No evisceration here. I've encouraged other foster families to consider openness with dads after adoption (rather than the moms the system tends to focus on more) because showing up for a visit and having fun is often already how the dad understands being a dad and things are sort of as they would have been anyway. Obviously experiences differ, but I've seen this many times.
I don't have a well thought out policy recommendation, just a wish that things were different. But this seems to me to be connected with the issues we were arguing about on adoption -- that a man who isn't in an immediately legally orderly relationship with his kids is optional and has no responsibilities beyond the often impossible and even more often oppressive-feeling expectation of cash childsupport.
If we lived in a world where active coparenting, even for unmarried parents without a strong relationship with each other, was a social norm at all levels, I think it would be better.
I think just normal poverty alleviation policies would suffice, no? It doesn't sound like a broader problem than that.
Agree with 1 and 2.
Parenting is tough even under the same roof.
I am surprised that more custody battles do not involve competing claims of "No, YOU take them!"
"No, YOU take them!"
It does happen though? How often?
Look, Mobes, if you want a roadmap, you're going to have to pay Will for that.
do not involve competing claims of "No, YOU take them!"
Don't you think the social norms assuming women will take custody are what keep that from happening? An unenthusiastic father drifts away and maybe provides child support or maybe doesn't, and no one's surprised. A mother declining custody, in the absence of a father aggressively seeking it, would look very unusual.
I'm not saying it doesn't happen sometimes, probably does, but there's a strong norm that while men may or may not walk away from their kids, women aren't going to.
A mother declining custody, in the absence of a father aggressively seeking it, would look very unusual.
My friend is grappling with this. He has made a play to be the primary custodial parent, and she's trying not to seem over-eager.
More seriously, I think this typically excellent Kotsko post is directly on point. Basically, successful marriage and child-rearing is now seen as a capstone to meritocratic success and is increasingly a luxury good unavailable (and seen as unavailable) to meritocracy's losers.
Same couple doing the DIY divorce? Because I'm judgmental and a horrible person, I kind of judge anyone who's looking for a less than 50-50 time-split with their kids, barring some kind of logistical/practical barrier. (In practice, where I know someone with such an arrangement, I assume there's some perfectly good explanation that would make me think it was a reasonable decision under the circumstances and the details are none of my business.)
10: yep. In fairness to her, she originally offered and assumed she'd have primary custody. And second, she thinks that he doesn't quite realize how much work he's signing up for, and that they'll renegotiate on an ongoing basis according to what kind of schedules they both have, and that eventually things will be pretty equal.
But no, she has no problem saying "Have fun doing all the morning and bedtime routines 5 days a week, and the laundry to boot." (He has suggested that she take them two evenings during the week, and then drop them off at bedtime, and that they alternate weekends.)
(She's definitely been doing the lion's share of unpleasant parenting tasks for the past few years. I agree with her judgment that he doesn't realize quite how much work he's proposing to take on.)
Two evenings during the week might be a problem once the kids get into school and such.
Oh, that sounds well within the realm of things I wouldn't judge at all. But they should really be talking to a lawyer, or at least doing some kind of research, to figure out how they should be memorializing their agreement on paper.
They're already in school and daycare. What problems?
These two are really unusual, I should add. They've been living in the house together for about two months, since the shit hit the fan, trying to sell or figure out how to keep the house, and parenting has gone amazingly civil. Anger already seems to be massively receding on both parties, although I'm sure it will flare up at times.
There's some online lawyer service offered by the county, which double-checks your paperwork for like $500. I think they're using that.
15.1: I was thinking once they started to get practices and homework and science projects and friends, kids would get unhappy about all the moving back and forth. That might be projection on my part as I don't like travel.
Of course, that's a problem with joint custody at all. Which does seem like a problem for the kids, but also seems hard to avoid.
15: Are they considering the thing where the kids stay in the house and whichever parent has custody stays with them? It does seem like it would be best for the kids in a lot of ways, but would take a huge amount of work and money on the parents' parts.
17: I think they'll just respond to the kids. They've talked about how some weeks it might make more sense for one parent to take the older kid to activities, and the other one to take the little one home, etc. I think they'll consult each other heavily on practical matters, the way they're doing now.
19: That sounds like a good idea, but it does involve being able to afford three places to live.
19: I don't think that's on the table, because that would essentially be three housing payments, which I don't think they can swing. Keeping the house is a little bit of a stretch, itself.
19: That one bothers me, because it both seems unambiguously best for the kids and as if it would drive almost any parents batshit insane. I cannot imagine myself tolerating that arrangement, even if I thought it would make my kids happiest. And then I feel like a terrible person, and am very glad that I've never had to work out these issues for myself.
21: Well, you could swing it with two -- the family house, and a grim little studio apartment nearby, that the adults could trade off as well. Again, I'd rather have my toenails pulled out with pliers, but if you could tolerate it it needn't be that expensive.
