“Watering the Leaves” - Reducing Dysfunctional Households

How do we reduce the number of poor, often highly dysfunctional, single-parent families in society, generally “of color” in urban settings and white in my rural confines? This question has plagued me for years. I think the mayhem in places like Chicago is fueled in large part by the forlorn, “lost” children of such households, who lack skills for today’s jobs and are mired in negative worlds.

So, have gone back at it again, by interviewing a rural social worker, a mid-size city court-appointed children’s advocate, and an African-American Pulitzer Prize winner who wrote a book, now a couple of decades ago, about a grandmother who had her own eight children before she was barely out her teens. Here is my report, with some suggestions, and I hope you appreciate that the tyranny of the 750-word limit can offer, not comprehensive solutions, but thoughts to stimulate the reader.

Suggestions:

First, recast our thinking about what will help, from often wishful thinking to hard-nosed but compassionate understanding of how most humans really behave, that is, in response to incentives and sanctions, opportunities and threats.

In that vein, make work pay. That is, policies should put welfare moms who have achieved jobs onto a sliding scale of benefits reductions while mom gets back onto her feet. At present, according to the rural social worker, benefits for housing, heating, cash payments, food stamps and more are cut rather abruptly once mom goes back to work, often making the scary world of work less attractive than staying on welfare. My social worker friend suggests something like a three-month grace period before benefit reduction, and then maybe reduced on a sliding scale, so mom can get on her feet.

Courts and welfare programs should require child development classes, in return for benefits and for keeping one’s children in the home. Many of these moms have no idea how to parent, because they were never taught how to do so by their moms, who often never knew how, either. And the threat of losing their children often changes behavior by mothers who, after all, love their own.

Make welfare administration rational, by providing recipients with one overall caseworker who oversees benefit programs for the recipient that are to be found in one physical location, rather than in as many as 10 different, scattered places, as is the case today.

Here is one of my own: Poor moms often never marry, and thus such vows are meaningless. Instead, for their own sake, at the time of sexual relations, females should pull a pledge form from their billfolds that prospective fathers must sign: If a child results, the father vows to love, care for and provide financial support to his child! I know, I know: This sounds fanciful, yet it has been shown that “nudges,” even like this, can affect behavior. And women are becoming more aggressive in their relations with men, as they should.

Most important, society should take advantage of, and drive down further, the rate of teen births, which has fallen dramatically in the past couple of decades. This alone would thus reduce the number of dysfunctional families significantly.