Kicking. Squealing.
Madeleine Schwartz (Harvard ’12) writes at The New Inquiry discussing the MTV series Teen Mom (h/t Reihan Salam):
Teen motherhood, single motherhood, unmarried cohabitation—these are not plagues or social ills that pose a threat to the otherwise normal structures of everyday life. They are our new social reality.
What the show doesn’t get to is that this is a good thing.
There is nothing wrong with teenage or single motherhood. The things children need: economic livelihood, emotional support and an education, are not dependent on a nuclear family structure. Poverty is poverty whether it’s endured by two people or four. A couple cannot raise a child better than one can. Once we get rid of the idea that marriage is the privileged form of cohabitation and that women cannot raise children without the help of a man—ideas that the Left has been working to eradicate for decades—there is no reason that a teen should not be financially and emotionally assisted for her choice to have a family. The potential diffusion of the family (as the New York Times recently reported, it doesn’t look like the trends will stop anytime soon) is one of the most exciting things to happen to the American social pattern since sexual liberation. It means the end of what were just decades ago universal truths: every household must be headed by a breadwinning man; only when married will a woman have social value.
Anything is possible, right? Yes, if taxpayers devoted enough money to a giant pool that covered all children, some of the problems associated with child care gaps would disappear. But that’s a different argument than saying nuclear families and fathers aren’t important. All else being equal, they are.
Schwartz articulates two different classifications of children. Are they by-products of life or are they planned events? If they are merely by-products of sexual activity – and if anything that happens to a person in the course of their life should be shared by everyone else out of some sense of communal obligation, then everyone pitches in to pay for the care of children. this view has been gaining traction for decades. How convenient that the people making this argument are women who’d like to not be faced with duty and obligation. Women like Schwartz cite the patriarchy that wants to hold women down, but they never admit that just maybe they are embracing this rationalization because it is most beneficial to them.
The “children are not by-products” school of thought holds that children are best raised and provided for at the most localized level. The mother and father and whoever can be mustered up to help out. The more the merrier and the closer in genetic or emotional investment the better. If children are considered common property then they stand the chance of falling victim to the Tragedy of the Commons. If the people who created the kid aren’t responsible for financial support then what else will they rationalize away?
Salam points out that though arguments like this fetishize the Nordic model of a society of high non-marital childbirth rates and social support, couples typically cohabit. For example, 40.6% of U.S. births and 54.7% of Swedish births occur to unmarried women, 29.5% of U.S. households and 18.7% of Swedish households with children have only one parent.
Rod Dreher draws attention to a piece at The Atlantic by Karen Kornbluh who shows that more U.S. children live in single-parent households and that they are also among the poorest in the world. The takeaway seems to be: “look we somehow have this problem of single parent households and poor kids, what else is there to do besides throw government money at the problem?” What Dreher writes about Kornbluh could be applied to Schwartz’s piece above:
What’s so interesting, and frustrating, about this piece is that it doesn’t seem to have occurred to this writer that single parenthood is something to be avoided. It’s just one of those choices that people make, and public policy should accommodate it.
…
Want to tweak public policy to give single parents a break? Fine. But don’t tell yourselves that this is going to make a significant difference in the future of kids born into these circumstances, or left there because of divorce. There really are deleterious consequences to the welfare of children — including the adults these kids will grow up to be — from our sexually permissive culture. The cost of out-of-wedlock childbearing cannot be significantly ameliorated with public policy adjustments. Should it be?
Winter is coming.
“…that women cannot raise children without the help of a man…there is no reason that a teen should not be financially and emotionally assisted for her choice to have a family.”
So they don’t need “a man”, but they can’t do it alone?
Is that what 4 years at Harvard buys these days?
“ideas that the Left has been working to eradicate for decades”
“The potential diffusion of the family (as the New York Times recently reported, it doesn’t look like the trends will stop anytime soon) is one of the most exciting things to happen to the American social pattern since sexual liberation.”
Let’s not forget these people hate the family. Everything from the left is based in hate.
“Is that what 4 years at Harvard buys these days?”
These people run our country. Scare huh.
Another blogger (Vox?) recently showed how women can say or write two self-contradictory statements within one short paragraph. The example he used is a woman being quoted in real life saying “I’m very inept at flirting” and two or three sentences later she says “I’m a really good flirt.” He then parsed the meaning of her real message, which was not contradictory at all — it was metatextual signaling, to other women, who pick up on the intended message. By saying that she sucks at flirting, she was signaling to other women that she is not the type who steals another girl’s man. And by saying she is a good flirt, she was adding that she can handle and manipulate men when situation calls for it.
Thus, women don’t mean things literally to the degree that men do. As Heartiste has been saying for a long time, with women you have to read between the lines.
I don’t have the time to parse everything Madeleine Schwartz is saying for its hidden meaning, but she is telling women, literally, that it is good to self-handicap by volunteering to be a single mother (or do a post of other sexually liberal things).
Will Madeleine Schwartz, Harvard c/o 2012, get herself knocked up with no man of acceptable status and commitment-likelihood in the picture? Highly unlkely.
The question is, is the writer giving bad-faith false counsel to her female readers, sort of like middle-aged women advising the younger ones to cut their hair short? Or is she in fact operating in good faith, communicating something that is not quite the same as her literal message?
Really, what the heck is taking this world so long to deleverage. I yearn for the end to electricity and running water. Welcome dark ages.
