[Dean's World] Ron Coleman: With children, married

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Posted by Ron Coleman:
With children, married
http://www.deanesmay.com/posts/1165348597.shtml


   [1]Mickey Kaus, snarking about the casual Page Six throwaway report
   about some celebrity's "happy impregnation" news that even a jaded
   liberal like him has to admit ties (though it does not set) a new low
   for casual morality regarding matrimony and motherhood.

   I've fought an [2]uphill battle in these pages for the proposition
   that we have lost something in our abandonment of traditional
   morality, especially as regards family life. There are so many unclear
   empirical questions, though, and so much cultural and religious
   baggage this conversation has to carry, that I never felt I was making
   any headway, or could, without recourse to explicitly religious
   arguments.

   [fatherknowsbest.jpg]

   That's why I'm grateful for a link provided in the Kaus article [3]an
   article by Kay Hymowitz in City Journal. Hymowitz takes apart the
   truisms, generalizations, assumptions and illogic that dance around
   the just plain truth that the socioeconomic, and social, reality for
   mothers and children -- and dads -- in households without a husband
   are worse off, remain worse off, and bestow a future of worse off to
   their own offspring.

   There are easily a dozen paragraphs I wanted to excerpt here, but here
   are a couple I settled on:

     [W]omen who grow up in a marriage-before-children culture organize
     their lives around a meaningful and beneficial life script.
     Traditional marriage gives young people a map of life that takes
     them step by step from childhood to adolescence to college or other
     work trainingâ-which might well include postgraduate education -to
     the workplace, to marriage, and only then to childbearing.

   ([4]show)

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     A marriage orientation also requires a young woman to consider the
     question of what man will become her husband and the father of her
     children as a major, if not the major, decision of her life. In
     other words, a marriage orientation demands that a woman keep her
     eye on the future, that she go through life with deliberation, and
     that she use self-disciplineâ-especially when it comes to sex:
     bourgeois women still consider premature pregnancy a disaster. In
     short, a marriage orientationâ-not just marriage itselfâ-is part
     and parcel of her bourgeois ambition.

     When Americans announced that marriage before childbearing was
     optional, low-income women didnât merely lose a steadfast partner,
     a second income, or a trusted babysitter, as the
     strength-in-numbers theory would have it. They lost a traditional
     arrangement that reinforced precisely the qualities that they --
     and their men; letâs not forget the men!â-needed for upward
     mobility, qualities all the more important in a tough new knowledge
     economy. The timing could hardly have been worse. At a time when
     education was becoming crucial to middle-class status, the
     disadvantaged lost a reliable life script, a way of organizing
     their early lives that would prize education and culminate in
     childbearing only after job training and marriage. They lost one of
     their few institutional supports for planning ahead and taking
     control of their lives.

     Worst of all, when Americans made marriage optional, low-income
     women lost a culture that told them the truth about what was best
     for their children. A number of researchers argue that, in fact,
     low-income women really do want to marry. . . . What they donât
     have, however, is a clue about the very fact that orders the lives
     of their more fortunate peers: marriage and childbearing belong
     together. The result is separate and unequal families, now and as
     far as the eye can see.

   If you're interested in this issue -- and how can you not be if you
   have children, if you have brothers or sisters of reproducing age, if
   you're one of those ten-years-and-counting "fiancées" or if you've
   had or may have children without the benefit of marriage--you should
   read the whole article. Then come back here and let's mix it up.

References

   1. http://www.slate.com/id/2154593/
   2. http://www.deanesmay.com/posts/1126763099.shtml#42752
   3. http://www.city-journal.org/html/16_1_marriage_gap.html
   4. file://localhost/var/www/powerblogs/deanesmay/posts/1165348597.html
   5. file://localhost/var/www/powerblogs/deanesmay/posts/1165348597.html