On Not Helping Single Mothers

Earlier this week the New York Times had a front-page article on single parenthood and social class (http://www.nytimes.com/2012/07/15/us/two-classes-in-america-divided-by-i-do.html?pagewanted=all). The article highlighted the budgetary and parenting problems that single mothers experience and emphasized the importance of marriage for providing the extra income and parenting potential that a husband brings.

Now Katha Pollitt of The Nation has provided an excellent critique of this article (http://www.thenation.com/blog/168932/new-york-times-misses-mark-inequality-marriage?rel=emailNation). She points out that boyfriends/fathers/husbands are often a crapshoot—you can end up with a good one, or you can end up with a bad one. And she also points out that single mothers in the United States lack the social supports that most other democracies routinely provide. As Pollitt puts it, “That’s a very American value right there: if you screw up in your early 20s, you—and your children—are on your own for life.”

This last point is crucial. As I emphasize in my new social problems textbook with Flat World Knowledge (http://catalog.flatworldknowledge.com/catalog/editions/5247), the United States sorely lags behind other democracies in providing all kinds of things that single parents and low-income married couples need: free or heavily subsidized child care and parental leave, various income provisions, and free or heavily subsidized health care. We blame Americans who haven’t “made it” for not making it, and we leave them to fend for themselves. Other democracies have decided that it’s important to do everything possible to help those in need so that their societies as a whole can flourish. As we think about single mothers and low-income families, we must recognize that their problems would be much less severe if our government helped them as much as other democratic governments help their counterparts.