Did the Welfare System Cause the Dissolution of the Black Family?
Introduction
In 1965 when the civil rights movements was experiencing an explosion, Daniel Patrick Moynihan penned a report to President Johnson claiming that one of the major reasons for poverty amongst black Americans was the fact that a quarter of black families were being headed by women. While that report caused a lot of uproar for the then White House aide, today we still see that many African American homes are manned by single women as many black babies seem to be born outside of wedlock. This is a problem that looks to undo whatever economic gains the black community may have acquired (Cummings 1983).
There are many reasons that can be given for the presence of poverty in any race and the same is true for the African Americans but one of the underlying causes has to be the breakdown of the traditional family setup. This is because women on average earn less than men and with no man to provide his share of the family income the women and children will feel the absence of that financial flow that may have made a difference in their lives. Many researchers and policy makers have pegged this deficiency as one that may spread to future generations if a solution is not found. And while this breakup of the family unit will seriously affect the African American homes, it will also affect the economy at large as they will have to pay compensatory measures or face the fractured lives and consequences like social conflict and strife that may happen as a result and this will only contribute in the widening of the gap between the haves and the haves not.
The question that many researchers and people have tried to fathom is whether family breakdown is the cause of poverty or if poverty indeed causes the breakdown. Whichever way they are aligned the truth remains that there is no denying the fact that a correlation does exist between the two. Study has shown that families raised by single mothers are twice as likely to be poor as those raised by two parents irrespective of what race they claim. Therefore could it be that this breakdown in family is not only affecting the African Americans but rather every single mother. Unfortunately, statistics also show that the income of families headed by African American women is below the poverty line for 50% of them. As we see today that most black families are those headed by women, it is a depressing fact to note that because they have not gained economic ground they will offset that gained by other black families. This is because working men tend to earn more than women.
Although experts are in agreement with regards the difficulty of raising a family alone, they tend to be in disagreement with the fact that people may think that the welfare system does in fact encourage families to split up so they could be dependent on the government for sustenance. However the opposite camp puts the problem squarely on the shoulders of discrimination and the difficulty of finding good jobs that would enable black men cater and feed their families. This camp believes that the welfare system and other similar programs are actually helping and not harming the black families as their support help these women take care of their families and their education teach these teenage girls to avoid teen pregnancies.
Many years ago families with an adult male in the house were denied benefits till it was changed in 1968 to include two parent families as long as the supposed bread winner was unemployed or even underemployed. Many people today believe the saying – there is a man in the house – has led to families breaking up and the father who for some reason may not be meeting his end of the bargain upping and leaving.
Unfortunately people have claimed that the culture that poverty emulates has ensured that many families that otherwise would have pulled themselves up by their bootstraps are comfortable with depending on welfare for their daily living. The high level of teenage pregnancies among black girls could be another reason there seems to be more single parent black homes as opposed to the white homes. In 1979 statistics showed that more than 25% of blacks were born to teenage mothers. The problem with welfare therefore is whether it helps or hinders these single parents. When the government provides free medical care, money, food stamps and other things will the recipient of those gifts still look for work or rest on her laurels.
While many people think that the black man is scared of commitment and marriage and so leaves the woman with the child, many people point to the fact that that is not the case for all men. They say the cause of the problem may not be marriage at all but rather income as many black men find themselves to be unemployed or even underemployed. Many of these unemployed men have given up finding jobs and some of them are not counted by census workers so even the statistics the country may have which is already glaring may in actuality be false. As times have changed more and more women are becoming bread winners as less and less black men are gainfully or even marginally employed (Cummings 1983).
Psychologists have tried to explain this vicious cycle as a search of self-worth among both sexes where the man seeks adequacy and adulthood from creating a child when everything else had failed for him. The girl on the other hand also wants to see herself as someone of worth by conceiving and bearing a child. While many see America as the land of dreams, it is also like any other country that is difficult to survive in without any marketable or basic skills. The longer these unemployed men remain jobless the more difficult it becomes for them to possess skills necessary for them to make it in the work force. So it is almost like the world is moving on without them.
One needs to ask if there exists any remedy to this problem that is not only breaking down the black family but also disrupting the American economy. These young men who grow up in homes without male role models will look to their mothers depending on the state for their sustenance and such a kid will not express his manhood through emulating adults but rather through street gangs and rivalries. These girls on the other hand see that they too can become independent at 16 with the prospect of getting a house, food stamps, medical and legal assistance and other types of aid that could be worth hundreds of dollars a month. The only thing stopping her from entering into that lifestyle is an illegitimate child. So the debates generally exist as to whether the economy will be better off or worse off with the welfare system that is set up in America. It just makes one wonder what type of life lessons such parents can teach their children.
