Marriage In America Its A Class Thing - Road to the Middle Class

AS THE JUNE WEDDING season swings around The Economist(sub) is taking a look at marriage in America, keying off Kay Hymowitz’s Marriage and Caste in America. What do they find?

There is a widening gulf between how the best- and least-educated Americans approach marriage and child-rearing.

They have a handy little graph which shows the percentage of children living with single parents since 1964. It looks like this:

Mother’s education	1964	1995	2001
Less than high school	13%	42%	37%
High school	7%	27%	29%
Post high school	6%	25%	23%
College degree	5%	11%	10%

Yes. It’s special, isn’t it?

Now the question is, why? How could the child-raising practices of Americans have diverged so much over half a century? It couldn’t be anything to do with the War on Poverty, could it?

Let us do some reckless speculation. The reason that college-educated women don’t go in for single parenthood is that you can’t raise a middle-class kid in a neighborhood with decent schools and send them to college if you are a single mother. The numbers just don’t add up. For college-educated women it just makes sense to dial in a husband and father when you are planning to have children.

But if you have no education then the government offer of support looks pretty good.

But notice that the incidence of single motherhood has been going down among the least educated since 1995. That’s interesting, isn’t it?

Now let’s see. In 1996 Congress enacted welfare reform. It could be that since the end of welfare-as-we-know-it more under-educated women have been choosing marriage for raising their children.

It’s a concept.

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Christopher Chantrill blogs at www.roadtothemiddleclass.com. His Road to the Middle Class is forthcoming.

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Chappies

“But I saw a man yesterday who knows a fellow who had it from a chappie that said that Urquhart had been dipping himself a bit recklessly off the deep end.” —Freddy Arbuthnot
Dorothy L. Sayers, Strong Poison

Civil Society

“Civil Society”—a complex welter of intermediate institutions, including businesses, voluntary associations, educational institutions, clubs, unions, media, charities, and churches—builds, in turn, on the family, the primary instrument by which people are socialized into their culture and given the skills that allow them to live in broader society and through which the values and knowledge of that society are transmitted across the generations.
Francis Fukuyama, Trust

Hugo on Genius

“Tear down theory, poetic systems… No more rules, no more models… Genius conjures up rather than learns… ” —Victor Hugo
César Graña, Bohemian versus Bourgeois

Education

“We have met with families in which for weeks together, not an article of sustenance but potatoes had been used; yet for every child the hard-earned sum was provided to send them to school.”
E. G. West, Education and the State

Faith & Purpose

“When we began first to preach these things, the people appeared as awakened from the sleep of ages—they seemed to see for the first time that they were responsible beings...”
Finke, Stark, The Churching of America, 1776-1990

Conversion

“When we received Christ,” Phil added, “all of a sudden we now had a rule book to go by, and when we had problems the preacher was right there to give us the answers.”
James M. Ault, Jr., Spirit and Flesh

Postmodernism

A writer who says that there are no truths, or that all truth is ’merely relative’, is asking you not to believe him. So don’t.
Roger Scruton, Modern Philosophy

Faith and Politics

As far as the Catholic Church is concerned, the principal focus of her interventions in the public arena is the protection and promotion of the dignity of the person, and she is thereby consciously drawing particular attention to principles which are not negotiable... [1.] protection of life in all its stages, from the first moment of conception until natural death; [2.] recognition and promotion of the natural structure of the family... [3.] the protection of the right of parents to educate their children.
Pope Benedict XVI, Speech to European Peoples Party, 2006

China and Christianity

At first, we thought [the power of the West] was because you had more powerful guns than we had. Then we thought it was because you had the best political system. Next we focused on your economic system. But in the past twenty years, we have realized that the heart of your culture is your religion: Christianity.
David Aikman, Jesus in Beijing

Religion, Property, and Family

But the only religions that have survived are those which support property and the family. Thus the outlook for communism, which is both anti-property and anti-family, (and also anti-religion), is not promising.
F.A. Hayek, The Fatal Conceit

Conservatism

Conservatism is the philosophy of society. Its ethic is fraternity and its characteristic is authority — the non-coercive social persuasion which operates in a family or a community. It says ‘we should...’.
Danny Kruger, On Fraternity

US Life in 1842

Families helped each other putting up homes and barns. Together, they built churches, schools, and common civic buildings. They collaborated to build roads and bridges. They took pride in being free persons, independent, and self-reliant; but the texture of their lives was cooperative and fraternal.
Michael Novak, The Spirit of Democratic Capitalism

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