Marriage Should Not Be the Elephant in the Room

Both of us are well-versed in the challenges of raising children. Between us, we collectively have nine kids. Without our respective husbands, it would be a much more daunting task, both for Amber raising her six children in Ohio, and for Ivana with her three kids in Connecticut. It’s very hard to be a single mother, and (usually) much easier to be married. But this undeniable fact has become almost unsayable in certain circles. This strange code of silence is doubtless rooted in good intentions, including rightfully seeking to reduce the stigma faced by single moms, and helping women to escape abusive relationships. Though well-meaning, the hesitation to acknowledge the good of marriage harms the women it is meant to uphold.  

In her Plough essay, The Case for Two Adults, our friend Mary Ellen Mitchell writes about founding a homeless shelter that provides wrap-around services to women who are pregnant or have small children—and how her work led her to understand that the American philosophy of independence and self-reliance is deeply misguided. She writes: 

[A]s a liberal I have long resisted the arguments of social conservatives who tout marriage as the solution to poverty. Schooled in ‘Housing First’ and a general social service mentality that independence was the highest good, I regularly preached a gospel to our homeless guests that they should ‘depend on no one.’

The problem with this approach (as Ms. Mitchell realized) is that a poor woman who is pregnant or raising young children must depend on someone, since she has someone totally dependent on her. Even when the government or a charitable organization provides housing, money, medical care, and other essential services, these women and their children are still vulnerable and lonely.  

As Leah Libresco Sargeant argues in her essay, “Dependence: Toward an Illiberalism of the Weak,” the 21st century emphasis on autonomy is flawed. She writes: “Our lives begin and (frequently) end in states of near total dependence, and much of the middle is marked by periods of need.”  The stories of poor and working-class women whom Amber has interviewed over the last decade often highlight this very issue: a young mother in poverty, like every mother, needs help in addressing even mundane problems. When she is sick with the flu, she needs help from someone else to get up with the baby at 2 AM. When she is driven crazy by a toddler’s tantrums, she needs another adult to offer support and wisdom. When her 10-year-old starts hanging out with the wrong group of friends, she needs another adult to back up her authority. Plus, of course, she could use some help paying the rent. In our economy, that usually requires two incomes. Ms. Mitchell observes, based on research by a third party:

[O]ne low-skilled worker can’t afford a two-bedroom apartment in most regions, including affordable Cincinnati. However, use the calculator to try out very low-paid, low-skilled jobs, like hotel maid for instance, and double that income – and the housing affordability on a two-bedroom unit in Cincinnati suddenly works without subsidies.

In the case of a young mom’s need for help, the obvious solution—as Ms. Mitchell points out—is for dad to step up. She notes: “In many cases, research suggests it is the fathers of children who are the best and most sustainable option for cohabitation and rent sharing.” This is not universally true, to be sure: abuse, mental illness, prison terms, and a host of other factors can mean it is sometimes impossible or undesirable for mom and dad to live together to care for their kids. Nevertheless, as Ms. Mitchell acknowledges, the evidence seems clear that on average, it is better for children to live with their mom and dad. Indeed even as norms change, this is what many parents, even unmarried ones, say they want for their kids. 

Making the case for two parents is a good starting point, but we would connect the dots to add that the largest benefits come from being married. If the two-parent ideal matters, marriage is the support that helps two different people stick together to do that. This is because marriage is a legal and social institution with a certain set of norms and expectations that increases the likelihood of relationship trust, happiness, and longevity. In other words, marriage is a kind of social technology. Or, as The Atlantic’s Derek Thompson puts it, marriage is like “social fitness.” Without marriage, the two-parent ideal becomes less achievable and less durable, and parents become more lonely and less happy. Melissa, a single mother of two, told Amber after a recent break-up,

When you’re living with someone and you have problems you guys can just split up. They can just leave, that’s it. But when you’re married, even if you just leave out of anger for the first few days, you have to come back… you’re being forced to deal with problems.  