19 would make for a great sitcom (especially when the parents start dating again) if, because of financial constraints, they only have 2 total residences rather than 3, the kid-house and the not-kid-house, which results in wacky misunderstandings when new romantic interests come over to visit and so on.
24: I'd think that any couple that could live like that could just stay married in name only and live better.
In fact, how has that not been made yet? Halford, get on it; talk to your people.
I dunno, we do a custody switch midweek and it's not a big deal at all. No homework yet, but plenty of activities -- you just have different parents take the kid to the different activities. And, you need to have a full setup for the kid at both houses. Again, once you get used to it, who cares? On the other hand, the "kids stay in one house and parent switch in and out" thing sounds completely bonkers to me, and like the ultimate in a guilt-driven mistake. There is no way that either parent would keep their sanity with such an arrangement.
Or maybe that's more K-sky's territory. Either way!
Or maybe that's more K-sky's territory. Either way!
28: If you have three or four kids, having the "full setup" at both houses would be much more expensive.
Maybe, but it's unlikely to not be worth it. Having insane parents is actually not the best thing for kids going through a divorce.
Obviously insane people should stay married.
4: Quoth shiv, when we had a moment to ourselves a few weeks ago: "Who are you, and why aren't you handing me a baby?"
31: Couldn't you just stagger custody? You could just have a half-setup in each house--one or two kids rooms--and switch them off.
Alternatively, you could buy a trailer for the kids and drive it between the houses. That way, they get their own personal space without having to have any duplication.
I'm sure the children will agree that these are practical and economic solutions and for the benefit of all.
9: More seriously, I think this typically excellent Kotsko post is directly on point. Basically, successful marriage and child-rearing is now seen as a capstone to meritocratic success and is increasingly a luxury good unavailable (and seen as unavailable) to meritocracy's losers.
A nice bit of data in support of that is this graph (I believe I encountered it in Twilight of the Elites ).
Figure 1.6 shows how spending on child-enrichment goods and services jumped for families in the top quintiles to a far greater extent that for those in the bottom income quintiles, as reflected in four large consumer expenditure surveys conducted between the early 1970s and 2005 to 2006.
You've got to wonder how that happened. I mean, even at the lowest economic levels, a two-person unit is going to get along better than a single person: more chances that someone will be employed at any given time, cheaper rent, cheaper food, all the potential for mutual support. How did marriage get socially defined as a luxury good?
37: I think perhaps the luxury good may be a relative lack of stress of the kind that tends to tear couples apart. Being poor sucks ass in ways that are especially hard on self image, which makes for shaky relationships. Maybe. Just speculating.
I have read the thread, but women have tremendous pressure to have at least 50-50. Otherwise, something is seen as wrong with her. As LB mentioned above, that societal expectations weighs heavily.
Also, in shared physical custody, the parent who makes more ends up paying child support to the other. In shared custody cases, women are often outraged that the man isn't paying them child support. They are often equally outraged that they should pay child support to the dad.
23: I'm so bitter and angst-ridden about this reaction (which I totally share). Yeah! It would be so difficult and awful to have to be continually uprooting yourself, and bouncing back and forth between two places, and never settling in anywhere! That would suck! LET'S MAKE THE KIDS DO IT INSTEAD.
I had many emotions about this issue (custody splitting etc) in middle and high school.
Nesting is difficult beyond a short-term period.
I have mentioned before that my schedule is as follows:
M & W with mom
T & Th with me
alternate Friday to monday am
Works great. Even for our autistic child.
"Bouncing back and forth" isn't what my kids do.
They have a home at their moms and a home with me.
They have a routine whereby they get to see both parents frequently. Most child specialists agree on the importance of that.
Yes. So did I. I still hated it, and it still felt like bouncing back and forth.
We view the arrangements for the kids based on what we are comfortable with.
Is sleeping in the same bed more important than spending time with both parents? A schedule or a routine doesn't require the same bed.
Solving the problem of "feeling like bouncing back and forth" does not necessarily require the child to spend the week with one parent.
It's not at all the same thing, but the couple years where RWM and I lived in adjacent cities and spent 5 or 6 days a week together at two different houses was great. So I don't think bouncing between two places is inherently miserable in-and-of-itself.
The three place solution (house for the kids, smaller apartments for each adult) seems pretty good if you're rich. (Not only do you need to afford the 3 places, but it seems you'd damn well better hire someone to do the housework and yardwork at the shared house.) But non-traditional ways of getting down to two houses just don't seem very workable. At that point you might as well all live together. (Has anyone linked yet to that old article about divorced couples living in the same house?)
I didn't really mind until I was about 11 or 12. (We did M/T at my dads, W/Th at my mom's, and alternate weekends.)
