The plight of inner-city blacks that Patrick Moynihan chronicled in his 1965 paper The Negro Family is now the plight of middle-America working-class whites. The typical child born to white parents without a college degree is growing up without the benefit of married parents at home.
You could say there’s a fatherhood crisis in Trump Country.
Marriage is declining fast in the U.S. Only half of adults are married. It was about three-fourths a generation ago.
You might go along with the explanation from the wonks at Vox.com, who say “the ‘decline’ of marriage isn’t a problem,” but is, rather, “a consequence of something good.” The argument for this is that women have been liberated by greater economic equality with men, and so now, they’re not forced to hitch their fortunes to a man.
But the data don’t support this explanation. The retreat from marriage isn’t Wesleyan-educated feminists refusing to tie themselves to a patriarchal institution, or enlightened elites eschewing a tired tradition. The collapse of marriage is mostly among those with no college degrees who don’t have great financial prospects.
Two-thirds of college-educated adults over 25 are married, compared to a bare majority of those without college degrees. The collapse of marriage outpaces the decline in childbirth, which thus produced a massive increase in the number of unmarried working-class fathers over the past two generations.
Nearly 60 percent of all babies born to non-college women are born out of wedlock. For college-educated mothers, the number is 1 in 10. So, out-of-wedlock births are the norm in the working class, but an exception among the elites.
“[W]hen it comes to the family, America really has become two nations,” scholar Kay Hymowitz wrote last decade. “The old-fashioned married-couple-with-children model is doing quite well among college-educated women. It is primarily among lower-income women with only high school education that it is in poor health.”
This is even more true today than it was when those words were written.
Why is this happening? Part of the problem is that low-skilled men are having a harder time finding well-paid work that allows one to head a household. The blue-collar labor market has shifted from lifelong union jobs in factories to intermittent and irregular service jobs at lower pay.
For a woman, a lifelong commitment to the father of their child looks less appealing when he doesn’t have a steady income.
A deeper problem deterring family formation is the erosion of community. Neighborhoods with less civil society engagement, less church attendance, less community activity, and less neighborliness tend to have less marriage and more children raised out of wedlock. It’s hard to raise a family without a support structure around you.
But ultimately, the reason so many children are being raised without fathers is that so many working-class white fathers aren’t behaving as fathers should.
There are some societal fixes to this problem: We ought to scrap poverty-trap welfare policies and strive for an economy that creates reliable blue-collar jobs; we need to make our own communities stronger and get rid of the anti-social policies that weaken communities.
But better jobs or a more generous safety net won’t lead to a resurgence of working-class marriage. In fracking country, where unskilled labor makes $18 an hour, there has been no rebound in marriage, although birth rates have risen.
Blaming weaker communities for weaker families can become circular reasoning. Communities are stronger when they are made up of intact families. Intact families are necessary to a good parish school, a good tee-ball league, and a good religious congregation.
In a time when the white working class, with the help of Republican politicians, has found plenty of scapegoats for its suffering, it’s important to return to the conservative idea of individual responsibility.
Paternity is a fairly easy thing to achieve. Being a real father involves a lot more work. Working-class men need to take up that demanding work.
