NYT: Program Seeks to Fight Poverty by Building Family Ties

[DeepModem Mom]

Program Seeks to Fight Poverty by Building Family Ties
By ERIK ECKHOLM
Published: July 20, 2006

BATON ROUGE, La., July 14 — The agency approached Herman Porter and his girlfriend, Aswanni Dunn, in what sociologists call the “magic moment,” the period surrounding the birth of a child when romance and dreams tend to soar, even among unmarried couples whose futures may be statistically doubtful. Would they like to enroll in a class about relationship skills and commitment?...

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The course is a prototype in the Bush administration’s campaign to fight poverty and aid children by promoting marriage — an effort that, after years in the pilot stage, is about to get going in earnest this fall and has drawn surprising support from some liberal poverty experts.

In a little-noticed bill reauthorizing welfare reform this year, Congress earmarked $750 million over five years for programs to promote “healthy marriages” and “responsible fatherhood.”...

***

When President Bush announced his marriage initiative four years ago, some liberal poverty experts were skeptical. They feared that conservatives were simply pushing their ideological agenda, portraying wedlock as a panacea for the deeply rooted social ills of the poor....

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But nearly everyone agrees that the breakdown of families — to take one indicator, one-third of all births in the country and two-thirds of black births are now out of wedlock — is feeding into a destructive cycle of poverty, educational and developmental deficits, and incarceration....

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/07/20/us/20marriage.html

[WCGreen]

1. Shotgun marriages always work out so well.....

[Igel]

2. Clinton tried one kind of research-based attack on

persistent poverty. A lot of people didn't like it; and while the approach continues (with many DUers hating some of its consequences), some of the more active programs have, AFAIK, been discontinued.

* is trying another approach. It'll be interesting to see if this approach does any better.

Interestingly, both play to a diffence in perception among their base. Dems seem to be more environment-driven, poverty is seen as something imposed; repubs are more essentialist, poverty is an expression of values and culture. Both are right, in part; the question is the relative weight of each.

[shrike]

3. You might be interested in "The Working Poor"

Its author does a very fair job, I think, at portraying the many roots of poverty.

[Igel]

5. I'll try to remember to track it down.

David Shipler, my local library's catalog tells me.

[Lydia Leftcoast]

4. Poor families began to "fall apart" when conservatives became indignant

about women receiving welfare while they had a husband living with them. Never mind that his place of employment had been shut down or that he couldn't make enough to support a family. As far as they were concerned, he was a lazy deadbeat, no better than a pimp living off a woman.

Historically, most poor people WERE married. But under the new rules, if there was evidence that a man lived in the home, welfare payments were stopped. (This was in the early 1960s).

This rule coincided with the deindustrialization of America. New Haven, Connecticut lost three major industrial employers in the 1960s and 1970s. The white unemployed workers were mostly absorbed by their long-established ethnic communities through a network of friends and relatives. The African-Americans, mostly recent arrivals from the South, had few established businesses to absorb the unemployed workers and, let's face it, the white ethnic communities were not inclined to hire them.

So if you drove through the largest black neighborhood in New Haven, you saw grown men standing on street corners on weekday mornings. They were mostly poorly educated and qualified to pull levers on a machine all day, but not for much else. And no one seemed to care about retraining them for something else.

Under those circumstances, women on welfare were the most reliable sources of income. But if a woman married the father of her children, she'd lose her welfare support.

Before conservatives start ragging on poor people for not getting married, they need to look back at the history of how their own Puritanism broke up families.

[TrogL]

6. healthy marriages

Congress earmarked $750 million over five years for programs to promote “healthy marriages”

Bullshit. This is code for faith-based Bible thumping.