Then it was a long campaign to lengthen stays and change the transition point away from school pickup and dropoff (so I didn't have to bring bags of things with me to school). I think by my freshman year of high school I had gotten up to week on/week off with the switch on a weekend. Then 2 weeks on/2 weeks off, and then at some point (junior year I think) month on month off.
I still saw the other parents in between, for lunch or dinner dates and stuff, but reducing the number of house switches made my life a lot less irritating. I would have LOVED to stay in a house and have the parents switch out instead. (there were other spouses and step or half siblings on both sides, so this was never even close to the table)
I have friends who are split up and for various reasons still live in the same house (but separate bedrooms) with their kid. It's obviously a terrible, horrible arrangement in terms of their (basically nonexistent) dating lives, difficult in various other ways, and wouldn't work at all if their marriage had ended in heat rather than heat-death, but I must concede that it certainly is more financially managable and more stable for the kid.
I can't actually tell how serious people are being about the "parents swap into and out of a single house where the kids stay" idea, but to be entirely earnest for a second:
One of the hardest, and most important, things about getting divorced is setting clear, workable boundaries that allow you to develop a workable life for both parents and kids. Think for a second about how hard this is to do if both parents are constantly moving into and out of a single house. Has anyone ever had a timeshare arrangement with another family whom they didn't like very much? How did that work out? Why would you think that your kids are better off not having to move beds but having non-autonomous parents being driven crazy by a pretty clearly insane living arrangement?
47:
The key is that it should be kid-centered. What works best for this particular child?
My issue is with people assuming that one parent only having four nights a month and some dinner visits is best. Or assuming that you have to do week to week.
and wouldn't work at all if their marriage had ended in heat rather than heat-death
I like this phrase!
49: I can't imagine being able to handle it myself, but I do know families who have done this successfully, and nobody went crazy, and they all (seem to) have lived happily ever after.
One of my best friends from high school's dad remarried a woman with kids from her previous marriage. For the first 3 years that she was my friend's stepmom, she only lived at their house half the time, because the rest of the time she was at her sons' place, trading out with their dad. Then her last kid went off to college and she moved in with her new husband full time.
49: I think this is right, but I also think Cecily is right about moving from house to house being a burden on the kids. The way it seems to me to net out is that burdening the kids with handoffs is preferable to driving the parents insane, because parents who have been driven insane will be worse for the kids than a little house-swapping. But putting the burden on the kids because the parents can't handle the alternatives seems sad to me. I don't see an alternative, but it's sad.
49: I'm the one who brought it up and I'm also one who has a hard time imagining it working for many reasons (though our hypothetical breakup plan is for one of us, which probably would mean me, moving to the third floor for at least a transition period) but it exists out there in the world and there are people who supposedly make it work.
I'm not sure if there is a best shared custody arrangement, but I do feel pretty confident in saying that it's incredibly important for the split-up parents to at least attempt to create a coherent experience for the kids. My ex and his ex acted like they were totally dedicated to doing this, but they couldn't help competing in subtle ways that really fucked with the kids. She wanted to be the cool mom with the cool boyfriend, apartment always full of relatives, no rules, lots of activity. He wanted his house to be a quiet, relaxing place for reading and creative play, no fighting and no begging to be bought things--a respite from the frantic environment at their mom's. They were so angry at each other after splitting up that they saw everything the other did as something to be corrected in their own childrearing--"At least when they're with *me* they know they're loved!" It was impossible for the kids (4 and 6) to figure out what the fuck was going on or how to behave. Space and number of days and all that stuff seems less important than agreeing on a coherent strategy.
And heebie, if your friends are open to suggestions, my friend and her ex-husband have a well-respected website and now a book about co-parenting. I haven't read it yet but I need to because it looks like, thanks to me, our fall fostering training day is going to be about using co-parenting strategies from divorce as a model for dealing with foster and foster/adoptive parenting.
55: Huh. Thinking about friends' divorced parents when I was a kid, there were always style differences like that, where one parent was more fun and the other was calmer and more stable. That never seemed like a source of problems, but of course I'm thinking about high school rather than little kids.
Some pretty marked "style differences" are pretty much inevitable. It's pretty difficult to parent as a single totally consistent unit, even within a single household and a married couple.
I was a babysitter through high-school for a family doing the 19 strategy. It seemed to be working pretty well -- I was often bridging a handoff, and met all parties, and the kids were un-freaked-out throughout. What had gone by the board was housekeeping, to a degree that icked me out as a teenager.
I think they had tiny apartments each, probably on the job side of the ferry commute. At the time, the housing market was in a slump, so if they each had a job this would have been surprisingly doable. Possibly they were also waiting to sell the big house in a non-slump.
