Posted on 03/27/2015 8:34:53 AM PDT by Kaslin
Our kids, at least many of them, are not doing very well. The reason, writes Harvard professor Robert Putnam in his just-published "Our Kids: The American Dream in Crisis," is the "two-tier pattern of family structure" that emerged in the 1970s and 1980s and continues to prevail today.
Starting in the late 1960s, rates of divorce, unmarried births and single parenthood rose sharply among all segments of society. About a decade later, they fell and leveled off among the college-educated, who almost entirely raise their kids in Ozzie-and-Harriet style families today (except that Mom usually works outside the home).
Among the bottom third of Americans in education and income, however, the negative trend accelerated. In 1965, Daniel Patrick Moynihan was alarmed that 26 percent of black births were to unmarried children. The rate is about twice that for the least educated third of Americans of all races today.
This shouldn't come as a surprise. Charles Murray's 2012 book "Coming Apart" describes the same phenomenon among white Americans. Curiously, Putnam refers only glancingly to Murray's work. But Putnam agrees with Murray (perhaps grudgingly) that this is bad for the kids involved.
They're careful to concede that single parents have a hard job and that some do well at it. But the data says those are the exception rather than the rule. On average and by a wide margin, children raised in such households do worse in school, have more trouble with the law and make less money and gain less satisfaction in life than those from the stable families of the upper third.
Putnam is troubled by the resulting inequality and lack of upward mobility. He begins "Our Kids" in Port Clinton, Ohio, where he grew up in the 1950s in a community unequal in income, but egalitarian in manners and mores. Since then, Port Clinton's factory jobs have mostly disappeared and the town seems riven between the gleaming condominiums on the now-clean waters of Lake Erie and gritty neighborhoods where many kids grow up in disorderly homes.
With a corps of researchers, Putnam fanned out across the country and found similar trends from fast-growing Bend, Oregon, to the down-at-the-heels Kensington neighborhood of Philadelphia. He tells the stories and quotes the words -- often heart-wrenching, sometimes heart-warming -- of specific kids identified by first names.
"America's poor kids do belong to us and we to them," he concludes. "They are our kids." The nation as a whole has to do something to help them. But what?
Send them money is one answer. But as the Manhattan Institute's Scott Winship points out, low-level wages and incomes, taking into account proper inflation measures and fringe benefits, have not fallen over the last 40 years. Food and clothing has become less expensive (thanks, Wal-Mart) and most households classified as poor have smartphones, microwaves and big-screen TVs that did not exist in the 1960s.
Like Sen. Mike Lee and other reform conservatives, Putnam would increase the Earned Income Tax Credit and expand the child tax credit. Marginal help. He hails the bipartisan support for reducing incarceration for minor offenses and helping ex-convicts. And let's, he says, eliminate pay-for-play fees for extracurricular activities.
Other proposals sound unavailing, like moving low-education households to more upscale suburbs; Section 8 housing subsidies already do that. And Putnam's faith that child care centers and mandatory pre-school can make a difference haven't been supported by research, except for two experiments more than 40 years ago whose results haven't been replicated.
Putnam doubts the chances of "a reversal of long-established trends in private norms," though they're common in history: The gin-soaked mobs of 18th-century London became the orderly Victorian masses. Like most high-education Americans, he doesn't want to denounce people for breaking old moral rules even when that hurts their kids.
The libertarian Murray doubts that government can do much. But he thinks that high-education elites, with their strong family structures, can. They need to "preach what they practice." Bloomberg's Megan McArdle, agreeing, nominates Hollywood for a lead role. Midcentury America's universal media -- radio, movies, television -- celebrated the old rules.
There are signs this is happening. Teenage birth and violent crime rates have been falling. Younger millennials may be learning delayed gratification and self-restraint. Maybe, as they grow older, divorce and single parenthood will become less common, too. Few kids in broken homes will read "Our Kids or Coming Apart." But they already know the story.
Crawling closer to Idiocracy every day.
