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CHAPTER SIXTEEN 340 The Other Side of the Demographic Revolution Social Policy and Responsible Parenthood June Carbone and Naomi Cahn At the core of the family values debate is a central irony. In the more liberal (and “blue”) regions of the United States where public institutions make little effort to preach traditional sexual values, the traditional twoparent marital family is alive and well. Teen birthrates have dropped dramatically , divorce rates have fallen, and children enjoy greater material and emotional resources than they did in earlier eras. In contrast, the “redder” parts of the country that most loudly proclaim the importance of family values and insist on the need to reinforce the commitment to marriage are experiencing a profound sense of moral crisis. These families continue to have much higher teen birthrates, continually rising divorce rates, and worsening circumstances for the next generation. We believe that the contrast between the two systems is not accidental . Underlying the different approaches to family structure are wholesale changes in the economy and the relationship between work and family. The new information economy rewards education and investment in the market potential of both men and women. Realizing the benefits of that investment, however, delays readiness for family life into the middle to late twenties, if not later. At the same time, the era of globalized competition has largely eliminated the male premium that made a husband’s earning capacity indispensable to family life and the relatively high-paying jobs for the unskilled that sustained young couples of a different era. The secret to the stable families in more successful communities? Embrace change. This new “blue” model, which we dub the responsible parenthood model, depends on a set of critical principles: Emphasize education for both men and women. Postpone childbearing until the adults have reached a measure of financial independence and emotional maturity. Adopt more flexible attitudes toward gender: with a decline in job stability , fathers and mothers need to be able to trade off family responsibilities and employment. Respect the life and reproductive choices of the mature and the independent; single parenthood at thirty is a different matter than 341 The Other Side of the Demographic Revolution at seventeen. The more troublesome consequences of the new system become ones of management: later childbearing inevitably means lower overall fertility (for better or ill) and longer high-fertility periods when pregnancy is unwelcome. And failure requires redoubling the effort: the solution to an improvident birth is not a shaky marriage but greater investment in the mother’s workforce potential, the child’s education, and avoidance of the second birth in close proximity to the first. This new model has been most thoroughly embraced by the collegeeducated middle class, and it has increasingly become the foundation for assistance to struggling families in the more liberal and Democratic regions of the country. The more Republican and traditionalist heartland, however, has emphasized promoting marriage. These efforts treat marriage as a matter of will and have focused most systematically on fighting abortion and containing sexuality without addressing the underlying economic and gender issues driving marriage and divorce rates. Yet, the shotgun marriage, which provided the stopgap for youthful indiscretions of old, does not work in the new economy: men are unlikely to earn enough to support a family and, indeed, have been harder hit by the recession,1 and women have greater ability to walk out in the face of infidelity, insensitivity , or violence—factors that increase with financial stress. Almost all of the proposals associated with the integrative model will fail to bolster the traditional family if the net result is to increase the number of children born to parents who are not prepared to care for them. Those who would place greater emphasis on marriage fail to ask the hard questions of whether their proposed exhortation can actually produce more stable relationships in a more unequal economy that writes off a high proportion of men as effectively unmarriageable because of high rates of chronic unemployment, imprisonment, violence, mental illness, and substance abuse. We suggest, therefore, that while societal changes have sparked profound disagreement between those who would continue to privilege twoparent biological, marital families (the integrative model) and those of us who seek responsible parenthood irrespective of family form (the responsible parenthood model), our disagreement is less about the ideal and more about the means for achieving healthy families. Even in an era of family change, almost 60 percent of today’s children live with their married biological parents...

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