Re: the original post: It seems they're saying part of the problem is that while conceptual gender neutrality of emotional nurturing has gotten through to men, but the conceptual gender neutrality of housework and cohabitation has not? (and in particular, low-income men, though I can't really figure out why.) I was thinking that this is where the tropes of pop culture--particularly TV---might have a role to play, except I can't even think of any fictive TV shows that seem like they would be both truly popular and "relatably" about poor young fathers in a positive fashion for young boys to "full absorb" different cultural messages from. Do we need to reboot Roseanne for the next generation and show David happily and effectively doing the housework while Darlene rakes in the big bucks as a . . .writer?
Thinking about 37 and 38, why marriage is now a luxury good instead of a bulwark against economic uncertainty: It *is* still such a bulwark among the comfortable classes, isn't it? By which I nearly mean people likely to get jobs with dependent-covering health care. All the desperate retraining we'll apparently need forever is doable, just, if two adults can alternate.
If the probability of being a sink at any given moment is too high for both partners, there's a really good chance that one of them will jettison the other to keep the kids afloat. I bet there are even realistic risk tolerances for which each adult can average being a money source over a working life, but the chance of the marriage staying stable is tiny.
...That seems so model-tractable that surely someone's done it.
Ile, I was also thinking that it seems like a failure in our didactic literature! Which is now TV norms.
I liked the bits of _Raising Hope_ I've seen because I thought one of its base assumptions was that doing what you could, practical as well as affectionate, was the measure of virtue and adulthood, male and female.
Well, nurturing is a pleasure in itself in a way that can't be farmed out -- that is, you don't get the pleasure of it unless you do the nurturing yourself. A greater proportion of the pleasures of housework come from pure results, no matter who has produced them. Sure, it's nice to feel the satisfaction of having done some housework, but it's also very nice, perhaps even nicer, to have the housework done while one was doing something else.
61: Say this again? You lost me.
Addressing what I think was part of your point, I think that where the interpersonal relationships are working okay and there isn't extravagantly self- or other-destructive behavior, another adult in the household isn't likely to be a sink even if they aren't bringing in income at any given time. Food's pretty cheap, a cohabiting adult doesn't cost extra rent, and they can at least do part of the parenting work.
One of the few TV shows I watch is Castle, and while reading this I was thinking that it basically embodies the image of the responsible single Dad, but makes it all easy by making him really rich and giving him a hale and hearty live-in mother.
Huh, I've never watched Raising Hope, I'd forgotten it exists. The premise seems so stupidly crazy to me I wrote off even checking it out. Is it any good?
But poor men insist on being seen as "more than just a paycheck" to their children; they have attempted to redefine fatherhood as being about "spending quality time" with their kids and engaging with them emotionally.... The problem with this vision of "doing the best I can" is that it really isn't good enough. It leaves all the most difficult responsibilities of parenthood, financial and disciplinary, up to mothers
It seems obvious to me that this vision of fatherhood is unlikely to 'stick' all through the kids upbringing, in the face of a potentially hostile relationship with the mother there's just too great a chance that the father will drift away.
I feel like in general and in most cases divorce puts the parents' happiness above that of the kids, but no one can talk about that honestly. That's not necessarily a terrible thing morally -- you can order a society to prioritize the independence of adults over other values -- but if you are going to do it you have a social obligation to create lots more collective supports for kids. Also, if you want to reduce divorce you need to create lots, lots more support for family life, more time off work and caretaking support, etc. Now that I have a kid I am constantly impressed by how anti-family our society is -- you're not just signing up for civilizing a primal little being, you're signing up for negotiating a seemingly endless series of barriers to managing your work life day-to-day.
63: This is right, and I think it's what makes the model of fathering in the article unworkably unstable. Kids probably are better off with a single mother handling everything practical and a father who shows up for emotionally nurturing contact but no practical support than they would be with a single mother and a completely absent father. Nonetheless, that model is (a) totally dependent on the custodial mother being willing to facilitate it, and (b) a practical drain on her but no actual help, making it unlikely that a large proportion of single mothers going to be willing to put effort into facilitating it long-term.
LB, I don't think you are right on the value of an extra person. Assuming that everyone gets along nicely is a big assumption, but I think you are underestimating how frustrating it is to have someone at home all day if they're not doing a bunch of chores or the not fun childcare to lighten your load. I think that I'd rather just know I had to do everything myself after work than hope my theoretical spouse had gone shopping and done laundry (rather than taking the theoretical kids to the park and watching TV, which is more fun for them but doesn't save me anything). That's a lot of resentment and disappointment to hold on to. I think it's totally possible to have each adult in a household be a nice, helpful contributor, but that's very optimistic.
I feel like in general and in most cases divorce puts the parents' happiness above that of the kids, but no one can talk about that honestly.
I honestly wonder about that. I've mentioned before that my parents had a great deal of difficulty with each other throughout their twenty-five year marriage, and while they never explicitly said they were staying together for us, I can't imagine why else they would have.
