Brookings: Topics - Marriage and Family Formation

Shame and Teen Pregnancy

Richard V. Reeves — Mon, 18 Mar 2013 00:00:00 -0400

Does shame perform a useful social function? Is it legitimate for the state to engender feelings of shame to further public goals? Is the answer to either of these questions affirmative, in the case of teen pregnancy?

These are the key questions raised by the decision by New York officials to use controversial advertisements that highlight the impact of teen pregnancy on the life chances of the child. The apparently ‘liberal’ response has been to rail against Mayor Michael Bloomberg for shaming teen parents. The very idea of passing moral judgment makes many people of a liberal orientation queasy, especially in the U.S.

I have argued, by contrast, that there is a liberal case for shame as a form of non-coercive regulation towards better choices – including avoiding teen pregnancy.

So, question 1: does shame ever have any positive role to play in a liberal society? Yes: it is in fact a valuable form of non-coercive regulation of behavior. As a general rule, we hope that illegal activities are also shameful ones. In many cases the shame might do more work than the sheriff. Drunk driving is a case in point.

Shame also helps to regulate activities that are legal, but unwise - either because of their implications for the individual themselves, or, especially, for innocent second parties. Racists and homophobes should be made to feel ashamed of themselves. But surely so should those who hit their child, or surround them with smoke, or drink heavily or smoke when pregnant with them.

The second question is whether official bodies have any business being in the shame game. You might agree that shame can be useful, but disagree with state-sponsored shame. Given that tax dollars are being deployed in a campaign like the current New York one, the decision has to be clearly justified - on the grounds of both efficacy and legitimacy. New York has tested its ads extensively, and is confident that they will have an impact by making teens think harder about choices leading to a risk of pregnancy. Time will tell if they are right, but we certainly not assume they are wrong.

Even if the ads work, the legitimacy question remains. The state should only be using shame to combat a legal activity or choice when there is real, significant harm involved, not for the individual but for other individuals or the broader community.

There is, for instance, no good liberal argument against ads invoking shame to try and stop people hitting their children or smoking while pregnant. Real harm is being done to real people. Government officials should exercise great care when it comes to the use of shame. But they should not rule it out.

The third question is whether shame can legitimately be attached to teen pregnancy, if there is reason to believe (as New York does) that is will help to lower rates. Is teen pregnancy really bad enough to justify such an emotional campaign? The short answer: yes. Not because of the impact on the parent, but on the child. Having kids in your teens actually has a small influence on life chances, as Alex Sanger shows in Beyond Choice: Reproductive Freedom in the 21st Century, albeit for the depressing reason that the youngsters most likely to become teen parents have such narrow life chances anyway.

So the New York campaign focuses on what teen parenthood means for the child. They are not saying, ‘becoming a parent in your teens will be bad for you’; they are saying ‘becoming a parent in your teens will be bad for your child’. And that is not a claim: it is a fact.

One last, vital point: there is no justification for doing less to help teen parents or their their children because they have made bad choices. We need, in fact, to do very much more to improve the life chances of children born to teen parents. Shame legitimately attaches to teen pregnancy. It is also a crying shame that so many kids born to teens are effectively abandoned to their fate.

Authors

Richard V. Reeves

Image Source: © ERIC THAYER / Reuters

Restoring Marriage Will Be Difficult

Isabel V. Sawhill — Thu, 20 Dec 2012 00:00:00 -0500

Editor's Note: The below is a reaction to “The President’s Marriage Agenda for the Forgotten Sixty Percent,” a report featured in this year’s issue of State of Our Unions, an annual journal published by the National Marriage Project at the University of Virginia and the Center for Marriage and Families at the Institute for American Values.

This report sounds an alarm about marriage trends in middle class America. It is full of important facts and citations to the literature. Indeed, I know of no better source for such information than the Institute for American Values and the National Marriage Project. As the authors note, marriage is alive and well among the best educated but rapidly disappearing among those with less than a college degree. What we are seeing is alternative living arrangements that have spread from the poor, and especially poor blacks, to the rest of society. The consequences for children and for society have been far from benign.

Against this backdrop, the authors argue for a more muscular response including: ending marriage penalties in tax and benefit programs, providing help to less skilled men so that they can become better marriage partners, more investment in marriage and relationship education, and a more robust effort by civil society to restore a marriage culture.

While I am deeply sympathetic to most of this report’s conclusions and to the wake-up call it embodies, I have three reactions that I believe need to be part of this discussion.

First, I am conflicted. My right brain says that marriage is a good thing for all the reasons enumerated in the report. My left brain says that we can’t put the genie back in the bottle. It may be possible to slow the decline in marriage but I am increasingly doubtful that it can be resurrected in its 20th century form. The interesting question is what form will the much greater diversity of living arrangements take in the future. I suspect marriage as we have known it is not coming back. A combination of greater affluence, more gender equality, and changes in attitudes are conspiring against a restoration.

Second, I am somewhat less optimistic than the authors about the ability of their policy agenda to make much of a difference. In part, this reflects my belief that the trends we are witnessing are deep seated and that the authors’ preferred policies, while perfectly sensible and probably helpful on the margins, are swimming against a tide that is too strong to be reversed. Moreover, the research on what such policies have accomplished to date is not very reassuring.

Third, like the authors, I am concerned about the consequences. However, I put greater faith in policies and messaging that encourage young adults to defer childbearing until they are ready to be parents — or to not become parents at all. If childless adults do not marry, whatever the consequences for them, it does not significantly harm others. The problem for single parents is not that they are single; it is that they are parents as well. Parenting is hard enough for married parents; it is even more difficult for those who must do it alone. I say this realizing that many single parents did not choose this role. But then I am reminded of the fact that 70 percent of pregnancies to single women under 30 are unintended. Something is wrong in an era when many effective forms of contraception are available and often subsidized, yet the vast majority of young adults are still not taking responsibility for the consequences of their sexual encounters. In addition, while the policy hurdles to successfully providing young adults with the motivation and the means to prevent unwanted pregnancies and births are high, the task seems to me to be less daunting than an effort to bring back marriage.

In sum, by all means let’s work to restore marriage as the best environment in which to raise children but at the same time let’s stop the epidemic of unplanned childbearing that creates unwed (or temporarily cohabiting) mothers in the first place.

Authors

Isabel V. Sawhill

Publication: Family Scholars

Obama and the Two Types of Marriage

Melissa Rogers — Thu, 17 May 2012 15:01:00 -0400

In the wake of President Obama's declaration of his personal support for the right of same-sex couples to marry under civil law, the nation is understandably focused on debating the merits of this position. Three related points from President Obama's announcement, however, deserve our attention as well.

First, President Obama noted that there is an important difference between civil marriage and religious marriage. The state defines civil marriage, which serves as the gateway for a wide variety of government benefits, rights and privileges. Religious marriage, on the other hand, is defined solely by religious communities.

These categories may be fuzzy in our minds because current law not only respects the ability of clergy and religious communities to define and bless religious marriage, it also allows clergy to solemnize civil marriage. That's why one often hears a minister conclude a wedding by saying, "By the authority vested in me by the state of X, I now pronounce you husband and wife." Setting aside the oddity of a minister claiming the authority of the state rather than a higher power, the fact that the state allows clergy to bring a civil marriage into being does not mean it can require clergy to bless or recognize any relationship the state defines as civil marriage. Some clergy won't perform interfaith unions, and many refuse to perform a wedding when they believe a couple is unready for the momentous commitment of marriage. Just as the state cannot force clergy to perform these marriages, the state cannot require a clergy person to marry same-sex couples. In his remarks, President Obama affirmed these ideas, emphasizing that he was "talking about are civil marriages and civil laws," as opposed to religious marriages, and that "churches and other faith institutions are still gonna be able to make determinations about what their sacraments are -- what they recognize" as religious marriage.