Poverty could be linked to many things but some of the most telling are unwed childbearing, fatherlessness and a lack of the work culture (Marshall et al, 2006). However this correlation is not one that is very new as Daniel Patrick Moynihan made this same conclusion in 1965. He tied the breakdown of the black family to poverty and over dependence on the welfare system. Although the Moynihan report was over 4 decades ago most of what he said still rings true in the African American home setting. In his report he spoke about how their high rejection rates, crime rates and victimization has added to their educational deficiencies in creating men that could not cater foe even themselves even if they wanted to much less someone else. While many assumed that he was happy to just heap blame on the victim, what he was trying to accomplish in earnest was the fact that slavery and discrimination would always be a part of the black history and unless something is done about that they may keep transferring these problems and issues across generations.
In my opinion while I believe that the welfare system has contributed to the dissolution of the African American family, I also see this as a catch 22 situation. In all honesty the welfare system is supposed to help those with the least the most and many of these families do need the help. Now do people clamour for this help at all cost and to the detriment of the family unit – definitely?
Marriage is being touted as the end to the welfare reform. When the welfare reform was set up in 1996 its aim was to increase the number of children that grew up in two-parent families. Unfortunately today’s trends shows that more and more black families are moving away from the traditional two parent families to the unconventional family set ups and majority of these families are manned by young adults. One of the major forms of this new trend is the unwed childbearing situation. Today we look to black women in their 20s and even some in their teens becoming single parents. However a look to America’s history will show that in the past this was the age by which most of these young women got married. Now policies should be put in place to help with families and encourage marriage although we see people who favour these welfare reforms sceptical about such policies. They believe that public policy cannot really do anything to enforce marriage since that is the way they see it.
In saying that the collapse of marriages in African Americans is linked to the rise of dependence on the welfare system, I will like to know which the dependent is and independent variable in all of it. Do marriages collapse because of the welfare system or has the welfare system destroyed traditional marriages as we know it. In the 70s marriage was a norm for the black community as over 64% of all adults over eighteen were married. Move ten years to 1980 and that percentage has dropped to 51% but that is nothing compared to the 41% of 2004 (Marshall et al, 2006). On the other hand the percentage of children born to unwed mothers was also steadily increasing. People may try to explain this phenomenon in many ways but this reversal of the traditional family in the black community happened because we told them to. The Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC) promised to offer entitlement to cash if there were dependent children in the home and the mother was not working or planning to marry someone who was.
If this is indeed true why do we feign surprise when we see low income communities have people that work and are married reduce drastically. The welfare system gave them the ultimatum that needed to be met in order for them to benefit from these entitlements. They said, “Do not go to work and do not marry someone that is working” and these women in the African American communities obeyed the orders. It should be stated that most of these single mothers do not start out by wanting to be unwed mothers. Most of them wanted to get married and have a house with children. For people in the middle class they usually form an attachment, then commitment, marriage and then children. For the people in the low income communities these sequences are turned upside down as she starts by having a child.
The American Welfare System and Family Structure: An Historical PerspectiveThere has been a steady increase of single mothers in the black communities since the 1970s and this has raised some red flags because most families that are headed by single mothers are likely to live in poverty with their children likely to drop out of school. This will also make it hard to find gainful employment without basic skills and the cycle of poverty continues. The welfare system of America has been blamed for the dissolution of the traditional families as they offer aid to families headed by single parents (Moehling, 2004). This aid makes it difficult for such women to consider marriage or even finding a job as they tend to look at the welfare system as their golden goose. Single motherhood did not just appear out of the blue as it has been on the rise among blacks from as early as the 40s. In 1911, the first state-wide mother’s pension law allowed government give grants to the mothers of dependent children.
The New York Times is known for doing a couple of series and one of such that they did was on “Class Matters.” For anyone that has read this series will see two blatant pieces of information in that write up? One is the fact that multigenerational poverty is mostly black and the other is that this poverty is in some way tied to the nuclear family and how it has collapsed in the inner city. We have the statistics to back up this sad happening as almost 70% of black children are born to single mothers who are likely to pass this poverty on to their children. This phenomenon has almost turned America into a two family nation. The first one is thriving and intact and the second one is broken and struggling and more often than not African American. While much has been said about Moynihan and the case he presented titled, “The Negro Family: The Case for National Action” (Hymowitz, 2005). At the time he was the unpopular voice and raging debates broke out as a reason. Unfortunately many years down the road and we see that his words were more prophetic than ever as we see the things he mentioned with regards the broken black family come to pass.
Between 1954 and 1964 we had an economy that was buzzing as she was able to generate 7 million jobs within the first five years of the 60s. By this time around a half of the blacks had moved from the lower class to the middle class and some of them were earning more than whites in the fifties. With time the tides started to turn as more blacks were becoming out of work. Policy makers had always assumed that women and children would be cared for as long as the men in the households had jobs. But at this time blacks were beginning to lose their jobs and more and more women were turning to the welfare to sort the problems. Moynihan had an issue with this as he believed that the family shaped the ability and character of the children and that students in the ghettos will learn that adults do not complete their education or get men that could take care of their families or get jobs. As time went on the black family continued to unravel with child poverty and welfare dependency soaring as more and more black children were being born to unwed mothers. The ghetto lifestyle has no positive role model to latch on to as we see rap music glorifying the ghetto life and culture.