And I really don't know if we were better off. On the one hand, no custody difficulty or bouncing from house to house, more economic resources, everything you'd think of for an intact family. On the other hand, boy was the atmosphere in our apartment thick with tension. I kind of didn't realize how tense it was, and how wound up and on edge I was, until I was away from it.
Having a fairly cheerful, happy relationship with Buck still feels odd to me, like we're not doing things normally.
69: Ditto. I have nothing to add but super ditto.
69, 71: Well, yeah, assuming the interpersonal relationships are working okay (which means assuming that both partners are putting in some reasonable amount of practical effort) is a fairly strong assumption. But not one that there are economic barriers to: a model of marriage that would leave everyone better off isn't dependent on breadwinner jobs -- two people scrambling to make ends meet are still better off if they're helping each other out in good faith than they'd be alone.
I have no explanation for the punctuation in that last sentence.
69 is super true and also IME correlates with employment stuff in various ways. Obviously it would have been nice if Lee had taken on running the household while she was not working but she didn't and I decided to cut her slack on it but (as everyone here knows) was really bitter and grumpy about it nonetheless, which is a core character failing of mine. Now she's working and even though we're both more harried in certain respects, the tone of the household is better.
Make no mistake: this isn't only a poor-people's problem. Since 1965, mothers at every level of the economy have tripled the hours they spend working outside the home. Fathers now spend much more time playing and talking with their children than they did in past decades, but men's domestic labor--cooking, cleaning, and readying the kids for school--has not kept pace, meaning women are still working the "second shift" defined by Arlie Hochschild in 1989.
This paragraph in the article is highly misleading -- men and women in married couples report the same total number of hours of work (paid work, childcare, and housework combined).
I totally agree that times of unemployment are very difficult to navigate, because there's two incompatible fairness measures: doing equal amounts of work or doing equal amounts of undesirable work. I've found it stressful when it's only a couple months and we don't have kids, a longer amount of time with kids sounds like a perfect resentment producing machine.
70: these things are highly individual -- I know in my own case my father was much happier post-divorce but it definitely made my childhood worse than it would have been had he just stayed in the relationship with my mother, unhappiness and all. So my intuition is colored by that. But I think statistically and on average kids seem to respond negatively to divorce
BTW, this is also a subset of a general thing about human selfishness. In cultures where divorce is extremely rare, I'm sure adults also have lots of ways of putting their own interests above that of the kids, sometimes in ways that are more harmful than divorce. I just think the prevailing piety about saying that the kids always come first prevents some useful realism.
And back to the original link, I really do want to read the books and thought the article tone was a bit moralizing (and also much more, "Oh, look at these strange poor people, my middle-class peers!" than even heebie's this/this setup suggests) but think the underlying work looks great.
One complication is how hard it is to juggle multiple custody arrangements or multiple dads, which is what was being discussed there. It's hard already to deal with relationships with Mara's mom, her dad, her mom's other kids who live with an aunt, her parents' other kid who lives with a friend, and now there are the branches of Nia's family, too.
But for Mara's siblings there are four different dads involved too, one out of the picture, one actively raising his child after having limited contact for over a decade, one (Mara's) who does an overnight "fun" visit every month or two and pays some child support for her sibling but has of course had his rights to Mara terminated, and one who shows up a few times a year but irregularly and seemingly at the whims of his current partner. So when one aunt was trying to juggle all of that plus their mom plus her own kids' dads, I think just handling child support and visitation must have been like a full-time job, not to mention all the big feelings that come up for the kids when so-and-so gets to go see HIS Dad and how come MY Dad never does that....
If I may anecdate, it does ring true to me--it seems to me a lot of my clients at least talk convincingly of their investment in their kids even if their relationships with the mother(s) aren't good.
It looks like this is 10 years old, but here's an interesting interview with the author of the study about how these couples and no-longer-coupled parents she's worked with view marriage and their futures.
As to the reasons that poorer couples might not get married (marriage as luxury good), the financial benefits are probably not as large as for middle class couples. No health insurance from a job, marriage tax penalty, combined earnings vs poverty level shift (especially with fluctuating incomes as employment status changes, how many times do they want to re-do paperwork to ensure you are getting appropriate benefits?), previous child support arrangements (not sure how this works, but I bet it makes a difference). Plus, in terms of social pressure, doing it "right" with a wedding is really expensive (starting with an engagement ring, right?), plus fear of failure if it doesn't work out. The less tangible things (like making medical decisions) are likely not too big a deal in these cases, assuming there are reasonably good family relationships.
81 et al. -- I thought the best explanation was from this paragraph in the article linked in the OP:
Far from disdaining marriage, low-income single parents have fully absorbed mainstream cultural messages about what that institution should entail: two good jobs, home ownership, and a "soul mate" kind of love. Because these goals appear impossible for people living hand-to-mouth at the bottom rung of the American economy, however, men told the researchers that marriage is generally off the table as a realistic lifestyle. Indeed, they mistrust women, whom they see as enforcers of middle-class earning expectations they cannot meet. The love these men feel for their children is far stronger than any romantic connection they've made with those children's mothers.