Second, the president expressed his support for appropriate religious exemptions in legislation recognizing same-sex marriages. In his comments to ABC News' Robin Roberts, President Obama pointed to the example of New York as a state that has been "respectful of religious liberty" in this regard. New York's same-sex marriage law says the state may not "penalize, withhold benefits, or discriminate" against a minister for the minister's refusal to perform a marriage for same-sex couples. Religious organizations and their employees may not be required to provide services, facilities or goods "for the solemnization or celebration" of same-sex marriages, and refusals to do so may not form the basis of any civil claim, nor result in any state penalties, withholding of benefits, or discrimination. This New York law also says the state's recognition of same-sex marriage will not affect things like the ability of religious organizations to make religion-based employment decisions and religious colleges and universities to limit married student housing to heterosexual couples, if that is their practice.

Given constitutional protections for free exercise and religious autonomy, courts would recognize certain exemptions for religious objectors from same-sex marriage laws even without specific legislative language. Spelling these matters out in legislation, however, helps to clarify what is and what is not at stake and to reassure those who would define religious marriage in ways that differ from the state's definition of civil marriage. It may also result in the adoption of wider free exercise protections than is constitutionally required where such protections adequately respect competing interests and are otherwise constitutionally appropriate. There is serious debate about issues like whether some small businesses should be exempt from obligations to provide goods or services for same-sex marriages where business owners have religious objections to doing so and whether religious organizations receiving government grants should be exempt from non-discrimination conditions on the use of grant funds. At the same time, there is no question that exemptions like those in New York law are widely supported, including by President Obama.

Finally, President Obama insisted that conversations about these sensitive and important matters should be conducted in a spirit of civility, and that proponents of same-sex marriage should resist the temptation to demonize those on the other side of the debate. Obama said:

[I]t's important to recognize that folks who feel very strongly that marriage should be defined narrowly as between a man and a woman, many of them are not coming at it from a mean-spirited perspective. They're coming at it because they care about families. ... [A] bunch of them are friends of mine ... pastors and ... people who I deeply respect.

Likewise, Governor Mitt Romney has called this issue is "a very tender and sensitive topic." As President Obama and Gov. Romney recognize, we can state our beliefs on these issues plainly without slandering those who take a different point of view.

Americans must decide whether they support or oppose recognition of same-sex marriage in our civil laws, but they also must determine how religious objectors will be treated where same-sex marriages are recognized and the spirit in which these debates will be conducted. President Obama's remarks on all these scores are worthy of attention and consideration.

This piece originally appeared in The Huffington Post.

Authors

Melissa Rogers

Publication: The Huffington Post

Image Source: © Shannon Stapleton / Reuters

We Are a Sideshow No Longer

Jonathan Rauch — Wed, 16 May 2012 00:00:00 -0400

It’s a beautiful spring day in Washington, D.C., around 5 p.m. I am arriving at the august Peterson Institute for International Economics. Today, however, the place is not a think tank but a chapel, and the important words to be uttered are not “trade-weighted exchange rates” but “I do.”

My old friend Joe Gagnon is getting married today to Paul Adamczak, his longtime partner. How I hate that word “partner”! As if Joe and Paul were members of the same law firm. Within the hour, I am pleased to realize, they will be partners no longer. Under District of Columbia law, they will be husbands.

Today’s ceremony is freighted with extra excitement. Only three days ago, President Obama announced his support for same-sex marriage. The subject is much discussed here at the wedding. Of course, as an invitee mentions, Obama’s endorsement alters not a jot of law, not a tittle of policy. Yet a cultural barrier has been crossed, a taboo forever retired. The highest officer in the land and, by extension, his political party and half the country have embraced today’s ceremony as their own. We are a sideshow, an outlier, no longer.

The think tank’s auditorium is transformed by draperies, flowers, gentle lighting, rows of plush chairs. Lovely. It occurs to me, as I reflect on the week’s events, that only one decoration is missing. An American flag would be very much in order.

Chamber musicians play as I take a seat. A few rows ahead of me sits a restless boy, perhaps 8 or 9 years old. My mind pitches back to an earlier time, more than four decades ago, and another boy, about the same age. He is sitting on the piano bench in his house in suburban Phoenix. I remember exactly the spot, exactly the moment, though I could not tell you the date exactly. Suddenly, out of the blue, the boy realizes that he will never be married. He does not know why marriage and family are out of his reach. He will in fact not understand why for almost 20 years, when he comes to understand he is homosexual. But children understand marriage long before they understand sex, and this boy knows, intuitively, that he is different in some way that rules out the kind of life that other people take for granted. He will always be an outsider to family life.

I look again at the boy in front of me and try to imagine what it is like to be him. He will never experience the desolate realization that I had long ago in Phoenix. He will never even be able to comprehend it. The wedding he now witnesses seems ordinary to him. For the whole span of his life, whether he is straight or gay, there will be a destination for his love within the folds of marriage. I find I envy him.

The grooms are walking down the aisle, Joe accompanied by his father, Paul by his mother. In front, two candles are lit for the parents who are not here. I wonder how Joe’s father feels, giving away his son to a man in a legally recognized ceremony. I think back on a conversation with my own father. This is in 1995, not so very long ago, but an eon as it seems today. He is urging me not to write about gay marriage, a subject I will soon take up for the Economist and the New Republic. He knows and accepts that I am gay; that is not the problem. It is my career he is worried about. The idea of a man marrying a man or a woman marrying a woman, he tells me, is such an outlandish idea that if I associate myself with it I will no longer be taken seriously as a writer. People will think I’m a nut. At the time, his prediction seemed plausible.

My gaze alights on one of the absent parents’ candles. My father lived to know and love Michael, who became like another son to him. He lived to see same-sex marriage legalized in Massachusetts and then in several other states. Alas, he died only a few months before Michael and I could legally marry in Washington, D.C. Had he been at our wedding, he would have blessed us, happy to see his prediction proved so blessedly wrong.

The officiant begins the ceremony and the grooms join hands. There are readings from Robert Frost and Plato’s Symposium. Later, Joe will admit to worrying that the readings might seem hackneyed. But the words have their intended effect as my eyes well up. They have an unintended effect, also, as I realize the improbability of what I am witnessing: a thoroughly conventional same-sex wedding.

Read the full piece at Salon »

Authors

Jonathan Rauch

Publication: Salon

Image Source: Kimberly White / Reuters

Second Chances: A Proposal to Reduce Unnecessary Divorce

Fri, 21 Oct 2011 09:30:00 -0400

Event Information

October 21, 2011
9:30 AM - 11:00 AM EDT

Saul/Zilkha Rooms
The Brookings Institution
1775 Massachusetts Avenue, NW
Washington, DC 20036

There are two popular misconceptions about divorce: that it happens only after a long process of misery and conflict, and that once they file for divorce, couples don't entertain the idea of reconciling. But the majority of divorced couples report average happiness and low levels of conflict in the years prior to their divorce, and new research shows that in at least 10 percent of divorcing couples, both spouses are open to efforts to reconcile--and in another 30 percent, at least one spouse has interest in reconciliation. This research also suggests that the high divorce rate in the U.S. is not only costly to taxpayers and harmful to children, but that a substantial number of today’s divorces may be preventable.

On October 21, The Brookings Institution and the Heritage Foundation hosted an event to release a new report from the Institute for American Values, "Second Chances: A Proposal to Reduce Unnecessary Divorce." Co-authors Professor William Doherty and Justice Leah Ward Sears presented the report’s findings in a discussion moderated by Brookings Senior Fellow William Galston. Robert Rector from the Heritage Foundation and Theodora Ooms from the National Healthy Marriage Resource Center offered their analysis of the report and its proposals.

After the program, panelists took audience questions.

