Can We Break Generational Poverty Cycles?
A colleague at work (I teach in a university) recently sent out a link to a PBS documentary on poverty in America. Born Poor begins with three children whose families are living in conditions of material scarcity in the U.S. and follows them into early adulthood. The unspoken narrative thrust of the documentary is that the financially dire conditions these Americans were in during their childhoods prove utterly impossible for them to escape. At first glance, the underlying message of the film is: there is no hope for the poor in America. No matter what they do, they will remain poor. Yet a little decoding of the film in the language of human agency and responsibility tells another story.
The narrative of Johnny’s family runs roughly thus. During his childhood, his father was making good money and the family—Johnny’s father, mother, and three or four children counting him—lived in a middle-class home. Then a recession hit and the father’s earnings fell off. In short order, they could not afford to stay in their home.
Later, as a teen, Johnny takes up behaviors destined to negatively affect his economic future. He starts smoking marijuana and is arrested for shoplifting. This offense leads to his being sent to Chicago to live with his grandmother. He manages to get his act together sufficiently to make it to a small Baptist college, where he is on the football team. He dreams of using his athletic talents to make his fortune in life. As a college student, he has a wife and three children, and the couple are expecting a fourth. He has no job, and they live on welfare.
Johnny’s dreams of the NFL do not pan out. He ends the film working for his father’s contracting business. Financially, he is struggling at the conclusion of the film, and it seems clear that his family is still receiving government assistance. But among all the individuals portrayed in the film, he has the most. He has a family, a wife and children, and he continues to work diligently to make a living for them. The other two characters, though, fare considerably less well. One is destitute and on welfare; the other is living with her sibling with their single mother and struggles to hold down a job. Neither is stably married or otherwise in a committed relationship, even when children come along.
The story PBS probably wants viewers to read here is the same one the left has been telling about poverty forever: if you are in poverty while young, you are doomed to stay there. It does not really matter what you do. You will somehow just wind up in the same place. Unmentioned in this film are the forces that are endlessly discussed elsewhere in the left’s propaganda on this topic, but they are to be inferred. Something must be operating behind the backs of the individuals in the film to nullify their desires to no longer be poor. “Structures” are the common conceptual apparatus to explain this. Their fate is, ultimately, out of their hands, beyond their control.
It certainly is, tragically, true that many people born into poverty stay poor. But this film (and other narratives like it) shows with some clarity how much the actions of the poor contribute to that likelihood: in particular, it’s the fracturing of families; the failure to marry, and stay married to, the father or mother of one’s children.
There is no single better guarantee of continuing poverty than single parenthood. Studies consistently show that single parenthood has a comparatively negative effect on the economic well-being of the family across all income groups, but this effect is exaggerated when it comes to the lowest-income groups. This stands to reason given the fact that lower income groups are closer to the poverty line, and so a proportional income loss from single parenthood will be potentially more significant at this end of the income spectrum. The difference in dollars between married and single-mother-headed families in upper income groups is greater, but it is more consequential in lower income groups. We see this example play out in the documentary, in which two of the three protagonists of the film pursue this familial model, and their children pay for that choice. The evidence is significant that encouraging marriage in lower income groups substantially reduces the incidence of poverty in those groups.
Alas, the number of replications of the lives of the other two protagonists of the film in the general American population is exceedingly high. PBS, like many other elite institutions, does poor single parents, their children, and the rest of us no favors by refusing to talk about how much the actions of these parents contribute to their fates and those of their children.
The narrative of this PBS documentary will come as no surprise to the astute student of modern American culture: specifically, how our culture has reduced stable marriages to a mere option among many others. It is often noted, with disdain, by cultural elites that in the past marriage was an expectation, and now increased freedom in relationships, for women especially, has produced a better and more diverse environment for relationships and family. But it is not clear that “escape” from marriage and the stable two-parent family model has been a home run for adults or children, and this is especially so in the lower classes. As a sociologist who has spent several decades watching academics and other elites prevaricate and mislead on this topic, it was astonishing to me to watch what is proffered as a careful ethnographic statement on the causes of enduring poverty that cannot bring itself to point out that the most obvious of those causes is that young people have children but fail to marry or to otherwise remain partnered with the people with whom they have had those children.
What I would have liked to see discussed here—in addition to a direct statement about the contribution these young people have made to the reproduction of poverty in their own adult lives by their partnering and child-rearing choices—are some of the possible ways to address this problem successfully. What could have helped the protagonists in this film? What would help them, from a policy perspective as well as an interpersonal or social one?
There is no question that a strong cultural push toward the institution of marriage would yield profound economic and other dividends especially for those at the bottom of the social hierarchy. Unfortunately, the mainstream of much social science today seems committed to the culturally libertarian view of family (“Every possible form of family is just as good as any other.”) that triumphed in America in the wake of the 1960s. But solid social science demonstrating how greatly marriage improves conditions for poor families is abundant. Being married halves the likelihood of family poverty, according to sociological studies. That undisputed fact is, alone, a good enough reason for us to take up the admittedly difficult challenge of putting marriage back on the list of social outcomes we design policy to achieve.