Without two "good" (or decent) jobs or the possibility of home ownership, the idea of marriage becomes a burden -- a constant reminder of one's failure to meaningfully provide the life that marriage seems that it should entail.
Or, to continue from 82, marriage these days means much more than just cohabitation or splitting finances.* Although I don't believe it's addressed in the OP article, I'd be very surprised if cohabitation and multi-family arrangements weren't common among low-income single parents. But cohabitation is different than marriage, and it's marriage itself and what it culturally entails, including divorce, that seems burdensome and difficult to impossible.
The * was supposed to be "and that's one of the reasons why the gay marriage cases are so important."
74: Obviously it would have been nice if Lee had taken on running the household while she was not working but she didn't and I decided to cut her slack on it but (as everyone here knows) was really bitter and grumpy about it nonetheless, which is a core character failing of mine because I'm human.
FTFY.
Marriage, or even just cohabitation, are a thing economically. Money is spent. This is accepted by retailers and real estate people as a major driver of their businesses. They probably know.
To put on my McManus hat for a moment, here you have every reason to hate liberals. These people do, in fact, have the emotional-political change set up. They're doing it; they would do more if it were possible. What they don't have is the economic, material wherewithal to back it. And what solution is offered?
More thought reform. More people who are richer than you telling you to be a different person and writing PhDs about what's wrong with you. More moralising. More medicalising/therapy culture. No money.
"Oh, look at these strange poor people, my middle-class peers!"
"Why don't those poor people just get credit cards? Then they could eat all they wanted."
I was thinking once they started to get practices and homework and science projects and friends, kids would get unhappy about all the moving back and forth. That might be projection on my part as I don't like travel.
This is why our paperwork specifies that our parenting time agreement is contingent on both living X miles from Rory's school. Living walking distance apart makes a lot of things less complicated.
70: My parents continue to stay married despite openly hating each other. This does not increase happiness for the children. It is also a big part of why I divorced - I suspected (and this has since been confirmed) that Rory would be much happier with two houses than trapped in one with people who hate each other.
Trying to be clearer, probably only getting pedantic, likely pwned or late, SORRY:
Starting point, the expectations of marriage, as demanding as Halford clarifies in 82. This seems nearly impossible to meet! The Dunmow Flitch was rarely awarded and it only asked for a year and a day without argument. I thought Lizardbreath's question was, more or less, Isn't marriage actually an economic advantage, so that couples would hang on to it -- and do better by hanging on -- thus countering the unrealistic standard?
So, counter-hypothesis, given the evidence that a lot of couples aren't hanging on to it: marriage is now not an economic advantage, and the poorer you are, the less of a benefit it is.
ydnew's 81 lists a lot of very explicit benefits that only accrue to the middle-class and up, and some costs that are hard to bear for anyone below that. Thorn alludes to the problem of expectations for what an unemployed person will do at home. Also, near the bottom of the SES ladder, for a long time there were benefits only available to families with no father present (Do we still do that? So cruel.)
I was thinking about something more systemic and stochastic, about the kinds of risk and investment the modern economy demands for people to stay employed. I'm hypothesizing
(1) getting from unemployment back into the labor market now usually requires input of money and resources. From the top down, e.g.: startup capital, graduate school, internships, BA, AA, certifications, two weeks unpaid but using gas and bus money, jeans and enough food to dig a ditch on. Some of these have always been true, some are getting more expensive and less subsidized. I think the evidence that employers are outsourcing training and other costs to the employees is strong.
(2) Working-for-pay lives are interrupted more often as you move down the economic scale.
(3) Non-market work isn't as useful as it used to be (or possibly fewer people know how to do it); e.g. lots of people evidently lack something needed to cook cheaply at home, and the economic payoff for home sewing now mostly accrues to the UMC, and consumer goods are rarely repairable. (It looks to me, through my hat, as though basic child care would be economically worth it -- however annoying when it occurred around piles of undone laundry -- and as though the affectionate fathers in the OP could do that. Yes? No? Sprouts of a desperately needed change in our framing of manhood?)
And these three things multiply, so that an unemployed person is often a literal drain on the family. This is familiar from Great Depression stories, and also from Victorian Immiseration stories.
If an unemployed person is a net cost, and the surplus earned by the other party is smaller than that cost, then at some extent of unemployment the children (and other party) are better off if the marriage or coupleship dissolves. And if you wait too long, worse disaster. So rational economic actors, and also terrified people who want to feed their kids, will avoid marriage if their expectation of such an extent of unemployment is higher than their risk tolerance. The worse off a couple is, the higher such an expectation. In this case, we would expect to see less marriage among the poor than the rich even if they valued it highly and didn't want expensive weddings.