Can Family Breakdown in Low-Education America Be Reversed? Maybe
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Maybe indeed. But only if “Low Education America” can ignore and overcome the liberal political climate so predominate in our government.
“Low Education America” my Obama! Just another term for low information voters. Voters, by the way, that have been carefully crafted and groomed by Great Society socialists for decades.
Crawling closer to Idiocracy every day.
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I vehemently disagree. These bastages are RUNNING toward Idiocracy as fast as they can.
Just how many trillions more shall we send? Isn't this what Monihan/Johnson's Great Society was supposed to fix?
Here's a clue, this will NEVER get “fixed” — ever. In fact, it is most certainly going to get worse, far worse. We are already reaping what Liberals have fought so very hard to sow. You can just see the feral youths, deprived of a father and a family are becoming more brutal. This will continue.
Liberals demanded feminism. Liberals demanded paying women to have children out-of-wedlock. Liberals demanded we all ridicule the 1950’s and the “Leave it to Beaver” way of life.
The Liberals told us that America was too puritanical. Liberals, such as Kinsey, told that Americans were too sexually repressed. MTV shows programs glorifying single parenting and becoming a pregnant as a teen.
The list goes on and on. Make no mistake, there are certain immutable truths in the universe and one of them is that you reap what you sow. The Liberals have long gotten their way in the public sector as Liberals promised that we could each be our own god, answerable to no one.
Things will only get worse. There is simply no changing this trajectory unless there is a great awakening in America, but the hour is late, and the bill is coming due.
This has been tried for decades and hasn't worked. It just exports the problems to other neighborhoods, drops housing values for those who have worked hard for their homes, turns neighborhood schools into inner city schools and forces the working people into suburbs farther away.
I look at it as a longstanding decline, you see it as more immediate or maybe moving up to light speed. I probably don’t disagree with that.
Either way, the depressing result is the same.
Can Family Breakdown in Low-Education America Be Reversed?
Absolutely!
Step 1—Stop paying single women to have babies.
Barone and his GOPe buddies promote the idea of giving kids two daddies and/or two mommies. Nothing he says about the welfare of kids interests me.
I blame women.
Having children out of wedlock IS stacking the deck against your OWN kid.
All the numbers bear this out... so it’s a choice (that the MSM has glamorized) and that low IQ types have accepted wholesale.
They want to be like their favorite film personality or TV idol... ‘who needs a traditional family?’
Well, YOUR kid does, for one! STOP BEING SO SELFISH AND STUPID!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Was Jesus “highly” educated?
Basically the Democrats do not give a whit for kids. They spend trillions that we do not have that the kids will have to pay. They encourage divorce by trumpeting overblown domestic violence claims. They encourage the black culture which views the income stream of baby mamas to be the acceptable lifestyle. They promote the war on women so that the single women will vote for them.
The education system is so broken that children and their young single parents have no way of getting a clue how to improve their situation.
It is orchestrated to be this way. The Democrats have orchestrated and perpetual a continual underclass of people.
You are so right.
You are correct. And, this was what Section 8 housing was all about, integrating low-income households into higher income areas. I don’t know of any studies or evidence other than anecdotal, but everything I have seen seems to demonstrate that what happens is that the area go downhill precipitously and those who were in the area previously run away (move out) — fast.
It doesn’t matter if you put just a little bit of yeast in a batch of dough, it all becomes leavened.
I think the fed. gov. should drop some of these Section Eight projects into wealthy, lib neighborhoods. I’m sure they’d enjoy the diversity. (snicker)
But on second thought-
No.
Destroy the family, you destroy the country.
— Vladimir Ilyich Lenin
Who passed no-fault divorce laws so men wouldn't have to pay alimony?
Who passed all the laws to make Feminism our new culture?
Who gets all those single women pregnant?
Who made abortion legal?
Who walks away from their own children to allow them to be raised by unloving stepfathers?
MEN!
So all the loser women with 3 and 4 illegitimate kids I have been supporting are rape victims?
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