Posted on Sat, Jul. 02, 2005
Mom and Dad in unhappy marriage isn’t good for kids
By Diane Glass
If you listen to Shaunti, you’d think fatherhood initiatives are a lot of harmless cheerleading. Many are. But there is a growing interest in marrying welfare policy with a pro-fatherhood agenda as a means to coerce single mothers into marriage. These movements have a far more insidious intent, deceptively cloaked in homespun mission statements that at first glance are as heartwarming as an episode of “Extreme Makeover.” This deceptive advertising hasn’t gone unnoticed.
In a 1999 American Psychologist article, two scholars criticized a work trumpeting fatherhood as an essential ingredient to raising healthy children. The article, “Deconstructing the Essential Father,” wasn’t meant to minimize fatherhood or take a feminist stand. It simply demonstrated that such studies mistakenly assume women and men have different parenting styles and argued that neither mother nor father is “essential” in rearing children. Rather, it is loving and consistent behaviors in a parent that predict a happy, healthy child.
So you’d think fathers would applaud this asexual and fair-minded view. It makes no gender assumptions about a parent’s ability. Nevertheless, many government-run pro-father, pro-family initiatives continue to support the false notion that married heterosexual couples are the Holy Grail of Parenting.
But binding women and men in marriages that could potentially be abusive isn’t good for children and is about as effective as assuming a complementary set of genitalia is a recipe for good parenting. Poor single mothers marry men in their own economic class.
Marriage doesn’t lift families out of poverty, explains one of the original writers of the critique, Dr. Louise Silverstein. “It’s also a way to deflect blame,” she says. Suggesting that the consequences of poverty are a personal responsibility resolvable by marriage is an “unwillingness to take public responsibility for these problems.”
These initiatives are an “unproven social experiment,” adds Institute for Women’s Policy Research expert Avis Jones-DeWeever. “The reason that some women are poor isn’t because they’re not married, but because they have low levels of education.” If these family-oriented programs were truly interested in assisting single mothers escape poverty, then “(W)e really need to focus on how we can create a system where they are better prepared to assume better-quality jobs,” says Jones-DeWeever, instead of trying to marry them off.