Brava. To your third point, childcare is frequently subsidized and often provided by family members, plus kids get old enough for school pretty quickly in the grand scheme of a parent's working lifetime, at which point the costs drop significantly. I'm not sure that stay home mom or dad balances at that end of the spectrum. (To be honest, I think it's a tradeoff for all but the wealthy to have a parent stay home that can't be rationalized simply by the working to pay for daycare argument,)
90 is great, but I think that maybe the simpler explanation is the one I was trying to get at in 83 -- plenty of low-income people cohabit with a boyfriend, or live with extended families, or live with their siblings and parents, or do other shared-household things that provide the economic benefits of living in multiperson households. That certainly seems to be true for the low-income people I know personally. Not being married doesn't mean not living with any other adults. And marriage, with with its burden of expectations, and long-term expectations of support, and cultural baggage -- is different.
And so if other cohabitation options are available marriage becomes increasingly idealized, and that idealized marriage increasingly becomes a pipe dream.*
*Or one that is tried out, but then can't be sustained given the pressure of the workplace, etc., ending in divorce, which makes all of the other problems worse.
And I believe the various FPL-based benefits (Medicaid, SNAP) look at household size, without reference to marital status.
To 90.4, that was a feature of the old AFDC which welfare reform got rid of. (Originally intended for widows, I'm told.)
Coming in late, my parents started their divorce with the shared-house and shared-grim-apartment setting, rotating every week. Once a place was found, my father set up house in his own place and my mother moved back in permanently to the place they had shared, and my brother and I switched every week (I was in high school at the time). I found switching less disruptive, in general, than having parents annoyed at each others' care of the house and so on. It deprived me of a few things, like access to my computer half of the time, but given my 12-16 hour school days (including commute), that wasn't as important.
Your school days sucked. I left the house at 8 and was home by 4 unless I went to the bar.
Yeah, they did. I left the house at 6am and got back at 6pm, with an actual school day from 8:30-4. Then I started driving myself and doing extracurriculars, so I left home at 6am and got back 8-9pm, and would be in the school building from 7 to 7 or so. While the school was great, there's no question that avoiding my home life was part of the point.
How did you find time to drink and smoke?
I used to park in the crosswalk at school because the cops knew my dad and wouldn't ticket the car.
90: Plus of course the impact of inacrceration/felony record. My state is one that's frozen childcare subsidy funds and I think that's going to be one of the worst choices made in balancing the budget. There's also a freeze on payments for any new kinship caregivers, so now essentially no one will be able to afford to care for a child in crisis rather than have that child go into foster care with strangers and the odds that child will have had decent educatioor childcare have gone down quite a bit. Also, we're apparently the only open foster home in our region right now, though there are still plenty of private agencies who place kids at a higher cost to the state and with a higher payout to foster families than state homes like ours. So this is obviously a good financial decision and not just one more clusterfuck that sticks it to poor people, right? I am livid.
Have you tried heavy drinking? I think I'm livid about lots of stuff, but I can't remember.
I'm not very good at emotional support/reassurance stuff.
I'm also not good at not pissing on the seat.
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Maybe this is the right place for me to complain most undiplomatically about a certain local volunteer teaching organization that recently tried to balance its budget by making its mostly poor students pay tuition, with the result that enrollment is now close to zero, the volunteers who were planning to teach are pissed off, and the budget is still not balanced. That was a stupid plan!
It's also a vivid contrast to the well-funded SWPL'y educational outreach program at the place where I work. As Alex said earlier in the thread, and bob has said thousands of times, money makes such a big difference.
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there's also a freeze on payments for any new kinship caregivers, so now essentially no one will be able to afford to care for a child in crisis rather than have that child go into foster care with strangers and the odds that child will have had decent educatioor childcare have gone down quite a bit.
This drives me insane.
"Why should we pay for them to care for their child/relative!?!??!?!!"
"Umm....bc otherwise they can't."
f'ng dumbasses.
The article describes these involved fathers as around for the fun things but not for the day-to-day grind, and thinking about it, I'm not sure that's distinctive of low SES fatherhood norms as it is American norms about fatherhood more generally. Plenty of high SES dads I know seem to get inordinate amounts of praise for doing things like playing with their kids on weekends, and there seems to be the expectation (e.g., in new parent classes) that the dads have to be dragged to do anything not-fun, like changing diapers. My parents were very traditional in their division of labor, which means my mom is continually impressed by shiv for doing things like doing the grocery shopping with the Calabat in tow. "Your father never did that!"
So I wonder how much what the article notes as characteristic of these young men isn't so much a different social norm, as it is the larger norm minus the expectation that the father is the breadwinner.
