TBR: Promises I Can Keep
Today’s book is Promises I Can Keep: Why Poor Women Put Motherhood Before Marriage by Kathryn Edin and Maria Kefalas. Over one-third of children in the US are born to unmarried mothers, a figure that has been steadily increasing for decades. This trend worries a lot of people, both because children born to single parents are disproportionately likely to be poor, and because there’s a growing body of evidence that suggests that such children do worse on a range of measures than their peers, even after you control for income. But while this trend is very well documented, little is known about why.
Questions about why are generally very hard for researchers to answer; it’s not possible to get at them with administrative data or big national surveys. Edin and Kefalas are sociologists and ethnographers and so to try to answer the title question, they spent 3 years living and working in low-income neighborhoods of Philadelphia and Camden, talking to 162 low-income single mothers about their lives.
Edin and Kefalas’ main findings are:
- Motherhood was highly valued by the low-income women they talked with. It was their main source of identity, their main way of leaving a mark in the world, of creating hope for the future. The idea of not becoming parents — or even of delaying parenting until their 30s, as is common for middle-class women — was horrifying to the women in the study. One reason, although not the only one, is that many of the other opportunities that life offers to middle-class women are out of reach for these poor women.
- The women in the study valued marriage, and hoped to be married some day. But they set very high standards for marriage — wanting both an emotional commitment and for themselves and their partners to have achieved some level of economic success — which they were unlikely to reach anytime soon. If they held off on having kids until they had partners they saw as marriage material, they might never have kids. This was an unacceptable possibility for them. Having kids with men they weren’t willing to marry wasn’t their first choice, but it was a lot better than not having kids.
- Early parenting has very little economic opportunity cost for these low-income women. The earnings path for such women is so flat that having kids doesn’t hold them back very much. And many of the women told Edin and Kefalas that they were on the fast track into trouble until they got pregnant and turned themselves around because they wanted to be good mothers.
- Being a good parent didn’t seem like an unachievable task. Even before having kids of their own, they had spent a lot of time taking care of children and mastering the physical skills. They defined being a good mother as "being there" for the kids, and doing your best, not as providing a certain level of material goods.
- Some of the moral hierarchies advocated by the women in the study were directly contractory to those that dominate middle-class American society. The one that surprised me the most is that they consistently believed that having a child out of wedlock was greatly preferable to marrying and then getting divorced. They also felt rising to the occasion and dealing with whatever hardship life dealt you was a significant virtue; thus, having an abortion or giving up a child for adoption were both seen as signs of weakness, even selfishness.
This brief summary doesn’t realy do justice to the book, however. Poor women are often the objects of others’ moral scrutiny. Even generally sympathetic books like Random Family and American Dream portray their subjects as sort of buffeted by the winds of life, rather than as rational actors and the protagonists of their own stories. Edin and Kefalas assume that these poor women’s choices make sense by their own values and priorities, given the constraints that they face, and let the voices of the women carry their story. It’s worth reading.
March 23rd, 2005 at 9:20 am
Wouldn’t it be nice if we could all assume that most choices made by parents make sense by their own values and priorities, given the constraints they each face? If folks stopped to think about that for one second before judging another parents’ choice of preschool, feeding method, housing, what have you, being a parent would probably be a bit less stressful.
Thanks for the review, I’m looking forward to reading the book.
March 23rd, 2005 at 10:06 am
Yeah, thanks. I used to hear something similar from my ex about girls he knew in highschool, girls who were competing to see who could get pregnant first. I can see now why the Dems aren’t winning these women in droves; we’re not talking to them. Rhetoric of help won’t do it. Abortion-rights talk certainly won’t do it. I won’t get to read the book anytime soon — what are their aspirations for their children? Are they like my best friend from childhood, who’s a single mom of two (different dads), in/out of the system, and has vague ideas of Harvard glory for her son? Or are they more focused on highschool graduation and family life?
You know, the most successful ads I’ve seen aimed at poor single moms are the Hamilton Tech kinds of ads. Pretty, twentysomething woman in a med-tech uniform, obviously not rich, working with a child; next you see her with her own pretty children. She talks about how she’s a single mother, she knew she’d only have one chance for college, and she decided to go for this career that lets her take good care of her kids. She looks kind of strained, but like she’s got grit.
Dems have to pick up on this kind of message.
March 23rd, 2005 at 3:10 pm
Amy, they say that most of the women hope that their child will be the one to stay in school, get a good job, get married, then have kids, but they don’t really expect it.
