In his Sept. 14 New York Times column, Nicholas Kristof conceded that American Liberals are “often reluctant to acknowledge one of the significant drivers of child poverty—the widespread breakdown of family—for fear that to do so would be patronizing or racist.”
He went on to note that families headed by single mothers “are five times as likely to live in poverty as married-couple families” and are “less likely to graduate from high school or earn a college degree.”
Then, one week later the Times published an op-ed titled “The Rise of Single-Parent Families is Bad for Kids,” by Melissa S. Kearney, the author of “The Two-Parent Privilege: How Americans Stopped Getting Married and Started Falling Behind.”
I’m pleased the Liberal Establishment is finally agreeing with the longtime position held by Conservative social scientists that family structure matters.
But for the Times to suggest that single-parent families are on the rise is misleading. It is not a recent phenomenon. Daniel Patrick Moynihan, a Democratic politician from New York and social scientist, alerted the nation to the rising crisis 58 years ago.
In 1965, then Assistant Secretary of Labor, Daniel Patrick Moynihan, in his groundbreaking report, The Negro Family: The Case for Nation Action, the “Moynihan Report,” as it famously became known, painted a bleak picture of the nation’s inner-city African-American poor.
Moynihan found that many poor Black people were caught up in a “tangle of pathology” thanks to U.S. welfare systems that simply “pensioned the Negros off.” The expansion of Aid to Families with Dependent Children—which was originally created in 1935 to provide help to needy orphans and widows—actually encouraged Black men to abandon their children because AFDC could not be paid to families where fathers were in the home.
Moynihan added that the absence of male figures damaged family stability and contributed to an “entire sub-culture of dependency, alienation, and despair.” It also pushed Black families into “a matriarchal structure, which, because it is so out of touch with the rest of American Society, seriously retards the progress of the group as a whole and imposes a crushing burden on the Negro male and, in consequence, on a great many Negro women as well.”
In “Freedom Is Not Enough,” a book on the Moynihan Report, historian James T. Patterson, points out that Moynihan, “… favored enactment of family allowances that would be given to all families with children.” He also argued for programs that would give “men proper jobs and a respectable place in the community and family.”
Great controversy arose after President Lyndon Johnson said in a June 1965 commencement speech at Howard University, based on Moynihan’s findings, that if the Black family unit did not become more cohesive, all the civil-rights gains would become meaningless.
Moynihan was assailed by members of the Civil Rights movement. Progressives pummeled him for dissenting from conventional ideological wisdom, and the fledging feminist movement attacked him for his “unflattering description of matriarchy” and for leaving the “impression that lower-class Black women having babies out of wedlock were irresponsible.” Dr. Benjamin F. Payton, a Black sociologist, denounced Moynihan as a “crypto-racist.”
Lyndon Johnson quickly distanced himself from the speech and his administration repudiated the Moynihan Report. As a result, those destructive anti-poverty programs continued to be funded.
In the mid-1960s, 25% of Black children and 3% of white children were living in families with one parent.
Since that time those numbers have escalated thanks to Liberals promoting social service strategies based on flawed ideological formulas.
In 2019, 62% of Black children and 23% of white children were living in single-parent homes.
For decades, the warnings of Conservatives that the epidemic breakdown of working-class families is due to the erosion of the nation’s founding virtues, which were based on industriousness, honesty, religiosity, and marriage, had been dismissed by Liberals.
But, as John Adams once quipped, “Facts are stubborn things; and whatever may be our wishes, our inclinations, or the dictates of our passion, they cannot alter the state of facts and evidence.”
Perhaps Liberals are finally ready to accept the “stubborn” facts about the plight of the American family and will join Conservatives in restoring the virtues required to rebuild the basic unit of society.