America has a nation has always tried to practice libertarianism as they believe people should be allowed to live their lives as having a child outside of wedlock is not a crime. As the nation sinks into a cultural inflection, social researchers and scientists have agreed that a child fares better when brought up by two parents. Marriage is not a panacea but it has its own merits and the welfare system is making it difficult for these women to consider the alternative. Is change coming or do we have to wait another forty years before someone can point out what is wrong with our economy.
Studies have claimed that the promotion of marriage to single black mothers could help reduce poverty. There have been a lot of debates from encouraging the single mother to find the benefits of being in a traditional married setting and the other has been the comfort with which the woman that gains support from the welfare system has seen welfare as a substitute to her husband’s earning. AFDC-U was set up in 1961 to provide assistance to children of able-bodied unemployed parents. In a bid to preserve marriage and to prevent the women from leaving the men so they could still qualify for the aid, the reform extended to two parent families as long as they were unemployed.
Family Values, Race, Feminism and Public Policy
In recent time we have been hearing the term family value over and over again in a bid to end the non-traditional families that were available in this country. People have claimed that if these single mothers had appropriate values then they may not have had children in the first place. The children of black single mothers have been blamed for everything from poor health, unemployment increased rate in school dropout and juvenile crime. Although many people have suggested that a move back to the traditional families could help solve the black family’s dependence on the welfare system. If we look to as far back as we can remember the blacks in America we would find that at that time the marriage among slaves carried no legal status and their children could be sold by their masters. During this period then race was used to determine how the slaves saw marriage and this was used to better the economic interest of their masters. At that time a slave woman could end up being a single parent by either being raped by a white man or through the sale of her slave husband. While a lot of these have changed for today’s black family, racism still ensures that the black families do not forget their days of slavery.
Many people do need welfare to be able to survive and there are those who are on this system who still wish they were not dependent of the welfare system. This is not true for everyone as there are those who look for ways to remain on welfare for as long as they can. Many people are filled with anger and fear at the fact that they make have to continue working as their money is used to cater for the women on welfare. The black woman on welfare may look to her life and figure that she has no power over her life. However she may look to the woman with her husband whose only access to money is through her husband. Welfare changes that for the women and displaces men from the centre of the family unit. The family value and the issue of work are things that need to be sorted out in a bid for the economy to move further. Parts of the economy have remained and part of the family has been disintegrated as a result of the welfare program.
People are clamouring for these young men to become gainfully employed. But the truth of the matter is that there are not many available jobs and the unwed mothers would rather receive a stipend than leave with a man who could not pay the bills. So although people could look to the welfare system and claim that it is aiding in the dissolution of the traditional family. I agree that women would want to know that they are with a man at home who can help in with the finances than live with one who has not, and if these women were made to pick a kind of lifestyle, they would pick up the one that ensured they had a stipend to see them through.
Racism as a destroyer is not totally annihilated from our society as we still see traces of it today. While the family is a place to learn things, people can still learn negative things from the family. One of the easiest ways the home becomes a lesson can be in the family the mother has at home. A child looks up to his parents in a traditional family and believes that to be what life is about. However the child with the single parent sees that to be the lot of people like him and it is in only rare cases that a child like ever amounts to much. While most of these black mothers try to change their children’s psyche for the better, most of them seem to be fighting an uphill battle. Such children are usually stigmatized and bullied and friendless and they turn out hating their life hoping for something else or lashing out at society for what they believe to be the fault of the government. This woman still has to face the wrath of the people who see her and consider her to be lazy since she is seen to be living off welfare and just like crime, the face given to the perpetrators of this bad behaviour is black.
Conclusion
The welfare system is like any other system or policy with both good and bad bits and while the bad bits are been splashed for the world to see and with it the dilemma of the black single mother. I think that we may never be able to go back to a time when the traditional family was basically the only family system we had. The world has gone too far for that to work. I however do believe that while the welfare system was set up to help those with children who could not help themselves, there are people who will abuse a gift horse. Hence you see women who are on welfare but have the option of achieving something with their lives and they just sit on their laurels expecting the benefits to flow. These are the people who believe that the government owes them something and the type of life they live will reflect that.
If the welfare system were to stop many families will be affected for the worse and I believe that these are the statistics and data that the government has that allows them to keep with the program. For every five people that may have seen the welfare system as their entitlement and refuse to do anything or find any job to offset what they are receiving, there is that one family that genuinely needs the welfare package to keep them alive and America needs to keep reforms like these for those people as well. Because they are Americans and it is their right to be catered for in their land. As every child deserves the basic needs of life, the government will have to help the mothers and parents of those children to ensure that they have an opportunity to a healthy, happy life. And this doesn’t matter whether they are black women or not, as long as they are Americans.
References
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