Single-Parent Family Needn’t Mean Disaster

One of the more startling statistics to reach these shores is the figure that in Sweden today 60% of first children and 45% of all children are born to unmarried mothers. This would seem to prove irrefutably the longstanding conservative charge that the welfare state destroys the family, promotes promiscuity and so on.

But, as so often is the case, the details are rather more complicated. A fascinating new study of “mother-only” families in several countries, written by sociologists Sheila B. Kamerman and Alfred J. Kahn, sheds some light on what is really going on.

In Sweden, as in much of Western Europe, old-fashioned marriage--in which people become engaged, get married and only then set up housekeeping--has virtually ceased to exist. An astonishing 97% of Swedes who eventually marry live together first. Many also have babies before they officially wed. But most are also thoroughly middle-class, and only 3% of Swedish children lack a known father. The fraction of children cared for by two parents living together is far higher than the 60% “illegitimacy” rate would suggest. About 29% of Swedish children live only with their mothers, compared with 23% in the United States.

It is of course disconcerting when a social institution as basic as marriage becomes so casual, but the picture of an entire nation of promiscuous single mothers and irresponsible fathers is simply inaccurate. In practice, society’s attention to the care of children is probably more reliable in Sweden than in America, where the illegitimacy rate is a “low” 21%.

The reason is twofold. First, Sweden, unlike America, has a comprehensive early child-care program, available as a right to all parents. High fractions of mothers now work in both nations (84% in Sweden, 64% in America), but in Sweden parents have assurance that someone dependable is caring for the kids during work hours.

More fundamentally, Sweden has decided that even single mothers (and their children) are entitled to a decent standard of living. In the United States the typical public-assistance grant provides an income well below the poverty line, locks welfare mothers into a cycle of dependency and offers nothing to struggling single parents whose earnings place them slightly above welfare limits. By contrast, in Sweden, as in most of Western Europe, payments to single mothers are sufficient to provide a modestly decent standard of living, and society offers other family supports as well.

The fact remains that to be comfortably middle-class in Europe or the United States requires two incomes, unless the mother happens to be an investment banker or a brain surgeon. To be a single parent, even in a generous welfare state, also invariably causes what Kamerman and Kahn delightfully term “time poverty.”

And that is why no reputable study has concluded that family allowances and other welfare benefits “cause” illegitimacy and divorce. A mother who is married remains far better off financially, even in nations that allow her to avoid destitution as a single parent.

To be sure, the traditional family is in deep trouble throughout the Western world. The causes may include everything from the sexual revolution to financial pressures that send mothers into the labor force, to the feminist revolt against the patriarchal family, to the ease of divorce.

But, as Kamerman and Kahn suggest, it is hard to blame all this on generous social policies. In the United States illegitimacy rates are remarkably uniform from states with generous welfare benefits to those with meager ones.

It may be, as Kamerman and Kahn report, that in much of Europe the single-parent household has become a “new family type” rather than merely a social problem. If so, that is only because Europe has chosen to give these families financial and other supports. But in America the single-parent family remains a profound social problem because it is also likely to be destitute.