In the UK at least, working class, poor, or unemployed men are much more likely to do a substantial amount of the childcare, and more of the general household labour, too. It's one of those ironic things that newspaper columnists often write as if the middle-classes were those most likely to realize a more equal division of labour between the sexes, and a fairer less chauvinist world, when in fact, the opposite is the case.
a certain local volunteer teaching organization that recently tried to balance its budget by making its mostly poor students pay tuition
Ten to one there was a board member or funder in their ears, telling them that fee-for-service was the way to reduce their "dependency" on grants and contracts.
I have such anger toward the people who see fees as the magic bullet for nonprofit funding. Newsflash: If the market could support these services, a for-profit company would be providing them.
Seriously, the contempt with which so many people say "dependent" is a perfect illustration of how messed-up their understanding of the sector is. If you want to change the model, feel free to share your ideas. But don't set up the rules of the game and then scream that people who play by them are leeches.
105: Here, at least, it was only people caring for children who'd officially been abused or neglected who were eligible anyway, so it wasn't just that you could drop your kids off at Grandma's and she'd get a check. Instead now you get a call that your sister is going to jail and her boyfriend beat her up along with a few of her four kids and can the caseworker drop them off at your house after school today? Oh, and you'll have to but some bunk beds and arrange your home so it meets state specifications on who can sleep where and you'll have to miss five days of work in the next two weeks for court and doctors' appointments, but no, there's no funding available for that because surely any family is ready to handle that, right?
I think Moby might have the only solution, but 24/7 drunkenness is not considered acceptable for foster parents. I'm just so sad that the policymakers are so cruel.
I went looking for marriage rates by SES in Great Britain but didn't find it. ttaM, does caretaking by fathers seem like a change or not? (To the expectations: `we know Har\/ard fathers change diapers, because they write a NYT column about it every time'. )
92 doesn't work for me as an explanation because it seems to need cohabitation to be just as good but not as good as marriage. It looks to me as though cohabitation covers two different things: something like a temporary or delayed marriage, between people who would choose to live together if they weren't financially constrained -- and for this I think an explanation as strong as 90 is needed -- or something more like having roommates or moving back in with parents, which is just making do with less. LB's original question about the financial advantages of marriage might work out differently among the three cases, since loyalty and payoffs are so different.
I may go reread _Jo's Boys_ or some other novel of thrift and affection triumphant. (What keeps coming to mind is _Keep the Aspidistra Flying_, which I find scabrous.)
108 & 109 just make me sad.
100-103: I just drank steadily from 5:30 to 9:30, without relieving myself until I walked 3/4 of a mile home. I feel like I should get some kind of medal for that -- a medal that has no smell, yet it is made of urine.
Ten to one there was a board member or funder in their ears, telling them that fee-for-service was the way to reduce their "dependency" on grants and contracts.
Could be, but I'm actually betting on plain stupidity in this case. It's a pretty small organization, and they've done silly things before. Their heart is in the right place, but the brain might be a little off.
re: 110
Well, the change by working class and lower SES men dates back to the 80s. It's a legacy of the Thatcher era and the evisceration of steady well-paid skilled work for men in lots of communities. I don't think marriage rates will tell you much, since marriage isn't as big a deal here as in lots of other places. It's common for people to cohabit for years/decades without marriage.
this is OT but ajay if you are lurking in comments I emailed you about how you should come see me tomorrow.
thorn, that is just so messed up and it makes me really sad to hear it. don't they want family to step in and help the kids?
109.1 is really sad, which makes me feel bad that 109.2, which I read first, struck me as so funny.
115.2: They absolutely do! They just don't want to have to pay for it anymore. There isn't a single child who's been in our house from overnight respite to permanency who hasn't already had at least one kinship placement before entering foster care. They'll place kids with any in-state relative who can pass a background check, but now that there's no funding and no assigned caseworkers to provide any support, those are working even less well than they used to.
114: Even w/o legal marriage, sounds different from the OP article. Is also a perfectly recognizable masculine trope: callused hands, warm hearts, do what needs doing.
114: Marriage, schmarriage -- I think the only reason it's such an issue in the US is that the legal/insurance/benefits generally regime is such that it's a serious practical benefit to a committed couple, so for a couple to cohabit without marriage it usually (not always, but often) indicates strong reservations about emotional and practical commitment. For a couple to turn down the practical benefits, it's likely to mean they're poised to spring in opposite directions if things turn out that way.
Without the practical benefits, I don't think we'd have anything like the same social distinctions in terms of poverty and outcomes for children in married and unmarried couples, because married and unmarried wouldn't describe terribly different sets of couples.
No great advantage for DINKs. But DINKs aren't the least likely to get married in the US, if I read the OP right.
Yes, the combination of micromanaging *how* care is provided but not helping to meet those rules is particularly nasty. Probably one can get dinged for things that one's landlord or employer is legally but not practically required to provide, too.