The
erosion of marriage during the past four decades has had
large-scale negative effects on both children and adults: It lies
at the heart of many of the social problems with which the
government currently grapples. The beneficial effects of marriage
on individuals and society are beyond reasonable dispute, and there
is a broad and growing consensus that government policy should
promote rather than discourage healthy marriage.
In
response to these trends, President George W. Bush has proposed--as
part of welfare reform reauthorization--the creation of a pilot
program to promote healthy and stable marriage. Participation in
the program would be strictly voluntary. Funding for the program
would be small-scale: $300 million per year. This sum represents
one penny to promote healthy marriage for every five dollars
government currently spends to subsidize single parenthood.
Moreover, this small investment today could result in potentially
great savings in the future by reducing dependence on welfare and
other social services.
The Importance of Marriage
Today, nearly one-third of all American
children are born outside marriage. That's one out-of-wedlock birth
every 35 seconds. Of those born inside marriage, a great many
children will experience their parents' divorce before they reach
age 18. More than half of the children in the United States will
spend all or part of their childhood in never-formed or broken
families.
The
collapse of marriage is the principal cause of child poverty in the
United States. Children raised by never-married mothers are seven
times more likely to live in poverty than children raised by their
biological parents in intact marriages. Overall, approximately 80
percent of long-term child poverty in the United States occurs
among children from broken or never-formed families.
It
is often argued that strengthening marriage would have little
impact on child poverty because absent fathers earn too little.
This is not true: The typical non-married father earns $17,500 per
year at the time his child is born. Some 70 percent of poor single
mothers would be lifted out of poverty if they were married to
their children's father. This is illustrated in Chart 1, which uses
data from the Princeton Fragile Families and Child Well-being
Survey--a well-known survey of couples who are unmarried at the
time of a child's birth. If the mothers remain single and do not
marry the fathers of their children, some 55 percent will be poor.
However, if the mothers married the fathers, the poverty rate would
drop to 17 percent. (This analysis is based on the fathers' actual
earnings in the year before the child's birth.)
The
growth of single-parent families has had an enormous impact on
government. The welfare system for children is overwhelmingly a
subsidy system for single-parent families. Some three-quarters of
the aid to children--given through programs such as food stamps,
Medicaid, public housing, Temporary Assistance to Needy Families
(TANF), and the Earned Income Tax Credit--goes to single-parent
families. (See Chart 2.) Each year, government spends over $150
billion in means-tested welfare aid for single parents.
Growing up without a father in the home
has harmful long-term effects on children. Compared with similar
children from intact families, children raised in single-parent
homes are more likely to become involved in crime, to have
emotional and behavioral problems, to fail in school, to abuse
drugs, and to end up on welfare as adults.
Finally, marriage also brings benefits to
adults. Extensive research shows that married adults are happier,
are more productive on the job, earn more, have better physical and
mental health, and live longer than their unmarried counterparts.
Marriage also brings safety to women: Mothers who have married are
half has likely to suffer from domestic violence as are
never-married mothers.
The Growing Consensus on Promoting Healthy
Marriage
The
overwhelming evidence of the positive benefits of marriage for
children, women, and men has led to a large and growing consensus
that government policy should strengthen marriage--not undermine
it. William Galston, former Domestic Policy Adviser in the Clinton
White House, has stated: "Marriage is an important social good,
associated with an impressively broad array of positive outcomes
for children and adults alike . . . . Whether American Society
succeeds or fails in building a healthy marriage culture is clearly
a matter of legitimate public concern."
Former Vice President Al Gore has
proclaimed, "We need to be a society that lifts up the institution
of marriage." Mr.
Gore and his wife have concurred with the Statement of Principles
of the Marriage Movement, which declares:
We believe that America must strengthen
marriages and families. . . . Strong marriages are a vital
component to building strong families and raising healthy, happy,
well-educated children. Fighting together against the forces that
undermine family values, and creating a national culture that
nurtures and encourages marriage and good family life, must be at
the heart of this great nation's public policy.
