Strong Families.
Sustainable Societies.

More Welfare, More Marriage?

Conservatives have long blamed welfare policies for a rise in out-of-wedlock childbearing. The academic research on the subject is mixed, but it’s certainly true that (a) a rise in welfare spending starting in the 1960s coincided with a skyrocketing rate of nonmarital births and (b) welfare was structured in a way that facilitated nonmarital childbearing because benefits were available primarily to single-parent households. Welfare reform was supposed to fix this problem. But what if some parts of it backfired? A newly updated working paper by Robert Moffitt of Johns Hopkins and two coauthors explores the possibility that the reform’s greatest success—moving single mothers off of welfare and into work—might have made those mothers less likely to marry the fathers of their children. It’s an unproven theory as of today, but an intriguing one that deserves more research. Read More