In Defense of Single-Parent Families

Nancy E Dowd, Nancy E. Dowd

• Publisher: NYU Press
• Year: 1999
• Print ISBN: 9780814719169
• eBook ISBN: 9780814744246
• Topic: Law
• Subtopic: Family Law
• Index: Law

Single-parent families succeed. Within these families children thrive, develop, and grow, just as they do in a variety of family structures. Tragically, they must do so in the face of powerful legal and social stigma that works to undermine them.
As Nancy E. Dowd argues in this bold and original book, the justifications for stigmatizing single-parent families are founded largely on myths, myths used to rationalize harshly punitive social policies. Children, in increasing numbers, bear the brunt of those policies. In this generation, more than two-thirds of all children will spend some time in a single-parent family before reaching age 18. The damage done in the name of justified stigma, therefore, harms a great many children. Dowd details the primary justifications for stigmatizing single-parent families, marshalling an impressive array of resources about single parents that portray a very different picture of these families. She describes them in all their forms, with particular attention to the differential treatment given never-married and divorced single parents, and to the impact of gender, race, and class. Emphasizing that all families face significant conflicts between work and family responsibilities, Dowd argues many two-parent families, in fact, function as single-parent caregiving households. The success or failure of families, she contends, has little to do with form. Many of the problems faced by single-parent families mirror problems faced by all families.
Illustrating the harmful impact of current laws concerning divorce, welfare, and employment, Dowd makes a powerful case for centering policy around the welfare and equality of all children. A thought-provoking examination of the stereotypes, realities and possibilities of single-parent families, In Defense of Single-Parent Families asks us to consider the true purpose or goal of a family.

PART I · MYTHS & REALITIES

CHAPTER 1
The Stories of Stigma: What We Say about Single-Parent Families

A remarkably consistent view of single-parent families dominates popular culture as well as public policy. “‘Single-parent family’ is a euphemism . . . for ‘problem family,’ for some kind of social pathology” (Kamerman and Kahn 1988).¹ Single-parent families are characterized as part of the “underclass”; broken and deviant, as compared to the nuclear, traditional, patriarchal family. Some equate the rise in the numbers of single-parent families with social decline and the death of the “real” family.

Recent Republican welfare reform legislation mirrors this image of single-parent families, especially never-married single parents. The Personal Responsibility Act proclaims its goals as “restor[ing] the American family, [and] reducing] illegitimacy” (House Report 1995). The act states that “marriage is the foundation of a successful society” and claims that “the negative consequences of an out-of-wedlock birth on the child, the mother, and the society are well documented” (House Report 1995). Included in the act’s data are bald statements that children of single-parent families are likely to have emotional or behavioral problems; are more likely themselves as teenagers to have children out of wedlock; are more likely to divorce; are more likely to have trouble at school and in peer adjustment; and are more likely to commit crime or to live in an area plagued by crime. The act also includes significant incentives for states to reduce out-of-wedlock births, dubbed the “illegitimacy bonus.”

Blaming single parents for significant societal ills is by no means confined to partisan politics. Some leading advocates of communitarianism, one of the most dynamic intellectual movements of recent years, similarly condemn single parenting as a sign of social decline, and advocate the revival and support of two-parent families as one of the core structures of “community” (Etzioni 1993). In order to support two-parent families, some communitarians encourage strengthening premarital counseling, discouraging divorce, dissuading single women from childbearing, providing generous maternity and paternity leave, and improving childcare. Ironically, they also advocate incentives to permit one parent to stay at home to raise children (Anderson and Davey 1995, 18).

Stigmatizing single parents is not strange in light of dominant legal and social definitions of family, and the exalted place in those definitions given to the nuclear, marital, two-parent family. We as a society, through law, support nuclear marital families in significant material and ideological ways. We provide resources including financial support, fringe benefits, tax breaks, and housing. We facilitate the use of reproductive technology or adoption for favored families. We define our vision of family, ideologically and practically, by our construction of marriage and divorce, and by limiting recognition of nonmarital families.

Law values the nuclear, marital, two-parent family premised on its perceived essential role in the socialization of citizens as well as its presumed inherent worth as a form of intimate association. “[W]e protect the family because it contributes so powerfully to the happiness of individuals . . . ‘the ability independently to define one’s identity that is central to any concept of liberty’ cannot truly be exercised in a vacuum; we all depend on the ‘emotional enrichment of close ties with others’ “(Bowers v. Hardwick 1986, quoting Roberts v. U.S. Jaycees 1984, 619).² “[T]he historic respect—indeed, sanctity would not be too strong a term—traditionally accorded to the relationships that develop with the unitary family . . . is typified, of course, by the marital family” (Bowers v. Hardwick 1986, n.3).