Participants

Moderator

Panelists

William J. Doherty

Professor of Family Social Science and Director of the Citizen Professional Center
University of Minnesota

Leah Ward Sears

Former Georgia Supreme Court Chief Justice
Partner, Schiff Hardin LLP

Theodora Ooms

Senior Consultant, National Healthy Marriage Resource Center
Public Strategies, Inc

Robert Rector

Senior Research Fellow
The Heritage Foundation

Iran’s Youth, The Unintended Victims of Sanctions

Djavad Salehi-Isfahani — Wed, 27 Oct 2010 14:16:00 -0400

Introduction—

Iran remained inexplicably calm this summer as various parts of the sanctions rolled out from the United Nations, Washington, and Brussels. The country’s press was occupied with reporting on the new policy initiatives from the Ahmadinejad administration, such as removing the thirty-year old subsidies on energy; reviving population growth by encouraging families to have more children as part of its conservative agenda; relocating a large part of the government bureaucracy from the earthquake-prone Tehran to the provinces; and wresting control of Iran’s mammoth private Islamic Azad University from Ahmadinejad’s powerful rival, former President Rafsanjani. All these initiatives have logics of their own but, curiously, none are directly concerned with the tightening of sanctions.

Even Tehran’s sophisticated middle class seemed unconcerned until the news came, on July 16, that the Educational Testing Service (ETS), the company that offers the Test of English as a Foreign Language (TOEFL) and the Graduate Record Examinations (GRE), was halting these exams in Iran because the latest round of UN sanctions prevented Iranians from paying the fees for the tests. Two weeks later the problem had been resolved and the tests resumed. However, as the first widely reported effect of the sanctions, this incident helped underline the fact that sanctions have unintended consequences that could hurt those far removed from the intended target - Iran’s Revolutionary Guards.

Unfortunately, not all the unintended consequences of the sanctions can be reversed this easily. Iran’s youth, who came to the streets in large numbers last summer to protest fraud in the re-election of President Ahmadinejad, and who for a while not only seemed to threaten his government but shook the foundations of the Islamic Republic, may turn out to be the biggest victims of the sanction. The sanctions are not expressly intended to hurt Iran’s economy, but there is little doubt that they will. The only hope for youth to find employment is the creation of new jobs but Iran’s economy is in deep recession and in no position to create new jobs unless private investment resumes. Sanctions scare away private investment and thus significantly reduce any chance of economic recovery.

Read the full Policy Brief at the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs »

Authors

Djavad Salehi-Isfahani

Publication: The Dubai Initiative

Image Source: © Raheb Homavandi / Reuters

Helping Fragile Families

Wed, 27 Oct 2010 09:00:00 -0400

Event Information

October 27, 2010
9:00 AM - 11:00 AM EDT

Falk Auditorium
The Brookings Institution
1775 Massachusetts Ave., NW
Washington, DC

On October 27, The Future of Children, a joint project between Princeton University and the Brookings Institution, hosted an event and released a new issue of the journal. The issue reports that unwed parents face a host of problems that complicate their ability to get good jobs, form stable families, and perform successfully as parents.

An accompanying policy brief recommends several policies designed to help these fragile families. Based in part on a recent Mathematica Policy Research report on programs aimed at enhancing the marriage and relationship skills of parents, the brief calls for changes in President Obama’s proposed new Fatherhood, Marriage, and Innovations Fund, by recommending that funds be set aside for establishing and evaluating marriage promotion programs.

Researchers, community program operators (including couples from the Oklahoma and Baltimore programs that were part of the Mathematica evaluation), and an advisor to President Obama responded to the recommendations in the policy brief and commented on policies and practices that would help support fragile families.

Speakers and panelists then took questions from the audience.

Click on the thumbnail below to view a full-size image

Participating couples, along with program operators, discuss their experiences with the Building Strong Families program.

Transcript

Event Materials

Participants

Panelists

Moderator: Irwin Garfinkel

Professor, Contemporary Urban Problems
Co-Director, Columbia Population Research Center, Columbia University

Mary Myrick

Founder and President
Public Strategies

Joseph Jones

Founder, President, and CEO
Center for Urban Families

Brandon Edwards and Victoria Porter Edwards

Participating Couple, Building Strong Families, Oklahoma City

Henry Downs and Angelalecia Tydings

Participating Couple, Building Strong Families, Baltimore

Martha Coven

Special Assistant to the President for Mobility and Opportunity Policy, Domestic Policy Council
The White House

Rob Wood

Associate Director of Research and Senior Economist
Mathematica Policy Research

Strengthening Fragile Families

Tue, 26 Oct 2010 17:43:00 -0400

The rise of fragile families—families that begin when a child is born outside of marriage—is one of the nation’s most vexing social problems. In the first place, these families suffer high poverty rates and poor child outcomes. Even more problematic, the very groups of Americans who traditionally experience poverty, impaired child development, and poor school achievement have the highest rates of nonmarital parenthood—thus intensifying the disadvantages faced by these families and extending them into the next generation.

Nonmarital births have increased precipitously in the past forty years, especially among minorities and the poor, the groups of greatest concern. Today more than 70 percent of black children, 50 percent of Hispanic children, nearly 30 percent of white children, and 40 percent of all children are born outside marriage, assuring the persistence of poverty, wasting human potential, and raising government spending. Reducing nonmarital births and mitigating their consequences should be a top priority of the nation’s social policy.

Social science aims to illuminate the choices available to policy makers both by promoting better understanding of social problems and by providing reliable information about the effects of potential solutions. And yet, until a decade ago, social scientists had accumulated little data about nonmarital childbearing and its consequences for parents, children, and communities. Recognizing the need for such data, in the late 1990s researchers at Princeton and Columbia universities organized the first large-scale study of nonmarital childbearing and its consequences. The researchers randomly sampled parents of approximately 5,000 newborns (including 3,600 nonmarital births) in twenty of the nation’s largest cities. For the past decade, the research team has been following the parents and children to learn more about their capabilities and experiences. The findings of this research, known as the Fragile Families Study, have been reported in numerous academic articles, newsletters, and books. Now the most important findings have been pulled together in the new volume of the journal The Future of Children. Here we provide a brief overview of those findings and draw from them what we believe to be the most important policy recommendations.

The Fragile Families Study Findings

Four findings in particular stand out. The first, a big surprise when it was first published, is that a large majority of unwed parents have close and loving relationships at the time of their child’s birth. A little more than half the unmarried couples were living together when their child was born, and an additional 32 percent were in dating relationships. One-night stands these were not. The couples talked readily about marriage, with 87 percent of the fathers and 72 percent of the mothers giving their relationship at least a 50/50 chance of leading to marriage.

The second, more sobering, finding is that unwed parents have a host of demographic and human capital characteristics that complicate getting good jobs, forming stable families, and performing successfully as parents. Unwed parents in the sample were much younger than the married parents—the mothers almost six years younger, and the fathers, four. Only about 4 percent of the married mothers, but 26 percent of the unwed mothers, were teenagers. And even though the unwed parents were younger than their married counterparts, about three times as many had a previous birth with another partner, leaving many of the children in these households to deal with a parent figure (the mother’s new boyfriend or husband) inside their home and a biological parent outside the home, an arrangement that can be stressful for all involved.

The human capital and health differences between the two groups are equally striking. Unwed mothers were more than twice as likely to lack even a high school degree, while married mothers were nearly fifteen times more likely to have graduated from college. In part as a result of their educational advantages, married mothers on average earned more than twice as much as unwed mothers, about $25,600 compared with $11,100. The lower earnings of unwed mothers contributed to a poverty rate that was more than three times as high (43 percent) as that of married mothers (14 percent). The differences between unwed and married fathers were similar. Unwed parents also differed in health status and behaviors detrimental to health. They were more likely to report being in poor or fair health, more likely to have a health-related limitation, and much more likely to use illegal drugs. Nearly 8 percent of unwed mothers reported heavy drinking, about four times the rate among married mothers.

A final difference in human capital between the two groups is of special concern. More than 36 percent of the unmarried fathers had a prison record, five times the share of married fathers who ever spent time in prison. Research shows that incarceration disrupts fathers’ relationships with their families, requires a difficult (and thus often unsuccessful) transition back to life in the community, and greatly reduces the chance of finding employment. Even when these fathers do find employment, they work less and have lower wages. As if these disadvantages were not enough, research consistently shows that recidivism rates are high, deepening even further the disadvantages associated with having spent time in prison.

