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About the Boys
“It’s about what these women will let guys get away with.” You may not expect to hear commentary like that at your garden variety think tank panel discussion, but it got pretty lively at the American Enterprise Institute discussion on the topic “Do Healthy Families Affect the Wealth of States?”
Megan McArdle of Bloomberg View is author of the above comment. The question at hand was: Why are so many young women (64 percent of moms under the age of 30) having children out of wedlock? The class divide in America is nowhere as wide as on the matter of marriage. College educated men and women are sticking with the traditional order of marriage first, children after. Not only that, but they are far less likely to divorce than their parents’ generation. Those with only some college or less, by contrast, are much less likely to marry before having children, and much more likely to divorce if they do marry.
McArdle was answering her own question in a sense. She noted that many who had studied the retreat from marriage among the uneducated propose the “working class men are garbage” thesis. According to this view, lots of young men are unemployed and playing video games all day. Why would a young woman want to marry such a loser? She’d just be getting another kid.
But as McArdle observes, someone is enabling that behavior on the part of the young men. Someone is putting a roof over their heads, food in their bellies, and paying the electricity bill so that the game console stays on. Is it his parents? Or is it a young woman? If she has a child (possibly his child), she is eligible for a whole panoply of government assistance, including TANF, food stamps, WIC, housing assistance, low income home energy assistance, and much more. Thirty years ago, in Losing Ground, Charles Murray wondered whether the welfare state was enabling the sort of behavior that isn’t good for people – like having children out of wedlock.
The question still stands. In the interim, Congress passed and President Bill Clinton signed a welfare reform bill that was successful in reducing welfare dependency to some degree and certainly contributed to a drop in childhood poverty. Two disheartening things have happened since: 1) the Obama administration unilaterally vitiated the work requirements in the welfare law through regulation; and 2) the secular trend toward unwed parenthood continued unabated.
Is it the lack of jobs for high school graduates that has made young men less “marriageable” or is it the retreat from marriage that makes kids who grow up in unstable homes less able to take advantage of job opportunities? Chicken? Egg?
Most of the panel members agreed that causation is probably a two-way street. What is not in doubt is the association of intact families with greater wealth, employment, security, and all-around high functioning. A study by W. Bradford Wilcox, Joseph Price, and Robert I. Lerman found that states with higher than average percentages of married parents were associated with higher median incomes, lower levels of child poverty, greater social mobility, and higher male labor force participation rates, among other measures of success, than states with higher levels of unwed parenting.
Life ain’t fair, and cannot be made perfectly fair. But it almost seems a conspiracy of silence among the college educated to keep from the working class the key secret to their success. Particularly in families with college-educated couples who don’t divorce (the vast majority), children are given security, stability, money, time, a kin network, and a thousand other advantages. The children of single parents, by contrast (and yes, many do fine) are much more likely to suffer from feelings of abandonment, to live in poverty, to cope with emotional tumult in their mother’s life (most live with mom), to be sexually abused, to be forced to adapt to a blended family, and so on. Also, as David Autor and Melanie Wasserman suggest in their report Wayward Sons for The Third Way: “A growing body of evidence … indicates that the absence of stable fathers from children’s lives has particularly significant adverse consequences for boys’ psychosocial development and educational achievement.”
There may be lots of reasons, starting with their parents, why many young, high school graduate males are unemployed and playing video games. But if young women consider them unfit husbands, they ought also to be unfit fathers, right? Unless, the state is the father. Over to you, Charles Murray.
Published in Domestic Policy, Marriage
I have two daughters and I hate what feminism has done to men and boys. I don’t want my girls to have to mine through the dating pool of “girly men” to find the one diamond in the rough (if it is even possible).
I asked a single Eastern European colleague of mine who is living in Scandinavia, about the men in that country as opposed to the men in her country. She concluded that all Scandinavian men were gay, that the men were women and the women were men there. That definetly highlighted the difference, for me anyways, between Eastern European and Western Europeans, and Western Europe is far ahead of the US in regards to the gender wars.
Ruh-roh. (Ok, I’m giggling a bit although I realize this is totally inappropriate.)
I will say – in all seriousness – that I am verklempt at all the comments about “feminism” as if the late Betty Friedan, Gloria Steinem and Terry O’Neill (current Prez of NOW) are raising your children.
They aren’t but the parents should be. Take back the night!
EThompson- Believe me when she said that to my friend and I we were in the same boat, we had to hold back our laughter to the point that I think red wine came out my nose LOL.
I am not letting Gloria Steinnam and the like raise my girls but some women are allowing them to raise their boys, that is my issue. I just hope more don’t so that my girls have a fighting chance of finding a decent husband.
I think it is less about a specific woman civilizing a specific man (though that is a common theme in fiction) than it is about the entirety of woman hood holding all men to a certain standard of respectability before giving them the time of day. Once a man has a woman, he loses a lot of motivation to better himself, but a man without a woman has motivation aplenty.
I agree that women can be a civilizing force, but parents are even far more of a civilizing force. The “women” whom we are expecting to civilize men are teenage girls and twentysomethings; yes, they can be a civilizing force, but only if they are taught how to be a civilizing force by parents who back them up. That isn’t happening right now.