The veneration of the nuclear marital two-parent family as core social organization of society does not, however, reflect the reality of family structures. It is estimated that 70 percent of children will spend some time in a single-parent family before reaching age eighteen; for women entering adulthood, the probability that they will maintain a single-parent family for some period of time is 40 percent (Norton and Click 1986). Single-parent families now constitute 30 percent of all families with minor children and are the most rapidly growing family form in America (Ermisch 1990).

Divorced or separated single parents remain the largest group of single parents (nearly 60 percent), almost double the number of never-married single parents (just over 30 percent), while widowed single parents are a diminishing proportion of single-parent families (not quite 7 percent) (Bureau of the Census 1989; Norton and Click 1986). Most children experience living in a single-parent family as one of several family forms during their childhood; on average, most will spend one to six years in a single-parent family. Only a small minority, about 10 percent, will spend their entire childhood in a single-parent family (Duskin 1990).

The American picture mirrors international trends: one of three households in the world has a woman as the sole breadwinner (Snyder 1991). The proportion of single-parent families in postindustrial countries averages 10 to 15 percent of families with dependent children; the U.S. proportion of nearly 30 percent represents one of the highest percentages.

When family households are analyzed by race, single-parent households are the dominant family form for African Americans and a significant and growing alternative family form for Hispanics (33 percent) and whites (23 percent). Nearly two-thirds of single parents are white, but single-parent families are proportionately more prevalent among Blacks. Never-married single parents predominate among Blacks, while divorced single parents predominate among whites (Rawlings 1994).

Given their increasing numbers and their remarkable diversity, the vehemence of the stigma directed against single parents seems strange, in some respects. We exact a terrible price from many children and their parents because of the stigma attached to this form of family. Stigma is not limited to names and negative stereotypes in popular culture. We impose economic and psychic penalties as a matter of social policy and legal structure. In particular, we continue to consign large numbers of children to poverty who have the bad luck to be born into, or whose family becomes, what society deems the wrong kind of family.

Overwhelmingly, stigma is tied to the strongly negative images we have of single mothers. When we speak about single parents, we tend to mean an individual who is the sole or dominant caregiver and whose household is the place where their children live all or most of the time. By that definition of single parent, the ranks are disproportionately female, both from a historical and current perspective. The proportion of children living with their single mothers is 87 percent, compared with 13 percent who live with their single fathers (Rawlings 1994).³ Divorced mothers, unmarried teenage mothers, welfare mothers, women of color—all of these categories of single mothers generate negative connotations. Those negative images and stories infect the law just as they infect other social institutions, acting as justifications for punitive legal outcomes.

Divorced mothers are frequently criticized as inadequate, incomplete mothers, particularly if they do wage work in addition to parenting. They fail as mothers because they do not mother enough; by definition they are second-rate parents. Single mothers’ success at being economic providers may come at the price of losing custody of their children. Sharon Prost, for example, lost custody of her children to her former husband, Kenneth Greene, because of her career as a top Capitol Hill staffer. Prost, chief counsel for the Republicans on the Senate Judiciary Committee, was awarded six days of visitation per month and ordered to pay $23,000 per year in child support, while Greene, who also works full-time as a union administrator, was awarded custody of their two sons. Despite the limited visitation schedule granted in the custody order, Greene has permitted Prost to have the boys overnight twelve to fourteen times each month, and Prost continues to drive them to school daily, stays home with them when they are ill, does their laundry, attends soccer practices, and chaperones their school field trips.

The trial judge who determined custody found that Prost had failed to make her children her first priority. “Her career choice of demanding jobs that require her to work late nights and many weekends necessarily cuts into the time available for her family . . . her devotion to her job and/or her personal pursuits often takes precedence over her family” (Prost v. Greene 1995, 624–25). The court viewed Prost as “driven to succeed” and “absorbed by her work,” citing as evidence Prost’s return to work immediately after the birth of her second child.

The court’s conclusion that Greene was the more nurturing parent relied heavily on the testimony of the couple’s au pair, who testified that Prost rarely cooked dinner or ate dinner with her children. By contrast, the court made little of Greene’s insistence that the couple retain an au pair rather than care for his children himself when he was unemployed for two years in the early 1990s.

