Politicians push marriage, but that’s not what would help children, By Eduardo Porter, March 22, 2016, New York Times: “Should the government push poor people to marry? The urge to do so has a long pedigree, dating perhaps as far back as 1965. When serving as a Labor Department official in the Johnson administration, Daniel Patrick Moynihan — who was later a top adviser to President Richard M. Nixon and ultimately one of the most influential Democrats in Congress as a senator from New York — argued that the surge in African-American families headed by single mothers was condemning many black children to fail in school and in life…”
Tag: Single parents
Family Structure and Parenting
Single parent or poverty? Study looks at which affects good parenting most, By Stephanie Hanes, January 28, 2015, Christian Science Monitor: “Income level, rather than family structure, has the greatest impact on whether parents read to their children, eat dinner together, or engage in any number of positive parenting practices, according to a new report put out today by the nonpartisan Council on Contemporary Families. For years, studies have suggested that single parents lag behind married couples when it comes to providing children the sort of enrichment activities that child development experts say have long-term impact on kids’ emotional and cognitive health, such as monitoring media access and facilitating participation in extracurricular activities. But it turns out that those differences all but disappear when income disparities are taken away, according to today’s report…”
Child Support Enforcement
- How our child support system can push the poor deeper into poverty, By Jeff Guo, September 26, 2014, Washington Post: “In the United States, nearly one in four children are due some sort of child support. But only 62 percent of the money owed is actually paid. To get a sense of who these deadbeat parents are, consider this chart comparing different states…”
- Locking up parents for not paying child support can be a modern-day ‘debtor’s prison’, By Tins Griego, September 26, 2014, Washington Post: “Dwayne Ferebee, 36, father of four, has been sent to jail four times over the past 12 years on civil contempt charges for failure to pay his court-ordered child support. The first two times, he spent a couple months behind bars until his mom came up with the $3,000 the judge told him he had to pay. The third go-around, he stayed in jail six of the maximum 12-month sentence before he could scrape together the money. The fourth, he had to wait until his fiancée received her tax refund. All told, he spent about a year locked up…”