Dear Mickey and Jonah:
Like both of you, I have known DeParle for a long time, have been an avid reader of his welfare articles in the New York Times, have had the opportunity to read and ponder his book, have heard him discuss his book before several audiences, and have participated in a public debate about the book. So I have had lots of time to think about the book and about the perspective of its author.
I am still surprised that Jason, or any liberal reporter for the New York Times, could write such a book; that is, a book that provides a clear and devastating portrait of the lives of the poor. I was reminded of Leon Dash’s writing about teen mothers in the Washington Post and then in two books— When Children Want Children (1989) and Rosa Lee: A Mother and Her Family in Urban America (1997)—as well as the infamous 1965 report on black families in which Daniel Patrick Moynihan argued that the major reason black families were not making more progress in America was because too many black children were being born outside marriage and reared in female-headed families. The left heaped scorn on Moynihan and, to a lesser degree, Dash for their frank portrayal of what scholars and reporters used to call underclass life and its consequences—and for blaming the victim. Yet, as Jonah and Mickey’s comments about DeParle’s book illustrate, the left has been positive, even enthusiastic, about American Dream. I recently spent a day at a meeting of senior staffers from leading foundations, a group with a distinct leftward tilt, which featured DeParle as the luncheon speaker. He not only talked in detail about the bad decisions Angie and Jewell made—and even referred to Opal and her drug-related problems with retaining custody of her children—and yet was received very warmly. Something happened between the revelations of Moynihan and Dash and those of DeParle that has caused all of us to be more accepting of the facts about underclass life.
I greatly admire the remarkable efforts of Angie and Jewell to achieve economic security and keep their families together. Like everyone else, I have been amazed by the vast number of mothers on welfare who made a successful transition from welfare dependency to work. DeParle even argues that welfare was not that big a deal to Angie and Jewell: When it was available, they took it; when it wasn’t, they made other arrangements—including work. Yet the fact remains that they had babies outside marriage when they were young, reared their children in homes that featured a remarkable degree of chaos and even crime, and took all the welfare they could get. As I listened to DeParle describe these conditions to a room full of the well-heeled, I reflected on what I know from both personal experience and research about the parenting styles of middle- and upper-class parents. The measures these parents take to support their children are truly extraordinary. They rearrange their homes, the mothers (and sometimes the fathers) usually take considerable time away from work when the baby is born; they have nannies that they carefully quiz before hiring; they spend $1,000 a month on day care; they take their children to scores of activities after school and on weekends; they often take their children to church on Sundays; they save for their child’s college education. Equally or even more important, scores of research studies show that they will talk often and responsively to their children, that they will set firm limits and enforce them, and that they will avoid harsh and physical punishment. These are the parenting behaviors that contribute in measurable ways to child development. And many low-income parents fail to support their children in this manner. Read the book—or the body of solid research that establishes the differences between parents on these skills and the huge impact these parenting skills have on children’s development.
Nor have I even mentioned fathers. Two parents not only earn more money than one, but they can talk to children twice as much as a single parent, take them on twice as many trips to the store or the museum, and are twice as likely to be at home. Two parents working together to supervise, stimulate, watch, and fawn over children constitute a child-rearing machine. Moreover, fathers in all likelihood bring something additional to the table. Most fathers are at once more playful, especially in rough-and-tumble play, and more authoritative than mothers. Fathers not only increase economic security; they promote psychic security for both their wives and children, even as the wives do for their husbands and children. Although the research is less clear on this point, I think we will eventually find that fathers are especially vital to controlling the behavior of teenage boys and girls. Homes and neighborhoods without fathers are likely to be chaotic, undisciplined, and violent. Read the book. Angie, Jewell, and their children would have been much better off if both had been married to men like Ken. And their neighborhoods would have been safer if their neighbors had been married to men like Ken. And equally important, even Ken himself would have been better off as a young man if he had been married to Jewell—and if all of Jewell’s children and not just Kevion were his. Do either of you doubt that it was Kevion more than jail that turned Ken from a drug dealer into a mature, employed man and attentive father?
The turn to employment by Angie and Jewell—and perhaps as many as 2 million other young mothers—is a triumph that is portrayed with greater force in DeParle’s book than in any other place I know. Yet the impacts on men and children that Mickey thinks might be taking place are not showing up very strongly in statistics. If employment by mothers turns out to be the linchpin of a family revolution among the nation’s poor, it would be the most important social development of our age. I do not disagree with Mickey’s hopefulness, and feel some of it myself, but the revolution we need in the nation’s inner cities and other pockets of poverty will not take place until nonmarital births plummet and the incidence of two-parent families explodes. That is the second most important conclusion to be drawn from DeParle’s magnificent and tragic book.
Ron