On appeal, the appellate court rejected arguments that the trial court’s conclusions were based on gender stereotypes. The court remanded the custody decision only because the trial court had failed to consider evidence of domestic violence by Greene against Prost.

Similar cases are common. For example, in New York, Renee B.’s mother lost custody of her eight-year-old daughter to her unemployed ex-husband on the basis that the father, despite his repeated refusal to pay child support, was better able to care for his daughter because he was at home while his ex-wife was employed in an office (Steinbach 1995). In South Carolina, Ruth Parris lost custody of her son because a judge determined she was “not particularly family-oriented” (Parris v. Parris 1995). Parris, described by the trial court as an “aggressive, competitive” real estate agent, took a year off from work after her son’s birth, was closely involved in his daily care, religious and secular education, music lessons, and other activities. Nevertheless, the judge gave great weight to the father’s domesticity, evidenced by his cooking of weekend meals, attending his son’s swim meets, and taking his son to doctor visits.

If there is an available stepmother who does not do wage work, that may further threaten the ability of a single working mother to retain custody. A two-parent marital family is viewed as a complete family; a single-parent family as presumptively inferior. A single mother may be required to replicate the time available to a mother working in the home, even if that undercuts the very wage work that she is required to do in order to carry her responsibility of economic support. So, for instance, Stephanie Orr was warned by a mediator that if she failed to rearrange her work schedule so as to be home each day by 3:30 P.M., she would risk losing custody of her eight-year-old daughter to her ex-husband, whose second wife was at home and could care for the girl after school (Creno 1995).

The stigma directed at single mothers increases dramatically when the mother has never married and even worse, if she is a teenager. Teenagers seem to epitomize all of the worst negatives of single parenting. They are viewed as socially, economically, and developmentally “at risk.” Their perceived poor judgment and, for some, immorality in becoming pregnant justifies the greatest stigma as a necessary deterrence to others. Most teenage single mothers struggle against nearly insurmountable barriers deliberately placed in their path.

Overcoming those barriers may be met with alarm rather than congratulation. In the case of Jennifer Ireland, her efforts to obtain a college education nearly resulted in losing custody of her daughter. Ireland, who had her child when she was seventeen, was ordered to turn over custody of her three-year-old daughter to the child’s father after she placed the toddler in day-care while she attended classes at the University of Michigan (Dateline 1994). Ireland had filed for child support from the father, Steven Smith, who countersued for custody, despite his lack of significant involvement in the child’s life until the support action was brought.

Macomb County Circuit Judge Raymond R. Cashen awarded custody to the child’s father because the father intended to have his mother, a homemaker, care for the child. The judge reasoned that the paternal grandmother would be the best caretaker of the child because of her maturity and availability, since she was not engaged in wage work. The young mother was characterized as uncaring and uninvolved, frequently pawning off her daughter on anyone willing to look after her. In November 1995, the decision was reversed and sent back to be retried by a different judge, with an order that daycare arrangements could not be taken into consideration in determining custody (“Mother Wins Custody” 1995).

The heightened stigma reserved for unmarried mothers is also evident in adoption cases (Dowd 1994). The adoption structure is designed to facilitate the transfer of children from stigmatized single mothers to, preferably, two-parent married couples. Recent high-profile adoption cases, such as the “Baby Jessica” and “Baby Richard” cases, have not been litigated on the basis of the rights of single mothers, but rather as a contest between biological and adoptive couples (DeBoer v. Schmidt 1993; In re Kirchner 1995). The unwed mothers legitimated themselves, as well as their child, by marrying the biological fathers of their children, who then challenged the adoptions on the basis of the fathers’ rights. Ironically, the recognition of the fathers’ rights to block the adoption is consistent with the devaluation of the judgments of the mothers, both with respect to the original surrender for adoption and subsequent rethinking of that decision.

One of the most public instances of stigma directed at unmarried single mothers was the furor over the decision to parent alone by the fictional television character Murphy Brown. Despite the relatively unusual circumstances of this single parent, that is, that she had an income sufficiently high that she could provide not only adequate but generous economic support for her child, the controversy over her decision to single parent reflects the stigma directed at real single parents of considerably less means and power. Then Vice President Dan Quayle strongly attacked the story line as an affront to “family values,” with a clear understanding that “family” excluded those who do not parent in heterosexual pairs (Rosenthal 1992). Quayle’s subsequent praise for divorced single parents served only to underscore the distinctive condemnation of unmarried single parents.⁴ He continued to argue that the deliberate choice of parenting alone was irresponsible and morally reprehensible, as opposed to the presumed involuntary single parenting of divorced mothers. Furthermore, the prospect that economically independent single parents might view single parenting as a viable choice as a consequence of the very kind of work (high wages, full-time, demanding hours) that formal sexual equality guaranteed provoked strong moral condemnation.

