The Presidential Election and Marriage: Where's the Debate? | What Happened and What's Next - 2/6/08

[Smartmarriages]

- WHERE'S THE MARRIAGE DEBATE?!?
- SPEAKING OF THE PRESIDENTIAL DEBATES, WHAT HAPPENED!? AND, WHAT'S NEXT??

At this point we can still say GRAB AN OAR. NOW is the time.....don't just
sit there!  We don't want to get to the point where we have to say GRAB A
BUCKET and bail - as our little boat is sinking. It's our country, and if
our elected officials don't know about marriage education it's our fault.
Row, row, row. - diane

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- WHERE'S THE MARRIAGE DEBATE?!?

The Presidential Election and Marriage: Where's the Debate?
By Ron Haskins of the Brookings Institution and the Annie E. Casey
Foundation.
February, 2008

It is now commonplace to observe that in the last half century, the American
family has undergone fundamental changes. Marriage rates fell and age of
first marriage increased; divorce rates increased until the 1990s and
stabilized at a little under 50 percent; nonmartial birth rates exploded so
that we're probably not far from the day when four of ten babies will be
born outside marriage; and cohabitation increased dramatically and appears
to be continuing its rise.(1) The upshot is that nearly 30 percent of the
nation's children live in a female-headed family at any given moment and
around half of children will spend some portion of their childhood in a
single-parent family. These trends have caused public concern because
children living in single-parent families are four or five times as likely
to be poor as children living with their married parents.(2) Moreover, there
is strong evidence that children reared by single parents have worse
outcomes on a host of developmental measures including reduced school
performance and higher rates of social and emotional problems.(3) Thus, the
decline of the married-parent family exacts a fearsome toll on the nation's
future - and on current and future taxpayers. Given the significance of
marriage to the well-being of parents, children, and the nation, it is
surprising how silent the current presidential candidates are on the
subject, especially since recent policy initiatives have given them
something to build on.

Congress has already made marriage promotion a goal of federal policy. A
central feature of the welfare reform law of 1996 was the repeal of Aid to
Families with Dependent Children, which provided cash assistance to
destitute parents (mostly single mothers), and its replacement by a new cash
welfare program called Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF).
Although the TANF program is widely known for its work requirements and
success in contributing to a large decline in welfare use accompanied by an
unprecedented increase in work by poor mothers, the 1996 LAW EMPHASIZED
MARRIAGE EVEN MORE THAN WORK.  The text of the legislation states that the
TANF program has four goals. Promoting work is one of the goals, but the
issue of family composition is a focus of three of the goals; namely, the
"promotion of marriage," the "prevention" and "reduction" of nonmarital
births, and the "encouragement" and "maintenance" of two-parent families.

Similarly, President Bush made marriage a major focus of social policy in
his administration. Two actions are especially notable. The first, and one
that has drawn support from all sides of the marriage debate, including
critics of the administration's goal of using the federal government to
encourage marriage,(4) is to launch high-quality demonstration programs
designed to produce evidence on whether marriage education coupled with
services - especially job services - can build and strengthen marriage and
improve children's development.(5) Some of the programs are designed for
young unmarried couples who have had a baby together, some for young couples
who are already married, and some to promote community-wide initiatives such
as use of the media to drive home the message that marriage is good for
children, adults, and communities and the use of churches and other
non-profit organizations to promote and strengthen marriage.

The second Bush marriage initiative, enacted as part of the 2006
reauthorization of welfare reform, provides $100 million a year for 5 years
to support about 125 programs throughout the nation that aim to support
healthy marriage. Most of the programs are sponsored by community-based
organizations such as churches and other groups concerned about the
institution of marriage and about services for the poor. SOMEONE WITH
POLITICAL SENSIBILITIES MIGHT NOTICE THAT THESE PROGRAMS COULD HAVE THE
EFFECT OF CREATING A NETWORK OF LOCAL ORGANIZATIONS AND INDIVIDUALS WHO ARE
ADVOCATES FOR THE PROGRAM AND WHO COULD PLAY A ROLE WHEN THE QUESTIONS OF
REAUTHORIZING THE $100 MILLION PROGRAM COMES UP IN 2009 AND 2010.

Concern with supporting marriage and with trying to increase the number of
children reared by their married parents is vital to the future of the
nation. Since the mid-1990s, the federal government has embarked on the most
ambitious agenda ever to create a marriage movement in America. Several
states and local governments have likewise accepted the challenge and
created new programs to support marriage.(6) And yet the presidential
candidates hardly mention marriage or any other problem of family
composition. The candidates talk frequently about reducing poverty. They
claim that their policies will sustain the economy, ensure employment, boost
wages, and maintain government programs to help the poor. But none of the
candidates discusses the fact that increasing marriage rates would reduce
poverty, improve child development, and increase economic production in the
long run. Republican candidates discuss their opposition to gay marriage,
but to compare the importance of gay marriage to marriage of biological
parents is to compare a lightening bug to lightening. It would be especially
important for voters to know whether candidates intend, if elected, to
continue the marriage agenda initiated by Congress and President Bush in the
last decade - or to start their own agenda. If a presidential election is a
national seminar on the nation's problems and potential solutions, the
candidates and the voters are missing an opportunity to have a lively
national debate about whether programs to promote marriage should be
continued or even expanded.