Will
Marshall, of the Progressive Policy Institute, and Isabel Sawhill,
widely respected welfare and family expert at the Brookings
Institution, recently issued a paper entitled "Progressive Family
Policy for the 21st Century." Marshall and Sawhill repudiate "the
relativist myth that `alternative family forms' were the equal of
two-parent families," citing a growing body of evidence showing
that--in aggregate--children do best in married, two-parent
families. They argue that "a progressive family policy should
encourage and reinforce married, two-parent families because they
are best for children."
Policy Background
Despite the overwhelming evidence of the
benefits of marriage to families and society, the sad fact is that,
for more than four decades, the welfare system has penalized and
discouraged marriage. The U.S. welfare system is currently composed
of more than 70 means-tested aid programs providing cash, food,
housing, medical care, and social services to low-income persons.
Each year, over $200 billion flows through this system to families
with children. While it is widely accepted that the welfare system
is biased against marriage, relatively few understand how this bias
operates. Many erroneously believe that welfare programs have
eligibility criteria that directly exclude married couples. This is
not true.
Nevertheless, welfare programs do penalize
marriage and reward single parenthood because of the inherent
design of all means-tested programs. In a means-tested program,
benefits are reduced as non-welfare income rises. Thus, under any
means-tested system, a mother will receive greater benefits if she
remains single than she would if she were married to a working
husband. Welfare not only serves as a substitute for a husband, but
it actually penalizes marriage because a low-income couple will
experience a significant drop in combined income if they marry.
For
example: A typical single mother on Temporary Assistance to Needy
Families receives a combined welfare package of various
means-tested aid benefits worth about $14,000 per year. Suppose the
father of her children has a low-wage job paying $16,000 per year.
If the mother and father remain unmarried, they will have a
combined income of $30,000 ($14,000 from welfare and $16,000 from
earnings). However, if the couple marries, the father's earnings
will be counted against the mother's welfare eligibility. Welfare
benefits will be eliminated (or cut dramatically), and the couple's
combined income will fall substantially. Thus, means-tested welfare
programs do not penalize marriage per se but, instead, implicitly
penalize marriage to an employed man with earnings. The practical
effect is to significantly discourage marriage among low-income
couples.
This
anti-marriage discrimination is inherent in all means-tested aid
programs, including TANF, food stamps, public housing, Medicaid,
and the Women, Infants, and Children (WIC) food program. The only
way to eliminate the anti-marriage bias from welfare entirely would
be to make all mothers eligible for these programs regardless of
whether they are married and regardless of their husbands'
earnings. Structured in this way, the welfare system would be
marriage-neutral: It would neither reward nor penalize
marriage.
Such
across-the-board change, however, would cost tens of billions of
dollars. A more feasible strategy would be to experiment by
selectively reducing welfare's anti-marriage incentives to
determine which penalties have the biggest behavioral impact. This
approach is incorporated in the President's Healthy Marriage
Initiative.
President Bush's Initiative to Promote
Healthy Marriage
In
recognition of the widespread benefits of marriage to individuals
and society, the federal welfare reform legislation enacted in 1996
set forth clear goals: to increase the number of two-parent
families and to reduce out-of-wedlock childbearing. Regrettably, in
the years since this reform, most states have done very little to
advance these objectives directly. Out of more than $100 billion in
federal TANF funds disbursed over the past seven years, only about
$20 million--a miniscule 0.02 percent--has been spent on promoting
marriage.
Recognizing this shortcoming, President
Bush has sought to meet the original goals of welfare reform by
proposing a new model program to promote healthy marriage as a part
of welfare reauthorization. The proposed program would seek to
increase healthy marriage by providing individuals and couples
with:
- Accurate information on the value of
marriage in the lives of men, women, and children;
- Marriage-skills education that will enable
couples to reduce conflict and increase the happiness and longevity
of their relationship; and
- Experimental reductions in the financial
penalties against marriage that are currently contained in all
federal welfare programs.
All
participation in the President's marriage program would be
voluntary. The initiative would utilize existing marriage-skills
education programs that have proven effective in decreasing
conflict and increasing happiness and stability among couples.
These programs have also been shown to be effective in reducing
domestic violence.