The third set of findings is equally sobering. Relatively few of the unwed couples were able to form stable relationships. At five years after the birth of their child, only about 35 percent were still together. Breakups were less likely among couples in which fathers had higher earnings, mothers had more education, attitudes about marriage were positive, and relationship quality was good.

Relationship dissolution is only the first step toward household instability. Once the couple splits, both of the unwed parents usually go on to form new relationships and often to have additional children by other partners. Over the five years of the study, over a quarter of unwed mothers lived with a new partner, and a fifth had a child with a new partner. Changes in dating partnerships were even more common. Nearly 60 percent of mothers who were single at birth experienced three or more relationship transitions over the five years.

The parental split reduces substantially the contact between the children and their fathers. By year five, only 51 percent of the fathers involved in splits saw their child even once a month. In effect, when couples break up, within five years half the children are destined to have little contact with their father. It would seem very difficult for a father who sees his child once a month or less to provide effective parenting.

Finally, and most important, these differences in demography, human capital, health, and household stability are associated with negative developmental outcomes for children born to unwed parents. Relationship instability in particular is linked with both poor test performance and behavioral problems in children, especially boys. With unstable and increasingly complex home environments, and with children’s development already moving off track by age five, it is difficult to be optimistic that most of the children of unwed parents will grow into flourishing adults.

Policies to Address the Fragile Families Findings

The Fragile Families Study has clearly fulfilled its goal of providing abundant information about couples whose children are born outside marriage and about those children. With 40 percent of the nation’s children—including a disproportionate number of poor and minority youngsters—now being born to unwed parents, the Fragile Families Study should raise grave concerns among policy makers about the problems faced by these families and their children. Although the Fragile Families Study was not designed to test the effectiveness of programs to help these families, we think, based on the Fragile Families Study and other studies, that four policy initiatives are justified.

Because few social interventions produce major or immediate improvements in the problems they address, there can be little doubt that nonmarital births and their attendant problems will still be with us for several generations. Thus the nation needs to maintain and even strengthen its safety net for single parents. We doubt that the safety net will ever provide these parents and children with enough cash and in-kind benefits to maintain a decent lifestyle, so the nation should, for both custodial and noncustodial single parents, strengthen its welfare policy emphasis on work and public work supports such as cash earnings supplements and child care. The federal government and the states should also work with noncustodial parents to create child support payment levels that they could be reasonably expected to meet. We are especially concerned about the weakness in the cash benefits part of the safety net revealed by the current recession. States must find ways to balance strong work and child support requirements with cash benefits and adjustments in child support for those who cannot find work.

The second policy initiative is preventing nonmarital pregnancies. Policy simulations in the new Future of Children volume show that mass media campaigns that encourage men to use condoms, teen pregnancy prevention programs that discourage sexual activity and educate teens about contraception use, and Medicaid programs that subsidize contraception all reduce pregnancy rates among unmarried couples—in the process saving more than enough public dollars to cover their costs. Happily, the federal government is now at various stages of implementing policies that are responsive to two of the three findings from the policy simulations. The Obama administration’s plan to expand teen pregnancy programs, now funded by Congress and being aggressively implemented, holds great promise for further reductions in teen pregnancy rates. In addition, a provision in the new health care legislation gives states the option to cover additional women with family planning services without the need for a waiver as required under current law. This reform is consistent with the simulation’s finding that additional Medicaid family planning coverage for women would be cost beneficial. With two of the three reforms recommended by the simulations already being implemented, only the third recommendation—media campaigns encouraging men to use condoms—has not already been addressed by policy makers. Given the evidence from the simulation of this policy, we think spending about $100 million a year on a social marketing campaign would be good policy and would pay for itself.

A third area needing policy reform is the U.S. prison system. The Fragile Families Study found that unwed fathers are more than five times as likely to serve prison sentences as married fathers are, with profoundly negative effects on their life after prison. So serious are the consequences for employment, integration into community life, and subsequent imprisonment that a prison sentence has come to be the modern equivalent of the scarlet “A.” And yet good studies find that many long prison sentences in the United States—which has one of the highest incarceration rates in the world—are the result of victimless drug crimes and recommitment for minor parole offenses.

Rethinking sentencing policy is especially urgent because research shows how difficult it is to rehabilitate men once they have served prison terms. A key goal should be to revise mandatory sentencing laws in accord with the recommendations of the United States Sentencing Commission—in this case, to shorten the sentences of nonviolent minor drug dealers, or even to address their offenses outside of prison. The fall 2008 issue of The Future of Children, edited by Lawrence Steinberg, reviewed impressive evidence that community programs that worked with adolescents and their parents were not only more effective than imprisonment in preventing subsequent crimes, but also were more cost-effective. Policy makers should make every effort to modify federal and state mandatory sentencing laws to keep young offenders out of prison.

Regardless of the timing, the Obama administration has joined the issue on what is arguably the most important provision in federal law on marriage and fatherhood. The marriage grant program provides an average of $610,000 for five years to 125 community-based marriage projects. Grantees include churches, postsecondary schools, county and state governments, nonprofit and for-profit entities, and faith-based organizations. Most of the programs provide marriage education for low-income couples, but some conduct marriage education for high school students, others provide divorce reduction programs, and still others combine educational activities with public advertising campaigns on the value of healthy marriage and the availability of services. Similarly, the fatherhood grant program funds 100 projects that promote responsible fatherhood by helping community-based organizations and others run programs that provide healthy marriage, responsible parenting, and economic stability services, including employment or skills training assistance, as well as encouraging fathers to make their child support payments.

The Obama administration would replace these networks of marriage and fatherhood programs with a “Fatherhood, Marriage, and Families Innovation Fund.” Rather than making grants to community-based organizations, the federal government would allocate funds to states or coalitions of states for two types of programs: “comprehensive responsible fatherhood initiatives” and “comprehensive family self-sufficiency demonstrations [that] address the employment and self-sufficiency needs of parents.” The Obama proposal would end funding for the current marriage and fatherhood programs and set in motion the new state-run programs. Thus, it appears that the emphasis on couple relationships and marriage in the Bush programs would give way to an emphasis on fatherhood and self-sufficiency, although marriage programs would be allowed. The Obama initiative also would focus much more on assessing program effectiveness than the Bush marriage and fatherhood grants, which have received virtually no evaluation.

Since the Obama administration announced its innovation fund proposal last winter, a program designed by the Bush administration as part of its marriage initiative has begun publishing results that bear directly on marriage and fatherhood programs. A random-assignment evaluation of Bush’s Building Strong Families (BSF) demonstrations in eight sites was mounted to test the effects of marriage education and services on young unwed parents. More than 5,000 couples participated either in a control group that received no services or in a treatment group that received three types of services: marriage education group sessions; support from a family coordinator who encouraged participation in the group sessions and provided ongoing emotional support to the couples; and referral for services such as job search, mental health, and child care. The marriage education sessions were guided by curriculums designed specifically for low-income couples to teach skills including effective communication, showing affection, managing conflict, co-parenting, and family finances. The curriculums offered between thirty and forty-two hours of group sessions.

Interim results fifteen months after couples had applied for the program can be summarized in four points. First, averaged across all eight sites, there were no differences between control and program couples on any of the major outcomes. Second, the programs nonetheless had positive effects on black couples, who improved their ability to manage conflicts and avoid destructive behaviors, reduced infidelity and family violence, and increased effective co-parenting. Third, the Oklahoma City site produced a host of positive impacts, including keeping couples together, increasing their happiness, and helping them express support and affection and use constructive rather than destructive behaviors during conflict, among others. The positive results for black couples appear to be driven primarily by the Oklahoma program. Fourth, couples in the Baltimore program experienced some negative impacts, including fewer couples maintaining their romantic involvement, lower expression of support and affection, more severe violence against women, lower quality of co-parenting, and less father involvement.

