Marriage and Caste in America: Separate and Unequal Families in a Post-Marital Age by Kay S. Hymowitz is thought provoking, scary, and a bit uplifting. Kay Hymowitz's basic premise is society's greater acceptance of children outside of marriage over the last fifty years has had disastrous affects on children from poor parents.
The introduction starts with:
"My argument in these essays can easily be summed up: the breakdown of marriage in the United States - which began about forty years ago as divorce and out-of-wedlock birthrates started to soar - threatens America's future. It is turning us into a nation of separate and unequal families."
Kay frequently talks about the life scripts we have been taught. Like the scripts for a play, the options we are taught as children guide us through life, giving us direction and encouraging us to make certain choices.
Kay says that in general children from middle class and upper class families tend to leave home, go off to college, get an education, get a job, get marriage and then have children. Parents orient much of their life around teaching and guiding their children to follow the same life script.
In contrast children from poor parents tend to have little direction, often having babies while they are only fourteen or fifteen. They rarely marry, rarely go off to college, and rarely get decent jobs. They are never taught life skills like hard work and delayed gratification. They have a much different life script.
This book explains how important marriage and family are to society. The foundation of society is the family. Married parents see as their mission preparing their children to be adults. When children are raised outside of a strong family, the children suffer, and society suffers.
This book is well written. It makes a number of excellent points. I marked up almost every page. Here are a couple of the enlightening points:
1) Educated women are more likely to have children after marriage. They "... know they'd better marry if they want their children to succeed academically, which increasingly is critical to succeeding in the labor market." (p. 25)
2) Middle class parents raise their children differently that poor families. For example "... in the first years of life, the average number of words heard per hour was 2,150 for professors' kids, 1,250 for working-class children, and 620 for children in welfare families." (p. 80)
Much of the book focuses on children from black parents. The statistics are scary. Kay writes that the worst problems associated with the decline in marriage has happened in black families. Much of this seems to be a result of welfare. Though this was not the intention, black women were rewarded with money for leaving their man. In some cities in America 80% of the children are living with a single parent. The book shows how most of these children will not be part of the success that so many middle class children take for granted.
The book ends on a positive note. There are a number of statistics that hint we've hit bottom and marriage is on the rise. The percentage of marriages seems to be rising, and the number of divorces is falling.
This is a good book, well worth reading. I strongly encourage you to at least check it out from the library.
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Technorati tags: marriage, family, Kay Hymowitz, parenting, children
4 comments:
This sounds like a very interesting book. Thanks for reviewing it - now I'm off to (hopefully) find a copy!
I don't think you should have any problem finding a copy. The book came out last year and seemed to have pretty good exposure and sales. Glenn Reynolds (Instapundit) and his wife interviewed the author:
http://instapundit.com/archives2/001452.php
Hi there:
I have not read the book, but it sounds like a fair amount of stereotyping is included which can be dangerous. Lots of very successful folks were raised by single parents & lots of children of married parents are total screw-ups. I am not sold on the theory this book advances but, as I said, I have not read it.
Thanks for contributing this post to this week's edition of the Carnival of Family Life, hosted at Confessions of a Novice. The Carnival will be live on Monday, January 28, 2008, so be sure to stop by and check out all of this week's excellent submissions!
Exceptions to a rule do not invalidate the rule.
In general skilled tall people are more effective in basketball.
In the United States in general people from India, China and Japan do better academically.
We started doing foster care last year. We've learned that almost ALL children in the foster care system are not coming from intact two parent families. There are a few children from intact two parent families, but it is the exception.
Kay Hymowitz writes that historically when the number of single parent families were a small fraction the rest of society could help pick up the slack. The problem is we have crossed a tipping point in that some communities have up to 80% of the children being raised by a single parent.
Stereotying is jumping to a conclusion without data. This book has plenty of data. The data may not be pleasant. It may contradict general society's expectations. But the data shows that there are problems in society, and one of the causes is the vast numbers of children being raised outside of marriage.
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