Life Without Father:
(Page 8 of 9)
September/October 1996
David Popenoe, The Wilson Quarterly (wwics.si.edu/OUTREACH/WQ/QUARTERL.HTM)
Because the causes of the decline of marriage and fatherhood lie mainly in the moral, behavioral, and even spiritual realms, the decline is mostly resistant to public-policy and government cures. All of the Western societies, regardless of governmental system and political persuasion, have been beset by this problem. The decline of marriage is almost as great in Sweden, which has the West's most ambitious welfare state, as it is in the United States, the most laissez-faire of the industrialized nations.
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Nevertheless, government policies do have some impact. While the statistical relationship of economic cycles to marriage and divorce is not particularly strong, for example, low wages, unemployment, and poverty have never been friendly to marriage. Government can do something about that. It can also remedy the decline in the value of the income tax exemption for dependent children and erase the tax code's 'marriage penalty.' As a society, we have decided through a variety of government programs to socialize much of the cost of growing old, but less of the cost of raising children. At the very least, we should strive for generational equity. But more than anything else, parents need time to be with their children, the kind of time that would be afforded by a more generous family-leave policy.
We also should consider providing educational credits or vouchers to parents who leave the paid labor force to raise their young children. These parents are performing an important social service at the risk of damaging their long-term career prospects. Education subsidies, like those in the GI Bill of Rights, would reward parents by helping them resume their careers.
Government policies should be designed to favor married, child-rearing couples. Some critics argue that the federal government would not involve itself in sensitive moral issues or risk stigmatizing alternative lifestyles. But recognizing alternatives doesn't require treating them as equivalent to marriage. The government regularly takes moral positions on a whole range of issues, such as the rights of women, income equality, and race relations. A position on the need for children to have two committed parents, a father and a mother, during their formative years would hardly be a radical departure.
Our social order is fraying badly. We seem, despite notable accomplishments in some areas, to be on a path of decline. The past three decades have seen steeply rising crime rates, growing personal and corporate greed, deteriorating communities, and increasing confusion over moral issues. For most Americans, life has become more anxious, unsettled, and insecure.
In large part, this represents a failure of social values. People can no longer be counted on to conduct themselves according to the virtues of honesty, self-sacrifice, and personal responsibility. In our ever-growing pursuit of the self--self-expression, self-development, self-actualization, and self-fulfillment--we seem to have slipped off many of our larger social obligations.
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