The pro-marriage initiative would not merely seek to increase
marriage rates among target couples, but also would provide ongoing
support to help at-risk couples maintain healthy marriages over
time.
The
plan would not create government bureaucracies to provide marriage
training. Instead, the government would contract with private
organizations that have successful track records in providing
marriage-skills education.
The
President's Healthy Marriage Initiative is often characterized as
seeking to increase marriage among welfare (TANF) recipients. This
is somewhat inaccurate. Most welfare mothers have poor
relationships with their children's father: In many cases, the
relationship disintegrated long ago. Attempting to promote healthy
marriage in these situations is a bit like trying to glue
Humpty-Dumpty together after he has fallen off the wall. By
contrast, a well-designed marriage initiative would target women
and men earlier in their lives when attitudes and relationships
were initially being formed. It would also seek to strengthen
existing marriages to reduce divorce.
Typically, marriage promotion programs
would provide information about the long-term value of marriage to
at-risk high school students. They would teach relationship skills
to unmarried couples before the woman became pregnant with a focus
on preventing pregnancy before a couple has made a commitment to
healthy marriage. Marriage programs would also provide marriage and
relationship education to unmarried couples at the "magic moment"
of a child's birth and offer marriage-skills training to low-income
married couples to improve marriage quality and reduce the
likelihood of divorce.
The
primary focus of marriage programs would be preventative--not
reparative. The programs would seek to prevent the isolation and
poverty of welfare mothers by intervening at an early point before
a pattern of broken relationships and welfare dependence had
emerged. By fostering better life decisions and stronger
relationship skills, marriage programs can increase child
well-being and adult happiness, and reduce child poverty and
welfare dependence.
Program Specifics
The
President's Healthy Marriage Initiative has been included in the
two major TANF reauthorization bills. One of these is the Personal
Responsibility, Work, and Family Promotion Act of 2003 (H.R. 4)
that was passed by the U.S. House of Representatives in May 2002
and again in February 2003. The Healthy Marriage Initiative has
also been included in the Personal Responsibility and Individual
Development for Everyone (PRIDE) bill introduced by Senator Charles
Grassley (R-IA) in the U.S. Senate.
The
proposal would create two separate funds to promote marriage. In
the first, $100 million per year would be provided in grants to
state governments for programs to promote healthy marriage.
Participation in this funding program would be voluntary and
competitive. States would neither be required to participate nor
guaranteed funds: Instead, they would compete for funding by
submitting program proposals to the U.S. Department of Health and
Human Services (HHS). The states with the best proposals would be
selected to receive funds. States receiving funding would be
required to match federal grants with state funds. In the second
fund, another $100 million per year would be allocated in
competitive grants to states, local governments, and non-government
organizations.
Both
funding pools could be used for a specified set of activities
consistent with the overarching strategy of promoting healthy
marriage. These activities would include:
- Public advertising campaigns on the value
of marriage and the skills needed to increase marital stability and
health;
- Education in high schools about the value
of marriage, relationship skills, and budgeting;
- Marriage education, marriage-skills
instruction, and relationship-skills programs--which may include
parenting skills, financial management, conflict resolution, and
job and career advancement for non-married pregnant women and
non-married expectant fathers;
- Pre-marital education and marriage-skills
training for engaged couples and for couples or individuals
interested in marriage;
- Marriage-enhancement and marriage-skills
training for married couples;
- Divorce-reduction programs that teach
relationship skills;
- Marriage mentoring programs that use
married couples as role models and mentors in at-risk communities;
and
- Programs to reduce the disincentives to
marriage in means-tested aid programs, if offered in conjunction
with any of the above activities.
Much
of the debate about marriage-strengthening will center on this list
of allowable uses of the marriage funds. Opponents of the
President's initiative will seek to broaden the list to include
activities that have little or no link to marriage. The effort to
broaden the program to include standard government services such as
job training, day care, and contraceptive promotion (all of which
are already amply funded through other programs) would dissipate
the limited funds available and render the program meaningless.
Criticisms of the President's Plan
The
President's Healthy Marriage Initiative has been criticized on a
number of grounds. Each of these criticisms is inaccurate.