It is disappointing that the BSF program had no effects overall, and the Baltimore results are disturbing. We urge further study of the Baltimore site, but note that the couples there were the most disadvantaged of all participants, and their relationships were more tenuous, which suggests that there could be thresholds below which participation in marriage education programs is not advisable. But despite these disappointments, the finding of benefits for black couples and the positive effects found in Oklahoma imply that a program serving black couples—who have the highest rates of unwed parenting—built on the Oklahoma model could produce similar positive effects. Moreover, initial evaluations of many social programs produce findings not unlike those reported in the BSF evaluation; indeed, findings are often even more discouraging. From this perspective, the early findings showing a range of benefits for the biggest subgroup (blacks) and for the biggest individual program (Oklahoma) seem relatively encouraging. It would be premature to use the BSF results to conclude that marriage education programs for unwed couples don’t work, or to abandon research and demonstration programs that attempt to promote healthy relationships between couples in fragile families.

A compromise along these lines with the Obama proposal lies readily at hand. The criticism that the Bush network of 125 marriage projects has provided virtually no evaluation evidence is entirely correct. As a result, no one has any idea whether these programs are working. We recommend that the Obama administration open a new round of marriage-promotion grants, allowing the 125 existing programs to apply if they so choose, but basing decisions about funding in the new round on the quality of the new proposals and on the reliability of the evaluation plan that would be required for every proposal. Projects should also be required to report a standard set of results that include the types of measures reported in the BSF evaluation.

The administration is proposing to spend $500 million over three years on its initiative. We would recommend spending about $50 million of the $500 million specifically on marriage education projects that attempt to replicate and expand the approach taken in the Oklahoma program. This would leave $450 million of the $500 million for the fatherhood and self-sufficiency programs favored by the administration. Projects that bring fatherhood programs and marriage programs into a close working relationship to promote child well-being would be especially welcome. The key point is to follow up on what has been learned from the BSF evaluation and evaluations of fatherhood programs in recent years.

Although the administration should consult widely to learn more about the program characteristics that may have played a role in producing the negative impacts in Baltimore and the positive impacts in Oklahoma and among black couples, we think two unique characteristics of the Oklahoma program are especially important. The two characteristics are involving married couples as well as fragile families in the marriage education groups and focusing strongly on attendance. Average attendance in the Oklahoma program was far superior to that in the other programs. About 55 percent of participants in Oklahoma received at least 60 percent of the marriage curriculum. In Indiana, where attendance was next best, 33 percent of participants reached that rather low bar. In the remaining six programs, an abysmal average of 14 percent did so. Half the participants in four of the eight programs failed to attend even a single session. A fair test of the marriage curricula requires that ways be found to boost attendance—as was in fact achieved by the Oklahoma program.

The most important conclusion from the Fragile Families Study is that these families play a central role in boosting the nation’s poverty rate and that they and their children contribute disproportionately to many other serious social problems. Our policy recommendations would in all likelihood have only modest effects on poverty and other social problems, but until more disadvantaged children live in stable households with both of their biological parents sharing healthy relationships, the negative effects of unwed births will continue to trouble the nation. Meanwhile, policy makers should strengthen the safety net that provides cash and in-kind support to custodial and noncustodial parents and helps them find work; continue to aggressively implement and even expand the prevention policies that have been shown to reduce nonmarital births and save money; revise criminal sentencing laws and experiment with policies designed to help men avoid prison and integrate back into their communities when prison cannot be avoided; and refuse to give up on healthy marriage programs that have shown at least some promise in achieving the stability and positive parent relationships that could prove helpful for these couples, their children, and the nation.

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Authors

Elisabeth Donahue
Irwin Garfinkel
Ron Haskins
Sara McLanahan
Ronald B. Mincy

Publication: The Future of Children

Image Source: © Joshua Lott / Reuters

Transitions to Employment and Marriage among Young Men in Egypt

Ragui Assaad, Christine Binzel and May Gadallah — Mon, 18 Oct 2010 15:24:00 -0400

Editor’s Note: This working paper is an electronic version of an article published as “Transitions to Employment and Marriage among Young Men in Egypt,” Middle East Development Journal, Vol. 2, No. 1, (2010) 39–88. DOI: 10.1142/ S1793812010000162. (c) copyright World Scientific Publishing Company http://www.worldscinet.com/medj/ .

ABSTRACT—

We examine in this paper the transition from school to work and the transition to marriage among young men with at least a secondary education in Egypt, with particular attention to how the first transition affects the second. In examining the transition from school to work, we analyze the determinants of the duration of transition to first employment after school completion, as well as the type and quality of job obtained in such employment. We then move to an examination of the determinants of further mobility to a second job. In examining the transition to marriage, we investigate the effect of time to the first job and the time to the first good job, if any, on the timing of marriage, controlling for cohort of birth, education, family background and community-level variables.

We find that the duration of transition to first employment has fallen over time primarily because of the reduced availability of formal employment, especially public employment, making it less worthwhile for young men to remain jobless while searching for such employment.

Having access to work in a family enterprise reduces significantly the duration of transition from school to work as does the need to be the main breadwinner of the family. While education beyond the secondary level has no significant effect on the duration of the transition, it does significantly affect the probability of getting a good job and a formal job, as a first job. The hazard of transition to a second job is negatively associated with the time it takes to get a first job, but that is primarily because it is negatively associated with the quality of the first job and the fact that it takes longer to get good first jobs.

Our findings relating to the transition to marriage confirm both the importance of early entry into the job market and of obtaining good jobs for early transition into marriage. However, if delayed entry (due to search) raises the hazard of getting a good job, it may actually be a worthwhile strategy, from the point of view of curbing the delay in marriage, for an individual to spend more time in job search.

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Authors

Ragui Assaad
Christine Binzel
May Gadallah

Publication: Middle East Development Journal

How Marriage Survives During the Recession

Justin Wolfers — Wed, 13 Oct 2010 09:39:00 -0400

The recession has taken a toll on the institution of marriage, we keep hearing. Last month, for instance, when it was reported that the proportion of Americans aged 25 to 34 who are married fell below the proportion who have never married, it was quickly attributed to the economic downturn. Young adults, according to this narrative, have less money to spend on a wedding and are less eager to enter into a lifetime commitment during times of uncertainty.

Again last week, when a report from the Pew Research Center noted that, for the first time, college-educated 30-year-olds were more likely to have been married than were people the same age without a college degree, the news was interpreted as another side effect of the recent recession. After all, the downturn has been especially hard on young men with no college degree.

But if you look at marriage in the United States over the past century, this interpretation doesn’t stand up. Marriage and divorce rates have remained remarkably immune to the ups and downs of the business cycle. Unfortunately, the marriage statistics are easy to misread.

It’s misleading to count the wedding rings among people in their 20s and early 30s, because the median age at first marriage in the United States has risen to 28 for men (from 23 in 1970) and 26 for women (from 21 in 1970). The fact that these folks aren’t married now doesn’t mean they won’t marry — many of them just aren’t there yet.

Look instead at 40-year-olds, and you see that 81 percent have married at least once. Yes, this number used to be higher — it peaked at 93 percent in 1980 — but, clearly, marriage remains a part of most people’s lives. These statistics are not a perfect barometer either, however, because they reflect weddings that were celebrated years earlier.

To most accurately track marriage rates, you need to focus on the number of wedding certificates issued. In 2009, the latest year for which we have data, there were about 2.1 million marriages in the United States. That does represent a slight decline since the recession began. But it’s the same rate of decline that existed during the preceding economic boom, the previous bust and both the boom and the bust before that.

Indeed, the recent modest decline in marriage continues a 30-year trend. And even as the number of marriages falls, divorce is also becoming less prevalent. So a greater proportion of today’s marriages will likely persist 30 years into the future.

This is not to say that marriage looks the same today as it always did — over the past several decades, there has been a tremendous shift in married life.

It used to be that a typical marriage involved specialized roles for the husband and wife. Usually he was in the marketplace, and she was in the home, and this arrangement led to maximum productivity.