Melissa has heard friends say that marriage is just a piece of paper, but she says she doesn’t believe them. Marriage, for her, is about loyalty and it’s something that she hopes to find. “I just have never felt that anyone’s like as loyal to me as I am to them…. ‘Cause that’s my biggest thing is just, if I got your back, you got mine.”  

Put another way, as Ivana realized from her time volunteering in Connecticut’s family courts, getting divorced or cohabiting, or staying single doesn’t eliminate problems for poor families with children—often it just shunts them into our slow, complicated, legal system. Single moms still often need to deal with custody, child support, and other issues. Ditto divorcing parents. The problems of how to raise and support kids often get more complicated—not easier—if mom and dad aren’t married, and especially if other unrelated adults enter into the picture, often moving in and then back out when the relationship ends, causing further instability for the children. 

Unfortunately, the topic of marriage is politically coded in our current dysfunctional “Left vs. Right” dynamic, and in academic or policy conversations talking about marriage can feel taboo. But there are some signs that this is changing, as those in the center of the ideological spectrum are becoming more vocal about the downsides of single parenting. Last year, Melissa Kearney, an economics professor at the University of Maryland, published The Two-Parent Privilege. This well-researched, compassionate book—without criticizing or faulting single moms—provides extensive evidence of the benefits of marriage for low-income single moms, including: offering a good shot at escaping poverty; providing more stability for young children; and giving parents a better chance at successfully guiding teens into adulthood.  

The problems of how to raise and support kids often get more complicated—not easier—if mom and dad aren’t married, and especially if other unrelated adults enter into the picture, often moving in and then back out when the relationship ends, causing further instability for the children. 

Given this, instead of acting as if marriage is neutral, we should talk about the good of marriage and follow the implications. Just as we craft social policy and cultural narratives around the assumption that connecting less-resourced people to jobs and education is good and helpful, so, too, can social service programs, religious organizations, and communities encourage and support struggling moms and dads to get married if possible. Too often, incentives in public programs and cultural messaging nudge people in the other direction.

Housing policy provides a clear example of how a “marriage-neutral” approach—one that treats marriage as one “lifestyle choice” among many instead of the public good that it is—penalizes poor and working-class people who marry or want to marry. A single mom working in the service industry, for example, may qualify for “Section 8,” the federal government’s housing voucher program. But what happens if she decides to get married? Her income will now be combined with her husband’s income for purposes of determining eligibility. This may mean they lose eligibility. This married couple then has to search for housing—often without the benefits of good credit and stable income that are critical for getting a market-rate rental. The same dynamics apply for Medicaid, and a whole host of other social welfare programs.  

This was the case for Brittney, a thirty-something mom of four in Ohio, who spent many years when her children were young parenting alone and living in government-subsidized housing. When she met a man whom she came to trust and wanted to marry, she worried about how getting married would affect the price of rent and her ability to pay the bills. They married anyway. “We lost our food stamps, and our rent went [up]. I am basically working to buy food at this point. There was no ‘bettering’ our situation there,” Brittney said.  

As Brittany found, health challenges often highlight the importance of marriage for young families without other social supports. Ivana interviewed a married mother, Beth, from Oklahoma who had a child who needed significant medical therapies from an early age. She didn’t have family in the area to help. With the support of her husband, she was able to cut back at work in order to take her daughter to different speech and occupational therapists, and other medical appointments. For a single mother, this would have been much more difficult; maybe even impossible.

Reticence about marriage in our public conversation is often well-meaning, intending to be sensitive to complex situations and to honor the valiant work of single parents like Melissa and Brittney. Yet in the long run, it distracts from the reality that most people want to get married but have obstacles to overcome, sometimes even obstacles created by the incentives in our public policy. Understanding and addressing those obstacles on the path to marriage ought to be a joint project of Left and Right, something we all care about. This is especially true because the work to be done is less about convincing people to marry, and more about helping them to gain the confidence, character, stability, and support needed to make marriage work. Confronting the challenges faced by poor, single moms requires being candid about their struggles. Marriage still matters. We should say so.