- Individuals will
be forced to participate in the program. Critics charge
that welfare mothers would be forced to participate in marriage
education. In fact, all participation would be voluntary. Services
would be provided only to individuals or couples interested in
receiving them.
- The program will
increase domestic violence. Critics charge that the
program would increase domestic violence by coercing or encouraging
women to remain in dangerous relationships. In fact, marriage and
relationship-skills training has been shown to reduce, not
increase, domestic violence. Such programs help women steer clear
of dangerous and counterproductive relationships. Moreover, domestic
violence is less widespread among low-income couples than is
generally assumed. For example, three-quarters of non-married
mothers are romantically involved with the child's father at the
time of the non-marital birth: Only 2 percent of these women have
experienced domestic violence in their relationship with the
father. In general,
domestic violence is more common in cohabiting relationships than
in marriage: Never-married mothers, for example, are twice as
likely to experience domestic violence than are mothers who have
married.
- Marriage-skills
programs are ineffective or unproven. Critics charge that
marriage-skills programs are ineffective. The facts show exactly
the opposite: Over 100 separate evaluations of marriage training
programs demonstrate that these programs can reduce strife, improve
communications skills, increase stability, and enhance marital
happiness.
- The program will
bribe couples to marry. Critics charge that the marriage
program will bribe low-income women to marry unwisely. This is not
true. As noted, all means-tested welfare programs such as TANF,
food stamps, and public housing contain significant financial
penalties against marriage. The marriage program would experiment
with selectively reducing these penalties against marriage.
- The program is
too expensive. The President proposed spending $300
million per year on his model marriage program ($200 million in
federal funds and $100 million in state funds). This sum represents
one penny spent to promote healthy marriage for every five dollars
spent to subsidize single parenthood. This small investment would also help
to avert future dependence on welfare.
- The public
opposes marriage promotion. Critics claim that the public
opposes programs to strengthen marriage. In fact, the state of
Oklahoma has operated a marriage program similar to the President's
proposal for several years. Most Oklahomans are familiar with this
program; 85 percent of the state's residents support the program,
and only 15 percent oppose it.
- The shortage of
"marriageable men" makes marriage unlikely for most low-income
women. Critics argue that marriage is impractical in
low-income communities because men earn too little to be attractive
spouses. This is not true. As noted, nearly three-quarters of
non-married mothers are cohabiting with, or are romantically
involved with, the child's father at the time of the baby's birth.
The median income of these non-married fathers is $17,500 per year.
Some 70 percent of poor single mothers would be lifted out of
poverty if they married the father of their children.
- Low-income women
are not interested in marriage. Critics charge that
low-income women are not interested in marriage and marriage-skills
training. However, at the time of their child's birth, more than 75
percent of non-married mothers say they are interested in marrying
their child's father. In Oklahoma, 72 percent of women who have
received welfare say that they are interested in receiving
marriage-skills training.
- Increasing male
wages through job training is the key to increasing
marriage. Some argue that the key to getting low-income
parents to marry is to raise the father's wages. This notion is
inaccurate for several reasons.
First, unmarried fathers already earn, on average, $17,500 per
year at the time of their child's birth.
Second, data from the Fragile Families Survey show that male wage
rates have very little to do with whether or not an unmarried
father marries the mother of his child. Instead, the most important
factors in determining whether or not couples marry after a child's
birth are the couples' attitudes about marriage and their
relationship skills. These are the precise attitudes and
behaviors that would be targeted for change in the President's
Healthy Marriage Initiative.
Third, the federal government already operates seven separate
job-training programs and spends over $6.2 billion per year on job
training. Since the
beginning of the War on Poverty, overall spending on job training
has exceeded $257 billion. This spending has had no apparent
effect on increasing marriage in the past: There is no reason to
believe it would do so in the future.
Fourth, most government training programs are ineffective in
raising wage rates. For example, a large-scale evaluation of the
Job Training Partnership Act (JTPA) showed that the program raised
the hourly wage rates of female trainees by only 3.4 percent and
those of male trainees by zero.