But today, when families have easy access to prepared foods, inexpensive off-the-rack clothing and labor-saving technology from the washing machine to the robot vacuum cleaner, there’s much less benefit from either spouse specializing in homemaking. Women, now better educated and with greater control over their fertility, are in the marketplace, too, and married couples have more money, more leisure time and longer lives to spend together. Modern marriages are based not on the economic benefits of playing specialized roles but on shared passions.

This new model of “hedonic marriage” has had an effect on who marries, and when — as research I have conducted with my better half, the economist Betsey Stevenson, has documented. In the old days, opposites attracted; an aspiring executive groom would pair up with a less-educated bride. And they would wed before the stork visited and before the couple made the costly investment of putting the husband through business school.

But today, that same young executive would more likely be half of a power couple, married to a college-educated woman who shares his taste in books, hobbies, travel and so on. Indeed, marriage rates for college-educated women rose sharply through the 1950s and ’60s, and have remained remarkably stable since. These women tend to marry after they have finished college and started their careers.

The decline in marriage, it turns out, is concentrated entirely among women with less education — those who likely have the least to gain from modern hedonic marriage.

This is not to say that the economic downturn has had no effect at all on domestic life. Census data show that the number of unwed couples living together rose sharply last year. With rents high and jobs hard to come by, it’s no surprise that people are doubling up.

Still, given that the marriage rate remains on trend, the rise in cohabitation isn’t coming at the expense of marriage. Instead, many young couples who might otherwise merely be dating are moving in together. Some of them, no doubt, will eventually marry. Truly, the recession has not torn young couples apart; it has pushed them closer together.

Authors

Justin Wolfers

Publication: The New York Times

Image Source: © Shannon Stapleton / Reuters

Investing in Young Children

Wed, 13 Oct 2010 09:00:00 -0400

Event Information

October 13, 2010
9:00 AM - 11:00 AM EDT

Room 1100
Longworth House Office Building

Washington, DC

On October 13, the Center on Children and Families at Brookings and the National Institute for Early Education Research released a new collection of papers that assesses the field of early childhood education and child care. Edited by Senior Fellow Ron Haskins and W. Steven Barnett of Rutgers University, Investing in Young Children: New Directions in Federal Preschool and Early Childhood Policy focuses on Early Head Start, Head Start, and home visiting programs. The editors recommend promising reforms for all three programs, including closing ineffective Head Start centers or giving other program operators the opportunity to compete for Head Start funds. Other recommendations include offering a few states broad regulatory relief to innovate and coordinate Head Start with other state preschool educational programs and child care.

To address these issues, the Center on Children and Families hosted a discussion featuring Haskins and Barnett. A panel of experts and program administrators offered their views on the analysis, especially on the recommendations to reform Head Start.

Speakers and panelists took audience questions.

Audio

Investing in Young Children

Participants

Panelists

W. Steven Barnett

Professor and Co-Director, National Institute for Early Education (NIEER), Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey

Ben Allen

Director, Public Policy and Research, National Head Start Association

Harriet Dichter

National Director, First Five Years

Roberto Rodriguez

Domestic Policy Council, The White House

Nicholas Zill

Educational Consultant

Iranian Youth in Times of Economic Crisis

Djavad Salehi-Isfahani — Mon, 11 Oct 2010 11:04:00 -0400

Introduction
Young people in Iran have emerged as important players on the country’s political scene but remain marginal on its economic scene. They were a vital part of President Khatami’s political base and contributed to his landslide victories at the polls, in 1997 and 2001. In June 2009 they again played a key role, this time in challenging President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s controversial reelection, which led to massive anti-government protests in the nation’s largest cities. A year later the political crisis appears to have subsided, but the economic crisis that has engulfed the country since early 2008 has deepened, and with it the crisis facing Iran’s youth. Youth unemployment is at record high levels and, for the majority of youth, marriage and family formation are increasingly becoming challenges to overcome rather than celebrations of reaching adulthood.

The economic recession has drastically reduced the economy’s ability to absorb new workers just as the number of young people entering the labor market reached its highest level ever. While the challenges facing youth are at an all time high, the major policy initiatives pushed by the Ahmadinejad administration address issues that have little to do with youth—reforming energy subsidies, offering incentives for families to have more children, and amending the family laws to tighten the conditions governing temporary marriage. These initiatives and a general form of policy paralysis following the political upheavals of last summer have prevented the government from addressing young people’s problems.

Studies show that Iranian youth face difficult transitions through school, from school to work, and to marriage and family formation. These and other studies of Iranian youth have documented how the period between adolescence and adulthood has over time become longer and filled with more frustration and anxiety, a condition common enough in the Middle East to have received its own expression – “waithood”. The old panacea that promised youth better futures through more education no longer seems to work in Iran; educated youth often find transition to adulthood more difficult than less educated youth. They seem to wait longer to find their first job after graduation, to delay marriage more, and to stay longer in their parents’ home. Unfortunately, these long periods of waiting are not spent in building human capital, saving for a home, or other activities that signal hope. For youth with the means, these periods are largely spent in idleness, in seeking degrees and diplomas that may not add to their productive skills, or in preparing for greener pastures abroad. Those without the means to pursue such options, leave school earlier to take up temporary jobs that neither provide stepping stones to future careers nor improve their chances of marriage and family formation.

In this paper, I review the evidence on youth transitions in Iran, using recent survey data for 2007 and 2008, to show how the economic crisis since 2008 has affected youth transitions to employment and to marriage. I also show how transitions differ by family background and by region of residence – rural and urban. While in many ways “waithood” is a phenomenon that cuts across social classes in Iran, disadvantaged youth sometimes face greater challenges in transitions to employment and marriage.

The next section begins with a presentation of Iran’s rapidly changing demography, which is a major influence on young peoples’ lives. Thanks to a baby boom in the early years of the Islamic Revolution, roughly around 1979-1984, the cohorts of young people reaching adulthood in the last few years have been by far the largest in Iran’s history. Iran boasts the highest share of 15-29 year olds in total population of any country in the world. Even a well-functioning economy would have difficulty absorbing new cohorts into the labor market when they outnumber the retiring cohorts 6 to 1. Iran’s peculiar demography has also affected the marriage market in adverse ways. The baby boom women of Iran have reached marriage age several years before the men from the same cohorts, thus facing the smaller older cohort of marriage-age men, causing a classic “marriage squeeze,” or a shortage of men – about four men for every five women of marriage age. The sections that follow present an analysis of the transition from school to work and to marriage.

Read the full report at Dubai School of Government » (pdf)

Authors

Djavad Salehi-Isfahani

Publication: The Dubai Initiative

Constructing "Life Histories" for Iranian Youth in Transition

Diana Greenwald and Djavad Salehi-Isfahani — Wed, 07 Jul 2010 10:51:00 -0400

Editor’s Note: The Middle East Youth Initiative has released a new study that explores youth transitions in Iran in depth, exploiting longitudinal data to track youth preferences and outcomes as they move from the education system into the labor and marriage markets. Diana Greenwald interviewed coauthor Djavad Salehi-Isfahani to discuss some of the paper’s main findings.

Middle East Youth Initiative (MEYI): How does your new study with Daniel Egel – “Youth Transitions to Employment and Marriage in Iran: Evidence from the School to Work Transition Survey” – improve our understanding of youth transitions from previous work on the subject?

Djavad Salehi-Isfahani: The big difference is in the type of data we use. Our previous study used cross-sectional data; this paper relies mainly on retrospective information. What we learned from our earlier study was a series of snapshots of youth in transition. In this paper we are actually able to follow individual youth (up to age 29) as they leave school, change jobs, and get married.

MEYI: This study confirms your earlier findings that educated young men in Iran suffer from the highest unemployment rates. Besides the demographic pressures – with Iran experiencing one of the most severe youth bulges in the region – what are some other institutional and behavioral reasons for this? Do you think the appeal of a university education for younger generations is being reduced as they witness the experiences of this cohort that is now facing challenges in the labor market?

