Absent in Bradley’s Equation and Absent in Poor Families: the Father

When Bill Bradley detailed his views on childhood poverty earlier this month in Los Angeles, two words were conspicuously missing from his speech. One was the word “fathers.” The other missing word was “missing”--as in, missing fathers.

Bradley came no closer to the subject of missing fathers than some fleeting references to the stresses confronting single parents. As a senator from New Jersey, Bradley had worked to toughen child support collection from absent fathers, but in his speech he casually dismissed those who believe that childhood poverty cannot be addressed without attacking the broader cultural problem of fragmenting families--a much more explosive issue on the left.

“We cannot return to a remembered past, a past I’m not certain ever really existed,” declared Bradley, Vice President Al Gore’s sole competitor for the Democratic presidential nomination.

That’s far too flip. Today, childhood poverty is at least as much a problem of values as of economics. That means any effort to reduce childhood poverty solely with the economic policies Bradley stressed is doomed to frustration. Without increasing the number of children in two-parent families, the United States is unlikely to make the progress it wants at reducing the number of children in poverty.

“Historically,” says David Blankenhorn, president of the centrist Institute for American Values, “whether or not a child was poor depended on what her mother and father did for a living [and] whether they had a job. Increasingly, whether a child is poor or not depends on whether she has a father in her life.”

Census Bureau numbers tell the story. More and more, childhood poverty is concentrated in families where the father (or far more rarely) the mother is absent. In 1997, the latest year for which census data are available, 62% of all children in poverty came from single-parent families.

Just 34% of poor children live in families with two married parents. (The rest live in assorted other conditions, including foster care.) That’s despite the fact that the number of married couples raising children is still more than double the number of single parents.

To some extent, this decade’s rising economic tide has lifted all these boats. In his speech, Bradley charged that the number of children living in poverty hasn’t decreased under President Clinton. But census figures show that the number of children in poverty declined from 15.3 million when Clinton took office to 14.1 million in 1997, a drop of 1.2 million. That reduced the share of children living in poverty from 22.3% to 19.9%.

Bradley’s aides now admit that his charge in the speech was wrong but say the actual decline is “negligible.” Clintonites counter that the decline in the children’s poverty rate since 1993 is the largest sustained drop since the 1960s. But the biggest story in the numbers is that even a booming economy can’t fully overcome the impact of family breakdown on children.

Since 1993, the poverty rate has fallen slightly faster among female-headed households than those with married couples. But even after that progress, a staggering 41% of single-parent families remain trapped in poverty (compared with 7.1% of married parents). A single white mother is still nearly five times as likely as a married black couple to be poor.

That disparity defies easy solution. Most parents without a partner make great efforts, but they are forced to stretch one set of resources over a job that demands two. That leaves many in an inherently tenuous situation, particularly economically.

Bradley was right to urge more support for all parents struggling to stay out of poverty. But Washington hasn’t been as oblivious as he suggested.

With the 1993 expansion of the earned income tax credit (which cuts federal taxes for the working poor), the 1996 increase in the minimum wage, the new program of health insurance for children in low-income families and the $500-per-child tax credit approved in 1997, Clinton and Congress have already taken important steps to bolster families--with one or two parents--straining at the margin of the economy.

More can be done, such as raising the minimum wage again. But it will be difficult to root out childhood poverty solely with such economic support because the vast majority of parents who work already earn enough to lift their families out of poverty. For married couples with children, when either partner worked full time in 1997, just 2.8% were poor. Even nine of 10 single mothers who worked full-time escaped poverty.

Those numbers suggest part of the answer to endemic childhood poverty might be to help more single mothers enter the work force (as welfare reform is already aiming to do with work requirements, training and subsidies for day care). But there are natural limits to that process; the real lesson may be that the best way to reduce childhood poverty is to encourage more men to marry the mothers of their children and help sustain the families they have created.

Not much is known about how to promote marriage. But interesting experiments are emerging. On the same day that Bradley delivered his fathers-free speech, an extraordinary collection of largely African American scholars convened by Morehouse College and Blankenhorn’s institute released a manifesto urging a broad national effort aimed at “reuniting fathers and children,” especially in the black community.

Among their recommendations was that Congress provide grants to help fund grass-roots, often religiously based, initiatives now springing up with three goals: to help absent fathers find work; to inspire them to rebuild ties with their sons and daughters; and to encourage them to marry the mothers of their children.

Rep. Nancy L. Johnson (R-Conn.) will introduce a $2-billion program to support such efforts later this year, and Clinton officials have expressed interest in the idea.

Reconnecting absent fathers to their families won’t be easy, but it’s essential to the cause of giving more children a chance. Bradley was only partly right when he said that the persistence of childhood poverty “is an issue of justice.”

It’s even more an issue of personal responsibility: the obligation of men and women to jointly support the children they bring into the world. Washington can surely do more, but, without that personal commitment, justice for poor children will remain elusive.

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