Finally, under H.R. 4, and the PRIDE bill, job training may be
provided, if needed, to individuals participating in
marriage-skills and marriage-enhancement programs. However, any job
training must be linked to marriage-skills training. To add job
training as a stand-alone spending category within a "marriage"
funding stream would cripple any future marriage program by
diverting substantial funds into traditional job-training
activities that have little to do with marriage.
- Encouraging
marriage at an early age is counterproductive. The age at
which women give birth out of wedlock is often underestimated. The
issues of out-of-wedlock childbearing and teen pregnancy are
generally confused: They are not the same. Most women who give
birth outside marriage are in their early twenties. Only 10 percent
of out-of-wedlock births occur to girls under age 18; 75 percent
occur to women who are age 20 and older.
The focus of the Healthy Marriage Initiative would be on
encouraging couples to form stable, committed relationships and to
marry before pregnancy and childbirth occur. In many cases, this
would involve delaying childbearing until couples were older and
more mature. Thus, the goals of promoting healthy marriage and of
postponing childbearing to a mature age are harmonious and mutually
supportive. However, simply encouraging a delay in childbearing
without increasing the incidence of healthy marriage would have
only marginal benefits and would not be wise policy.
- Government
should fund more pregnancy-prevention and contraceptive programs
rather than marriage promotion. Some urge that marriage
promotion funds should be diverted to contraceptive programs on the
grounds that, once women have had children out of wedlock, they are
less likely to marry in the future. But the government already
spends over $1.7 billion per year on pregnancy prevention and
contraceptive promotion through programs such as Medicaid, TANF,
Adolescent Sexual Health, and Title X. Overall, current funding for
contraception/pregnancy-prevention dwarfs the proposed funding for
marriage promotion. Diverting limited marriage funds to even more
contraceptive programs would clearly cripple any marriage
initiative.
However, as noted, the President's Healthy Marriage Initiative
would promote the goal of preventing non-marital pregnancy in
another broad sense. Marriage programs would encourage women to
enter healthy marriages before becoming pregnant. In many cases,
this would involve encouraging women to avoid pregnancy until they
become more mature and more capable of sustaining a viable, healthy
relationship. However, this approach would differ greatly from
simply handing out contraceptives.
- Promoting
marriage is none of the government's business. There are
some who argue that, while marriage is a fine institution, the
decision to marry or not to marry is a private decision in which
the government should not be involved. This argument is based on a
misunderstanding of the government's current involvement in the
issue of single-parenthood, as well a misunderstanding of the
President's Healthy Marriage Initiative.
First, the government is already massively involved when marriages
either fail to form or break apart. Each year, the government
spends over $150 billion in subsidies to single parents. Much of
this expenditure would have been avoided if the mothers were
married to the fathers of their children. This cost represents
government efforts to pick up the pieces and contain the damage
when marriage fails. To insist that the government has an
obligation to support single parents--and to control the damage
that results from the erosion of marriage--but should do nothing to
strengthen marriage itself is myopic. It is like arguing that the
government should pay to sustain polio victims in iron lung
machines but should not pay for the vaccine to prevent polio in the
first place.
Second, the government is already heavily (and counterproductively)
involved in individual marriage decisions, given that government
welfare policies discourage marriage, by penalizing low-income
couples who do marry and by rewarding those who do not. The
President's Healthy Marriage Initiative would take the first steps
to reduce these anti-marriage penalties.
Third, under the President's initiative, the government would not
"intrude" into private matters concerning marriage, since all
participation in the marriage promotion program would be voluntary.
Nearly all Americans believe in the institution of marriage and
hope for happy and long-lasting marriages for themselves and their
children. Very few wish for a life marked by a series of
acrimonious and broken relationships. The President's program would
offer services to couples seeking to improve the quality of their
relationships. It would provide couples seeking healthy and
enduring marriages with skills and training to help them to achieve
that goal. To refuse services and training to low-income couples
who are actively seeking to improve their relationships because
"marriage is none of the government's business" is both cruel and
shortsighted.
