Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: THURSDAY, March 18, 1993 TAG: 9303180124
SECTION: NATIONAL/INTERNATIONAL PAGE: A1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: Knight-Ridder/Tribune
DATELINE: LENGTH: Long
BUT DON'T YOU DARE CALL IT FAMILY VALUES
Is marriage really about money and responsibility? Is the 20th-century model of marriage for romantic love just fantasy? Is it not OK for parents to divorce anymore just because romance has died or because your spouse hogs the remote control?This sort of talk skewered Dan Quayle last May. But this view - that the two-parent home is in most cases the best place to raise a child, and government ought to get behind it - is gaining momentum. It's jumped party lines. It's in the White House.
Among the believers: William Galston, domestic policy adviser to President Clinton.
"It is no exaggeration that a stable, two-parent family is an American child's best protection against poverty," writes Galston in "Mandate for Change," a recent book endorsed by Clinton. The book was prepared by the Progressive Policy Institute, the think tank of the Democratic Leadership Council, which Clinton once headed.
Nobody's saying divorce is always wrong. But if last year's "Murphy Brown" fiasco is any preview, this philosophical shift could spark a national slugfest. In one corner are the academics and Washington policymakers, armed with bar charts and line graphs. In another corner, single parents and some feminists, bristling at preachy finger-wagging.
For nervous politicians, booby traps are everywhere.
Should states make it harder for parents to get divorced?
Should schools hand out condoms?
Should the president use his bully pulpit to campaign against unwed moms?
The Case for the Two-Parent Family comes down to this:
The vast majority of children who grow up with two parents will never be poor. Most children with a single parent will be poor at some time.
Here are often-cited statistics:
Children who live with single parents are five times as likely to be poor as children with two parents.
One of every five children is poor now. The number would be one-third less if we rolled back to the single-parent rates of 1960.
Family poverty has little to do with lack of education. Even when both parents are high-school dropouts, they are far less likely to be poor if they are married (25 percent) than if they are single (62 percent).
Family type is more important than race in determining poverty. Two-thirds of black single-parent families are poor, compared with 17 percent of black two-parent families.
But hasn't the fact that more women are working meant they are better able to support a family by themselves? "Just the reverse," says Galston. "Families need two incomes to maintain even a marginally middle-class existence." Not only do wives need husbands more; he says husbands also need wives more.
The problem isn't all money, says Robert Rector, senior policy analyst for The Heritage Foundation, a think tank in Washington. There is the separate issue of fathers as role models. "Ripping the father out of the house is doing something very bad to those children," says Rector.
About one-third of all American children live apart from their fathers. Among the children of divorce, half have never visited their father's home.
"The issues have to do with the contributions fathers make to parenting," says John Guidubaldi, a psychologist at Kent State University in Ohio. "Discipline and control. Role modeling. A purveyor of values."
An ongoing 11-year study by Guidubaldi follows 699 families in 38 states. It shows that children of divorce are more likely to have poor self-confidence and more frequently get in fights and use drugs. Guidubaldi says the adverse effects hold up across cultures (he's followed families in China, too) and regardless of family income.
Psychologist Judith Wallerstein's 1989 book, "Second Chances: Men, Women and Children a Decade After Divorce," supports this view and has helped spawn a trend in counseling toward saving marriages. Her studies showed boys are apt to experience the greatest trauma at the time of divorce and suffer most from father-absence.
The result of all this data is a wide range of family experts calling for government to adopt policies that promote two-parent families, including the 1991 bipartisan National Commission on Children headed by Sen. Jay Rockefeller, D-W.Va.
In state legislatures, liberals and conservatives alike are talking about such reforms as "two-tier" divorce laws. Childless couples could split at will. Those with children would face restriction. For example, says White House adviser Galston, they might have a longer waiting period during which they would have to seek counseling.
Updating the tax exemption for children is another possibility both parties are toying with. Last year, the exemption was $2,300. If it had been indexed for personal income growth when it was created in 1948, it would be about $8,000 per child now according to the Urban Institute.
Get-tough child support enforcement, experts believe, also could encourage married parents to think long and hard before splitting up. It would make clear that parents who ditch a marriage can't ditch responsibility, too. Only one in four women receives the full amount of child support she is due, according to the Census Bureau.
In early February, Rep. Henry Hyde, R.-Ill., introduced a bill that would require the IRS to collect the money. The proposal would be paid for by eliminating $700 million a year in federal grants now given to states to help them collect support payments.