"Single mothers ruining society"?

I’ve had it up to here with headlines like this: “Out-of-wedlock births are a national catastrophe” (said Slate), with their not-so-subtle subtext that, as Broadsheet put it sarcastically, “single mothers are ruining society.” I’m sick of hearing this line assumed as given fact even in liberal circles. I take this personally—that would be my mother—a fact that always startles the liberal men who spout this crap in my presence. I think they assume that single mothers are a) African American, b) teenagers, c) poor and ignorant, or d) all of the above. None of which fits my Harvard-educated mother who chose to have me at 24 (but who did briefly go on welfare after I was born).

The central argument is that because poverty is so high among single mothers, lack of marriage must be the cause of their poverty. “Some researchers identify out-of-wedlock births as the chief cause for the increasing stratification and inequality of American life, the first step that casts children into an ever more rigid caste system,” Slate’s Emily Yoffe says.

This makes me think the right headline should be, “Failure of education in basic statistical principles is a national catastrophe.” As any stats prof will tell his undergrads, correlation does not equal causation.

Here’s some pretty easy-to-come-by evidence that lack of marriage isn’t what’s causing child poverty: Sweden for over a decade has had the world’s highest rate of out-of-wedlock births—they’re now a majority of Sweden’s births—and yet one of the lowest rates of child poverty in the world. In several other Northern European countries with low child poverty rates, unwed mothers also are in the majority. France just last year joined this group.

A few other facts Yoffe and others of her ilk ignore: An American child is 79 times more likely to become a victim of child abuse than a Swedish child, although (because?) far more American children than Swedes are born within marriage. More than one third of all impoverished young children in the U.S. today live with two parents. And here's a zinger: Among African-American families, children from single-parent homes show higher educational achievement than their counterparts from two-parent homes.

And about that income stratification: It’s likely the causation goes precisely the other way. That is, because income is distributed far more unequally in the United States than in most other developed countries, it is difficult for low-wage workers (male or female) to support a family without a second income. And—duh—the shortage of affordable child care makes it difficult for single mothers to support themselves, whereas Western European nations provide publicly subsidized day care, not to mention myriad other supports to parents. The real catastrophe that we Americans should be talking about: the economic toll parenting exacts in America.

In addition to staggering ignorance of logic, the single-parenting-is-a disaster arguments always seem to me to expose a nasty cynicism about marriage. Given the lower rates of marriage among mothers in countries with rich social supports for parents, it appears it takes economic coercion, vulnerability, and shame to get a majority of mothers to marry. Apparently that’s the state marriage promoters want women to be in—that’s the kind of marriage bargain they’re for. Yuck.