When their children drop out of school or have kids young, they don’t see it as a sign that they’ve failed as parents, the way many middle- and upper-class parents would. Rather, they continue to see “being there” for their kids as the measure of their mothering.
March 23rd, 2005 at 9:10 pm
Thanks, Elizabeth. That makes sense to me and matches what I’ve seen.
Tough one though for the campaign rhetoric. You can see an appeal to fairness — you know, you do everything you’re supposed to do, the least they could do is quit changing your shifts on you & leaving you wondering who’s going to watch Mikey next week, and we’re the party that will make them cut it out & be more fair. But women like that won’t buy it. As far as they’re concerned, the world’s permanently unfair, and no part of it will ever change. They get their stripes by surviving despite that. And if they trust you once and you let them down, they’ll never bother with you again.
To be honest, I don’t know any politician who can deliver what they’re after. Not in one term. I thought of Giuliani — I remember watching the cops raiding houses up in Washington Heights back then — but he really came in like a wrecking ball, and those women don’t appreciate that so much. Destabilizes things and makes them work harder. Seems to me you’d need a network of very local politicians taking care of small, concrete things that are important to them, getting to know them personally, and earning their trust, after which those local pols could ask them to do something for him, and vote a Dem slate. Tell them it’s about the money, that’s fine. Tell them the money faucets open from DC and the state capitals, and not to expect any wins this time but just to trust him about it, and they’ll do it. So long as he makes it reasonably easy. Absentee balloting or polls at/near work or childcare. It’s the closest thing to a ward boss I can imagine, and I’m guessing that’s what the Dems need all over.
March 27th, 2005 at 5:23 pm
I would think that on a national level, Dems could work on implementing programs that make it easier for such women to finish school and then work while caring for their kids. And for the younger women, increasing the opportunities they can dream about.
But so many people bristle at the idea of helping poor single mothers–they see it as rewarding them for having kids that they shouldn’t have had…the Welfare Queen myth. I think a lot of it boils down to a semi-racist distrust of Hispanic or black women, a feeling that they really are lazy and shiftless and careless about having kids, therefore, public programs only make it worse.
My friend works in a Hispanic neighborhood, in a program aimed at helping girls get out of the barrio. Many of the girls she helps end up dropping out and getting pregnant; but a few make it through and go on to college and better things.
June 21st, 2005 at 7:17 pm
“Amy, they say that most of the women hope that their child will be the one to stay in school, get a good job, get married, then have kids, but they don’t really expect it.”
They don’t really expect it – do they even actually want it?
Edin and Kefalas’ main findings include “The idea of not becoming parents — or even of delaying parenting until their 30s, as is common for middle-class women — was horrifying to the women in the study.” Now if they’re so horrified by the very idea, how do they treat their daughters who try to act on that idea? Is being a virgin teen daughter of one of these mothers like being a gay son of a homophobic father?
July 4th, 2005 at 11:18 am
“Early parenting has very little economic opportunity cost for these low-income women.”
Because the rest of us are footing the bill for them: WIC, AFDC, etc. If having a kid out of wedlock meant supporting it yourself, I think there’d be a sharp drop in single motherdom.
Which would be A Good Thing, IMHO. I agree with another childfree woman on Usenet who stated flatly, “That our governments (state and federal) continues to fund this way of life is a slap in the face of anyone who is actually trying to work and make a living.”
July 5th, 2005 at 11:27 am
Oh, and to VH:
“Wouldn’t it be nice if we could all assume that most choices made by parents make sense by their own values and priorities, given the constraints they each face?”
The big unspoken assumption in that question is that all parents’ “values and priorities” are appropriate. Put bluntly, some value their next crack rock over their offspring.
“If folks stopped to think about that for one second before judging another parents’ choice of preschool, feeding method, housing, what have you, being a parent would probably be a bit less stressful.”
Cry me a river. Some parents NEED to be judged more harshly such as the morons in Camden, NJ who let their kids suffocate to death in a car trunk. Tell me, did they get indicted yet, or did they get the usual slap on the wrist because they’ve “suffered enough”?
December 27th, 2007 at 5:42 pm
Thanks for the review. I just got the book out of the library and am looking forward to reading it. I work in the field of teen pregnancy prevention but have never been content with placing my middle class professional female values onto the issue. I am hoping that this book will help me with my struggle.