Finally, the government has a long-established interest in
improving the well-being of children. For instance, the government
funds Head Start because the program will ostensibly increase the
ability of disadvantaged children to grow up to become happy and
productive members of society. It is clear that healthy marriage
has substantial, long-term, positive effects on children's
development: Conversely, the absence of a father or the presence of
strife within a home both have harmful effects on children. If
government has a legitimate role in seeking to improve child
well-being through programs such as Head Start, it has a far more
significant role in assisting children by fostering healthy
marriage within society.
Conclusion
More
than 40 years ago, Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan--at that time, a
member of President Lyndon Johnson's White House staff--wrote
poignantly of the social ills stemming from the decline of marriage
in the black community. Since that time, the dramatic erosion of
marriage has afflicted the white community as well. Today, the
social and economic ills fostered by marital collapse have exceeded
Senator Moynihan's worst expectations.
Tragically, when Senator Moynihan's
prescient report on marriage and the family was released in the
early 1960s, it was met with a firestorm of abuse. So vitriolic was
the attack against Moynihan that a virtual wall of silence came to
surround the issues he raised. For 30 years, nearly all public
discussion about the importance of marriage, and the role that
government policy played in either supporting or undermining it,
was muffled. Meanwhile, marriage declined and out-of-wedlock
childbearing soared. When Moynihan wrote his report in the early
1960s, 7 percent of all American children were born out of wedlock:
Today, the number is 33 percent. To any objective observer, the
link between the erosion of marriage and high levels of child
poverty and welfare dependence was obvious, but for decades, this
topic was scrupulously avoided in public discussion.
In
the early 1990s, the wall of silence surrounding the marriage issue
began to crumble. In his 1993 State of the Union address, President
Bill Clinton spoke forcefully of the harm wrought by the decline of
marriage in America. His remarks echoed those of Moynihan
30 years earlier. By the late 1990s, most responsible individuals,
on both the left and the right, had acknowledged the importance of
marriage to the well-being of children, adults, and society. Most
affirmed the need for government policies to strengthen
marriage.
In
response, President Bush has developed the Healthy Marriage
Initiative: the first positive step toward strengthening the
institution of marriage since the Moynihan report four decades ago.
The proposal represents a strategy to increase healthy
marriage--carefully crafted on the basis of all existing research
on the topic of promoting and strengthening marriage.
The
President's Healthy Marriage Initiative is a future-oriented,
preventive policy. It will foster better life-planning
skills--encouraging couples to develop loving, committed marriages
before bringing children into the world, as opposed to having
children before trust and commitment between the parents has been
established. The marriage program will encourage couples to
reexamine and improve their relationships and plan wisely for the
future, rather than stumbling blindly into a childbirth for which
neither parent may be prepared. The program will also provide
marriage-skills education to married couples to improve their
relationships and to reduce the probability of divorce.
Ideally, pro-marriage interventions for
non-married couples would occur well before the conception of a
child. A second--less desirable, but still fruitful--point of
intervention would be at the time of a child's birth: a time when
the majority of unmarried couples express an active interest in
marriage. By providing young couples with the tools needed to build
healthy, stable marriages, the Marriage Initiative would
substantially reduce future rates of welfare dependence, child
poverty, domestic violence, and other social ills.
There is now broad bipartisan recognition
that healthy marriage is a natural protective institution that, in
most cases, promotes the well-being of men, women, and children: It
is the foundation of a healthy society. Yet, for decades,
government policy has remained indifferent or hostile to marriage.
Government programs sought merely to pick up the pieces as
marriages failed or--worse--actively undermined marriage.
President Bush seeks to change this policy
of indifference and hostility. There is no group that will gain
more from this change than low-income single women, most of whom
hope for a happy, healthy marriage in their future. President Bush
seeks to provide young couples with the knowledge and skills to
accomplish their dreams. The Senate would be wise to affirm their
support for marriage by passing welfare reform reauthorization and
enacting the President's Healthy Marriage Initiative.
Robert E. Rector is Senior Research
Fellow in Domestic Policy Studies, andMelissa G. Pardue is a
Policy Analyst in the Domestic Policy Studies Department, at The
Heritage Foundation.