The worst images of single mothers, however, are not those attached to atypical, privileged white women, but rather to women of color. These are women that we rarely name. The high-profile legal stories, which name and identify single mothers, concern more privileged, divorced (usually white) single mothers who have the resources to challenge unarticulated stereotypes. The powerfully negative images associated with Black single mothers and Black welfare mothers rarely identify individuals, but instead stigmatize the entire class of Black mothers. The courts are far more rarely used to vindicate the rights of these mothers by questioning underlying assumptions about their competency as parents.

“[I]deologues have continued to fashion from whole cloth the specter of the mythical Black welfare mother, complete with a prodigious reproductive capacity and a galling laziness, accompanied by the uncaring and equally lazy Black man in this life who will not work, will not marry her and will not support his family” (Bray 1992). The dominant culture’s view of unwed Black single mothers continues to echo the 1965 Moynihan Report:

Ours is a society which presumes male leadership in private and public affairs. The arrangements of society facilitate such leadership and reward it. A subculture, such as that of the Negro American, in which this is not the pattern, is placed at a distinct disadvantage. Fatherless families are the root of everything from poverty, violence, drug addiction, crime and declining standards in education and civility to teen pregnancy, sexually transmitted disease, narcissism and urban unrest. (Moynihan 1994)

According to this view, the predominance of single-parent families among African Americans is cultural in origin. The cultural explanation means that an additional layer of stigma is laid upon Black single mothers, the stigma of racial self-destruction.

The blame placed on single Black mothers for the violence of young Black men during the 1992 Los Angeles uprising reflects this strongly negative view of Black mothers (Buckley 1992a, 1992b; Rosenthal 1992). The target of Dan Quayle’s speech that included a single reference to Murphy Brown was Black single mothers. “I believe the lawless social anarchy which we saw [in L.A.] is directly related to the breakdown of family structure, personal responsibility and social order in too many areas of our society. . . . Children need love and discipline. They need mothers and fathers. . . . Nature abhors a vacuum. When there are no mature, responsible men around to teach boys how to be good men, gangs serve in their place” (Rosenthal 1992). The most recent welfare reform debate as well is filled with negative images that presume the color of the typical welfare recipient is black, despite the fact that white, divorced women are the most numerous welfare recipients.

The scorn directed at single mothers has not insulated single fathers. Their failings simply are viewed remarkably differently from those of mothers. Although single fathers are praised, even lionized for parenting in a manner often taken for granted in the case of mothers, we nevertheless have more than our share of negative images of single fathers as well. We stigmatize single fathers as irresponsible reproducers and deadbeat dads, or render them invisible fathers.

The stereotype of men as irresponsible reproducers is particularly strong in recent high-profile adoption cases. When men assert parental rights in those cases, they rely on biology alone, not on caretaking, actual or potential, to assert their legal position. They also, generally, have succeeded only when they present themselves as willing not only to parent, but also to marry. Without the role of husband, fathers are seen as incapable caregivers, or, more strongly, as parents who routinely abandon their children.

Typical of this paradigm is the “Baby Emily” case, in which the Florida Supreme Court refused to reverse an adoptive placement in favor of a single father (In re Adoption of Baby E.A.W. 1995). In that case, the single birthmother supported the adoptive parents against the efforts by the biological father to block the adoption. The Court adopted a definition of fathering that required, in addition to genetic connection and economic support, emotional support of the mother during her pregnancy. In the absence of such parenting, the father was deemed to have abandoned the child, and as a consequence, to have forfeited his right to object to the adoption. While the Court certainly had adequate reasons to deny the father the right to block the adoption based on his emotionally abusive treatment of the mother, one can speculate whether the choice between an unmarried father and a two-parent married couple, supported by the wishes of the birthmother, also weighed in the court’s decision.

Far more than women, men are viewed as parents who see their children as their biological property, and who are capable of the most horrifying abuse. In a tragic New Jersey case, an unmarried father, Alan Gubernat, began to establish a relationship with his ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Part I · Myths & Realities
• Part II · Law & Single Parents
• Part III · Law Reform
• Epilogue
• Notes
• References
• Index