themselves. It seems obvious, but marriage advocates seem not to havenoticed that young men are reluctant to take responsibility for someone else'schild. William Julius Wilson long ago popularized the notion that the absence ofmarriageable males in many distressed urban black communities inhibits marriage.What Lichter is finding is that there's a shortage of marriageable females ingeneral.
Better-educated women are increasingly delaying both marriage and childbearinguntil they are in their mid- to late twenties and even older. This pattern isconsistent with spending more time in school and with establishing a career pathbefore taking on family responsibilities. Our goal should be to helpless-educated women follow a similar path. The alternative -- to encourage girlsin their teens or early twenties to marry -- is not consistent with society'sinterest in encouraging people to acquire the skills needed in the new economy orwith the job opportunities available to today's young women.
Moreover, older parents are usually better parents, so this strategy wouldwork to improve child well-being. And later marriages are much more stable. So ifwe want to discourage divorce, this makes sense as well. Indeed, age at marriageis the primary predictor of marital stability.
If early childbearing is the problem, what is the solution? Haven't effortsto reduce teen pregnancies and births been a failure? Ten years ago the answerto this question might have been yes. But there are now reasons for much greateroptimism. First of all, teen pregnancies and birthrates have declined sharply inthe 1990s. Between 1991 and 2000, the teen birthrate declined 22 percent to 48.5births per 1,000 females 15 to 19 years old. (The declines were especially sharpfor black teens.) Because so many of these teen births are to unmarried women,this decline has contributed very directly to a leveling off of the proportion ofall children born outside marriage in the late 1990s.
But there is a second reason to be optimistic. Recent research has found anumber of programs that effectively prevent teen pregnancies. These includesex-education programs that encourage abstinence but also teach about birthcontrol, and youth-development programs such as after-school mentoring orcommunity service. Another promising approach is public-service ad campaigns thatuse the power of the media to reach large numbers of teens in a way that willnever be possible through community-based efforts or classroom instruction alone.
Conservatives want to reduce early out-of-wedlock pregnancies by funding"abstinence only" education programs. The Bush administration's budget proposesto increase funding for these from $102 million to $135 million. These programshave not been adequately evaluated and, so far, their effectiveness has not beenproven. That doesn't mean that encouraging abstinence is a bad idea.Teen-pregnancy rates dropped in the 1990s because of more abstinence and more orbetter use of birth control. Nor does it mean that encouraging people to delaychildbearing until they are married is a bad idea. But government programs andsex-education curricula dictated from Washington are not the best way ofachieving these goals. Instead, we should focus on empowering parents, schools,and nonprofit organizations, including those that are religiously affiliated, tosend the message that children are better off with two committed parents who aremarried to each other. That means delaying unprotected sex and unwanted births.
Given these facts, what should Congress do when it reauthorizesthe welfare law this year? First, lawmakers should not expect that most stateswould know what to do with funds earmarked for encouraging marriage or that theirefforts are likely to be very successful. While there is nothing wrong withexperimenting with marriage-education and counseling programs, so far there islittle or no evidence to show that they will succeed. These programs are untestedand don't tackle the real source of the problem, which is not a failure to marrybut rather a failure to delay childbearing until marriage. Some people argue thatwe should aim marriage-counseling efforts at young cohabiting couples who havealready had a baby. Maybe this will work. But it's a lot like trying to put thehorse back in the barn. One hears a lot of talk about how we should support unwedfathers but not much about how to prevent them from becoming fathers in the firstplace.
For all these reasons, it would be better to provide states with flexiblefunding that could be used for a variety of efforts. This aid should be tied tosuccess in achieving the basic purposes of the law, including itsfamily-formation objectives. Based on existing research and experience, one ofthe most effective strategies states could choose if they want to reduce welfaredependency, child poverty, and the growth of single-parent families would be toemphasize programs that have a proven track record in reducing teen pregnancy.But let them choose from the full menu of approaches depending on their ownassessment of the evidence and on local community values.
Finally, any diversion of resources from the more basic task of supportingneedy families and "making work pay" would be unwise. Messages about marriage andabout teen-pregnancy prevention need to target the younger generation. Those whoare already single parents have little choice but to do the best job they can atmaking a living and raising their children, and they need our help.
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