Salehi-Isfahani: As we have previously noted, the reasons for the stalled transitions are several. First, the sheer size of the new cohort that is entering the labor market is much greater than Iran’s labor market could absorb, even if it were more efficient. Second, the inflexible labor market favors older, employed workers (insiders) over younger, new entrants, even though the latter are more educated and perhaps better equipped with new skills. Only 5 percent of those over 30 are unemployed, compared to 25 percent for those under 30. Third, the skills that young workers bring to the labor market are out of sync with what employers need. This is because of the emphasis that public sector employers and the education system place on degrees rather than skills.

The increasing unemployment of educated youth does not seem to have reduced the appeal of university education. Instead it seems to have ratcheted up the desire for credentials. This year, nearly one million youth took part in the entrance examinations for Master’s degrees, compared to 1.3 million for undergraduate education! Production of Master’s degrees is the fastest growing industry in Iran, with active participation from the private sector.

MEYI: One of the surprising findings in this study was the high degree of job mobility between the informal and formal sector among Iranian youth (and here you were specifically looking at the data for young men). To what extent do you think this mobility is voluntary?

Salehi-Isfahani: I wish we knew, but we cannot tell from the data. But if I had to guess, I would say that it is to a large extent involuntary. The higher mobility is mainly due to the response of employers to the high cost of laying off workers. They have exploited the labor law that allows employers to offer short-term contracts, which they renew periodically. These type of contracts do not provide either party—employer or the employed—to fully invest in the job or, as economists would say, firm-specific human capital. The incentive is simply not there when the contract is for less than a year. So, turnover for these jobs is high. Overall turnover is still low, though, because older workers have tenure.

MEYI: Your paper presents a complex picture of how marriage affects young women’s propensity to join the labor force in Iran. In looking at the reported activities of young women in the Statistical Center of Iran’s School to Work Transition Survey five years before and two years after marriage, you find that the share of these women who are employed does not change with the onset of marriage. Yet, in looking at their responses to the “willingness to work” questions and their actual reported labor force participation, you find that married women are less likely to want to work and less likely to be participating in the labor market. What could account for these seemingly divergent stories?

Salehi-Isfahani: This is an excellent question. I think the answer is that those who are employed are different from the general female population, to whom the attitude question is posed and who participate less. Presumably, the employed women have higher preference for work and have demonstrated that by working. The other interesting thing we learn from the fact that the employment rate remains constant before and after marriage is that marriage is not career ending for Iranian women. I believe that in Egypt similar evidence points in the opposite direction, that marriage reduces the probability of working.

MEYI: The study concludes by noting that there is still much research to be done to identify causation in some of the observed relationships, such as those between employment and marriage, for example. How can new research begin to tackle these questions, and what methodologies should be used?

Salehi-Isfahani: The difficulty in this type of work is that the data reveals the outcome of several decisions which are jointly made. For example, we find that, for men, being employed increases the probability of marriage. But what we do not know is whether men who want to marry are more likely to seek employment, so the causation could be the opposite of what we expect. We need to find an exogenous source of variation in employment, such as a jobs program that affects some but not all youth, to be able to infer the causal effect of employment on marriage. This type of answer is much more useful for policy than correlations because it offers insight into where the binding constraints are, say, for marriage. Is it really employment, housing, or age imbalance in the marriage market?

Authors

Diana Greenwald
Djavad Salehi-Isfahani

A "Kagan Doctrine" on Gay Marriage

Jonathan Rauch — Fri, 02 Jul 2010 00:00:00 -0400

Elena Kagan uttered neither the word “gay” nor “marriage” in her opening statement at the Senate confirmation hearings on her nomination to the Supreme Court, but she addressed the issue nonetheless. No, she didn’t say how she will vote when gay marriage comes before the court, as it may soon. What she did say was this:

“The Supreme Court, of course, has the responsibility of ensuring that our government never oversteps its proper bounds or violates the rights of individuals. But the court must also recognize the limits on itself and respect the choices made by the American people.”

Ms. Kagan may not have had gay marriage in mind when she made that statement, but it could not be more relevant. She seems to be saying that protecting minority rights is the Supreme Court’s job description, but also that a civil rights claim doesn’t automatically trump majority preferences. This is something absolutists on both sides of the gay marriage debate don’t like to hear, but it has the virtue of being right.

While the Senate considers Ms. Kagan’s nomination, Judge Vaughn Walker of the United States District Court in San Francisco is deciding how to rule in a major lawsuit challenging Proposition 8, the 2008 ballot initiative that revoked and banned same-sex marriage in California (while leaving the state’s marriage-like domestic partner program intact). Judge Walker may declare that the United States Constitution gives gay couples the right to marry — a decision sure to start a political firestorm (possibly just in time to give the Democrats an additional headache in this year’s midterm elections). Whatever he decides is likely to be appealed, presumably up to the court that Ms. Kagan seems likely to join.

This case is not primarily about the merits of gay marriage. It is primarily about who gets to decide. The plaintiffs say marriage is a civil right, and when a civil right is assailed, the Supreme Court has no choice but to take command. If the Supreme Court doesn’t protect minority rights, it abdicates its job.

Proposition 8’s defenders retort that gay marriage is not a civil right, because it is not marriage, or not marriage as defined by most Californians. If the court does not defer to the voters’ wishes, it oversteps its bounds.

Ms. Kagan seems to reject both forms of absolutism. Civil rights, she implies, are important, but so is judicial modesty, and a sensible judge balances the two. A sensible judge can say something like, “Same-sex marriage may indeed be a civil right, but not all civil rights demand immediate judicial intervention, and other important interests militate against imposing this one on the whole country right now.”

Viewed in that light, the argument for upholding California’s gay marriage ban has merit — not because the policy is fair or wise (it isn’t) but because it represents a reasonable judgment that the people of California are entitled to make. Barring gay marriage but providing civil unions is not the balance I would choose, but it is a defensible balance to strike, one that arguably takes “a cautious approach to making such a significant change to the institution of marriage” (as the lawyers defending Proposition 8 write in one of their briefs) while going a long way toward meeting gay couples’ needs.

I say this knowing how deeply it stings gay Americans to let states make invidious choices. In June, my partner, Michael, and I married in the District of Columbia. But every time I commute from my office in Washington to my home in Virginia, my marriage magically dissolves like some matrimonial Cheshire Cat, because Virginia constitutionally bans any recognition of it. What straight couple would tolerate that?

Shortly before we married, we visited a lawyer who explained that it would cost thousands of dollars to draw up documents protecting us in states that, like Virginia, treat us as legal strangers — documents making Michael my heir, giving him access to my hospital room, allowing him to make financial decisions should I be incapacitated. Even so, our pricey paperwork could replicate only a few of the perquisites of marriage, and only imperfectly at that. This is how second-class citizenship feels.

But the gay-marriage debate, while assuredly a civil rights argument, is much more than that. It is also a debate about the meaning of marriage, about the pace of change in a conflicted society and about who gets to decide. Whatever the activists on both sides say, nothing in the Constitution requires the Supreme Court to short-circuit the country’s search for a new consensus, either by imposing gay marriage nationwide or by slamming the door on it with an aggressively dismissive ruling. Sometimes the right answer for the courts is to step aside and let politics do its job.

In her testimony, Ms. Kagan described the Supreme Court as “a wondrous institution” and the democratic process as “often messy and frustrating.” She was right, as every veteran of a civil rights struggle can attest. But she was also right to say that the court should be “properly deferential to the decisions of the American people and their elected representatives.” If she can turn those platitudes into a jurisprudence that respects both gay equality and judicial modesty, she will be unpopular on both sides of the marriage debate — and correct.