[1] David Ellwood and Christopher Jencks, "The Spread of Single-Parent
Families in the United States Since 1960," in The Future of the Family, eds.
Daniel Patrick Moynihan, Lee Rainwater, and Timothy Smeeding, (New York:
Russell Sage, 2004), pp. 25-65; Betsy Stevenson and Justin Wolfers,
"Marriage and Divorce: Changes and Their Driving Forces" (working paper
12944, National Bureau of Economic Research, Cambridge, MA, 2007).

[2] Ron Haskins and Isabel Sawhill, "Work and Marriage: The Way to End
Poverty and Welfare," Welfare Reform and Beyond Policy Brief #28, Brookings
Institution (September 2003).

[3] Sara McLanahan, Elisabeth Donahue, and Ron Haskins, "Marriage and Child
Wellbeing," Future of Children 15, no.2 (Fall 2005). Few if any researchers
doubt that children reared in single-parent families do worse than children
reared by continuously married parents, but there is disagreement about
whether the differences are attributable specifically to marriage and not to
other differences between married and single parents.

[4] Frank F. Furstenberg, "Point/Counterpoint: Should Government Promote
Marriage?" Journal of Policy Analysis and Management 26, no. 4 (2007):
950-957.

[5] Laura Meckler, "Official Promotes Marriage to Help Poor Kids," Wall
Street Journal, November 20, 2006, p. A1.

[6] For information about a state marriage initiative, see
www.okmarriage.org.

Viewpoints in this section solely represent the authors' opinions and not
the opinions of "Spotlight on Poverty and Opportunity."

http://tinyurl.com/2csokl

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- SPEAKING OF THE PRESIDENTIAL DEBATES, WHAT HAPPENED!? AND, WHAT'S NEXT??

Dear Diane,
I wanted to provide a brief update to the list bout the results of our
recent politico.com campaign.
 
The California presidential debates took place this past Wednesday and
Thursday evenings, and unfortunately, none of the questions we submitted and
which MANY of the Smart Marriages newslist members voted on were read on the
air.  While that was disappointing, there were several positive developments
that came out of this project, as follows:

1)   At the close of polling, our nine ME questions were all in the Top 75
questions on both the Democratic and Republican sides ­ showing that our
collective voice came through!
2)   Since some of our questions were near the top of the list for most of
the polling time, we believe that hundreds if not thousands of people read
one or more of these questions ­ and since these questions were educational
in nature, these people all received a positive Marriage Education message.
3)   During most of the polling, our nine questions were in the Top 35
questions on both sides.  This provided us with a credible opportunity to
prepare and deliver ³Debate Briefing Packages² to each of the Top 5
Presidential Candidates ­ and to interact with their staffs around this
issue.  As such, we believe that we have begun the process of putting the
issue of Marriage Education upon their radar screens.
 
I want to thank everyone who took the time to sign on to www.politico.com
and vote for these questions.  It shows the powerful impact that we can
have, if we work together.
 
I have had people ask me ­ ³since our questions were so highly ranked, why
do you think that none of them were read on the air?²  My opinion is that it
is because this is such a ³new topic² for the moderators. Since many of them
had never heard of Marriage Education before reading our questions, I think
it was hard for them to take our questions very seriously.   So we need to
continue and expand our efforts to raise awareness about our field.
 
And there is no better time to start this than right now ­ during this
Presidential election year. During this past week, all five of the major
presidential candidates were here in California.  I managed to spend a brief
moment with two of them (two separate occasions), and you can bet that they
each got an earful about Marriage Education in the brief time that I had
their attention! But here¹s the problem ­ if the only place they hear about
this issue is when they are in California, it will be easy for them to
dismiss this as a California phenomenon.  But, if they get this same kind of
message in a dozen or so different campaign stops across the country, then
they will begin to realize that this is an issue that they need to pay
attention to.  
 
During these campaigns these candidates interact with the American public at
levels much greater than they will once they take office.  Now is our time
to let our voice be heard.  We need to be proactive to reach out to them and
let them know about the valuable work we are doing in this field ­ and the
impact it is having.
 
I encourage each of you to join me in becoming a ³Marriage Education
Activist² ­ by letting your voice be heard on this important issue whenever
and wherever you can.

Dennis Stoica
President
California Healthy Marriages Coalition
www.CaMarriage.com 

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