Authors

Jonathan Rauch

Publication: The New York Times

Youth Transitions to Employment and Marriage in Iran

Daniel Egel and Djavad Salehi-Isfahani — Wed, 30 Jun 2010 00:00:00 -0400

Introduction

Iran’s young men and women face serious challenges in their transitions to employment and marriage. The authors study the factors that affect these transitions using the 2005 School to Work Transition Survey (SWTS). As this survey contains detailed retrospective data of education, employment, and marital outcomes for youth ages 15-29, it provides a new and valuable tool for exploring the challenges facing these youth. In the authors’ analysis of the transition to employment, which employs discrete-time hazard models and probit models of women’s desired and actual labor force participation, they find that (1) the duration of unemployment increases secularly with men’s but not women’s education, (2) parental background significantly affects men but not women, and (3) labor force participation of a mother is the strongest predictor of a daughter’s labor force participation. For the transition to marriage, they find that job stability is the most important determinant of the age of marriage, as both years of employment and high quality employment contracts accelerate the marriage transition. Among women they find that the transition to marriage is delayed significantly by both work experience and increased education. The study discusses the relevance of these findings in designing policies to help these youth in their transitions.

This working paper is an electronic version of an article published as “Youth Transitions to Employment and Marriage in Iran: Evidence from the School to Work Transition Survey,” Middle East Development Journal, Vol. 2, No. 1, (2010) 89–120. DOI: 10.1142/S1793812010000198. (c) copyright World Scientific Publishing Company. http://www.worldscinet.com/medj/.

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Authors

Daniel Egel
Djavad Salehi-Isfahani

America Needs More Economic Mobility

Ron Haskins and Isabel V. Sawhill — Mon, 29 Mar 2010 11:25:00 -0400

Although the growth of income inequality has received lots of public attention in recent years, public policy should focus instead on expanding economic opportunity. Of the numerous advantages of concentrating on opportunity, two stand out. One is public support. Americans are less concerned about inequality than economic opportunity. The popular reading of the American Dream is not that America guarantees success to all, but that America tries to ensure equal opportunity so that hard work and initiative pay off. The second advantage is that new legislation will be more likely to win support if it is framed in a way that is popular with both political parties. In our new book, Creating an Opportunity Society, we lay out an agenda of policies aimed at improving education, encouraging work, and strengthening families. We argue that this opportunity-enhancing agenda is one that most people, regardless of political affiliation, can endorse.

Some might think that America already presents people with lots of opportunity to get ahead. But it turns out that you need to pick your parents well. True, there is considerable mobility from one generation to the next, but the American economy tends to help those at the top stay there while making it difficult for those at the bottom to move up. Kids from families in the bottom 20 percent of the income distribution are nearly five times as likely to wind up in the bottom 20 percent as kids from families in the top 20 percent. Similarly, children from other advanced countries are less likely to be stuck at the bottom of the income distribution than children in the U.S.

There is almost universal agreement that education is the key to economic success. Most people know that the family income of those who drop out of school falls far below the family income of those who complete college. Less well known is the fact that the income of those with less than a college degree has not increased for three decades or more. Promoting education is promoting opportunity.

Our research shows that children whose parents were in the bottom 20 percent of earners tripled their odds of earning $85,000 or more per year by obtaining a four-year college degree. Yet kids from poor families are both less likely to enroll in and graduate from college as compared with kids from families with more income.

What can we do to help more disadvantaged children get into college? The most important goal should be to improve their readiness for college coursework by improving their mastery of reading and math skills during the K-12 years. Because research shows that disadvantaged children fall behind in their intellectual development by age three, the focus on learning should begin in the preschool years. The results of a recent scientific evaluation of Head Start raise considerable doubt about whether it boosts school readiness. But the record of preschool programs funded and run by states seems much better than Head Start. Given their success, states should be given a bigger role in using Head Start funds.

The nation has devoted great attention and funding over recent decades to improving K-12 education. The Obama administration is now proposing to amend the No Child Left Behind law, in part by broadening and strengthening its accountability system. The national standards in English and math recently recommended by governors and school superintendents are also a step in right direction. To help students meet these standards we need better teachers along with more orderly classrooms, goals that some charter schools have begun to achieve. The emphasis on accountability, higher standards, and better teachers has put us on the right track to increased school achievement and preparation for post-secondary education.

The process of preparing for and applying for college is too complex. In 2009, about $170 billion in government and private funds were available to help students pay for college, with a considerable share - though not enough - of the money available to students from low-income and minority families. To inform parents while their children are still young that financial aid will be available when their children reach college age, the IRS, based on tax return data, should send annual letters to low-income parents informing them about the amount of money for which their children could qualify to help with college costs, In this way, both parents and children can begin early to prepare for college attendance. Schools should counsel students beginning in middle school about the courses they need to prepare for college and to help them select an appropriate school and apply for financial aid. The 127-question federal form students must complete to apply for financial aid is far too long and confusing. Research shows that applications by low-income youngsters increase when the burden of figuring out the complex application procedure is lifted. The form should be sliced to no more than one page

The strength of these proposals is that nearly all of them are backed by strong research showing that they can individually have positive impacts on the education of disadvantaged kids. Taken together, they can be expected to move the nation closer toward fulfilling our commitment to providing a level playing field for all and substantially increasing opportunity in America.

Authors

Publication: Huffington Post

Mama Says: A National Survey of Mothers’ Attitudes on Fathering

Tue, 01 Dec 2009 09:00:00 -0500

Event Information

December 1, 2009
9:00 AM - 10:45 AM EST

Falk Auditorium
The Brookings Institution
1775 Massachusetts Ave., NW
Washington, DC

According to a new report by the National Fatherhood Initiative, mothers report that stable, well-functioning marriages are extremely important to good fathering, yet over half of mothers say fathers are replaceable by single mothers and nearly two-thirds of mothers say that fathers are replaceable by other men. The report also reveals the important role played by work/family balance in shaping modern fatherhood.

On December 1, the National Fatherhood Initiative released “Mama Says: A National Survey of Mothers’ Attitudes on Fathering” at an event sponsored by the Center on Children and Families at Brookings. The event featured the report’s authors, Barbara Dafoe Whitehead of Rutgers University and Norval Glenn of the University of Texas. A panel of practitioners, state officials, and scholars offered their views on these and other findings of the survey.

Speakers and panelists also took questions from the audience.

Video

Audio

Mama Says: A National Survey of Mothers’ Attitudes on Fathering

Transcript

Full Transcript (.pdf)

Event Materials

Participants

Panelists

Barbara Dafoe Whitehead

Director, Center for Thrift and Generosity
Institute for American Values

Moderator: Roland C. Warren

President
National Fatherhood Initiative

Kathryn Edin

Professor of Public Policy and Management
Harvard University

Norval Glenn

Professor of Sociology
University of Texas

Nisa Muhammad

Executive Director
Wedded Bliss Foundation

J. Tracy Robinson

Executive Director
Ohio Commission on Fatherhood

Sheri Steisel

Federal Affairs Counsel
National Conference of State Legislatures

Encouraging Marriage Helps Everyone

Ron Haskins — Thu, 05 Nov 2009 09:07:00 -0500

Higher marriage rates among the poor would benefit poor adults themselves, their children, and the nation. Although I do not support coercive policies to achieve higher marriage rates, I do favor marriage promotion programs conducted by community-based organizations such as churches and other nonprofit civic groups. The activities these groups should sponsor include counseling, marriage education, job assistance, parenting, anger control, avoiding domestic violence, and money management.

There is no dispute that marriage has declined more among the poor and minorities than among the middle class - and that nonmarital births, now the major cause of single-parent families, are rampant among minority groups. According to the U.S. Census Bureau, children living in single-parent families are about five times as likely to live in poverty. There’s also a high probability they’ll drop out of school, get arrested, be involved in teen pregnancy themselves, have more mental health problems, and be less likely to be employed or in school as young adults. Indeed, parents themselves are physically and psychologically better off when married than single.

Research shows that around 80% of couples who have babies outside marriage say they are in love and most of them believe that there’s a good chance they will get married some day, according to a 2005 report published in Mathematica Policy Research. So if both the children and adults are better off and if the couples say they hope to be married one day, why not help them? As long as the programs are not coercive and are delivered by community-based agencies, what’s the problem? If we can learn how to help couples who want to marry, the payoff to them, their children, and society is potentially enormous.

Authors

Ron Haskins

Publication: Business Week