I think this is the most stark admission from a woman of what Heartiste and others have been saying: for young single women, the government is the preferred provider. Our Maddy here has quite literally said that the government should be the proxy for fatherhood, at least financially.
I agree; the normalization of single mothers is worrying. Shame and lack of social standing was the only way, short of cutting WIC, to minimize the number of children born into broken homes. As much as I know it’s unsustainable to keep paying single women to have children, I would feel somewhat bad seeing them starving on the streets.
@Spoos, “starving in the streets”?
How have single mothers in all times and all cultures dealt with their predicament? They implored the biological father, implored their family of origin; they found an old sugar daddy, they whored themselves out, they found employment, or they left their children to an orphanage. Unwed moms now simply marry BigGov.
Just as it is the function of the police to enforce the laws, the function of schools to educate children, and the function of hospitals to heal the sick, it is the function of marriage to prevent the problems that result from the production of children. Why else would it have existed for thousands of years? The traditional obligations men and women took on were designed to prevent these problems. But we destroyed all the obligations that prevented these problems. Now we are drowning in the problems that result from the production of children and everyone is scratching their head, asking how did this happen?
“A couple cannot raise a child better than one can.”
Where did they teach you to talk like that, some Panama City sailor-wanna-hump-hump bar?
@JS:
Exactly. Ever since women started promoting the lie that marriage is “for love” our society has lost sight of the true reasons for marriage. Marriage is a tool to discourage polygamy & increase male commitment to society, and a tool to ensure that the next generation of society is born and grows up in a relatively stable, socially-accepted context. Women accept feminism, delude themselves into the lie that marriage is all about “love,” and within a few generations we have ever-increasing rates of illegitimacy, divorce, single motherhood, gays demanding that their sexual unions be favored by society, and ten years after that we’ll have legalized polygamy bringing us back to the good ‘ole days of tribalism.
A young, single Harvard educated Jewess. There’s someone whose opinion I could live without.
All these lies about the “patriarchy holding women down.” Give it ladies, your behavior, on the whole, indicates that you should be held down.
Lara, CH commenter gig once memorably said this, paraphrasing here from memory:
If I know this about any woman – is she over or under 40, is she married, is she Jewish – then I can tell you with 99% accuracy what her opinion is on every subject under the sun.
“two parent households” are another archaic institution of the white patriarchy
white men know they are losing their position of privilege with women’s rights and the increase of minorities living in the US and they feel it is a threat. People complain all the time that there are scholarships only for blacks but take into consideration that 99% of the scholarships in all the US are given to Caucasians.
Actually looks like 65%-70% of all grants go to whites, which fits the population, and less than 50% of Pell grants for example go to whites.
Of course, the relevant question would be whether the scholarships are selected on the basis of race, and what are the graduation rates.
If you are already dividing the population by race and allocating government funding based on race, you may want to focus on the failure of urban public schools to educate enough to support the desired level of college attendance.
The question is, is the writer giving bad-faith false counsel to her female readers, sort of like middle-aged women advising the younger ones to cut their hair short?
lol! You can be a funny guy sometimes, PA. But you may have a point. What if she is so miserable that she merely wants company?
Oh and good use of the world, ‘metatextual’. LMAO!.
“Teen motherhood, single motherhood, unmarried cohabitation—these are not plagues or social ills that pose a threat to the otherwise normal structures of everyday life. ”
Usually when you say something like this, that goes against centuries of knowledge about the world, you would cite statistics or studies or figures or SOMETHING. Her only source is a TV show. And she doesn’t even seem to realize that it IS a TV show, with producers that picked these different teen moms for variety. They’re not a random sample of actual teen moms throughout the country.
I have nothing to add to the other excellent comments (Lara summed it up perfectly) except that I was pretty impressed with just how flawlessly terrible the article is. It’s literally just naked cheering for the collapse of civilization (“the most exciting thing since sexual liberation!”), with no irony or satire intended.
Here in Chicago there are neighborhoods where 90+% of the locals are from single parent families. Maddy should go live there for a few months, she might learn a few things they don’t teach at Harvard.
Yeah, I’m sure that Madeleine is from a strong two-parent household. Single parenthood is fetishized from afar but is still NIMBYism to these people.
Meritocratic elite, lol
A high school classmate of mine once posted a link on Facebook to some study showing that lesbian “parents” have the lowest rate of child abuse. She made some snarky and triumphalistic comment about that. I keep FB free of politics but in that case couldn’t resist. I commented “depriving the child of having a father is a form of abuse.”
By the way, the presence of a biological rather is the best assurance of the child being protected from abuse. Single mothers’ boyfriends/stepdads present high risks of child abuse.
A child is best off with two parents. The father keeps a check on the mothers’s propensity for drama and emotional abuse, and the mother checks the father’s tendency to emotional distance and nonchalance about providing physical comforts.
People who cheer on single mothers don’t have a problem with family, friends and big government taking the role of the second parent, hell most of the complaints i’ve heard on single mothers just come down to money and care-taking.
The absence of the father (as anything more can a wallet) doesn’t even come into the conversation.
On the other hand, there is a conservative case (with substantial caveats) that can me made for teen motherhood:
http://www.beliefnet.com/News/2002/10/Lets-Have-More-Teen-Pregnancy.aspx
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This is so predictable. And I love that the she writes “ideas that the left wants to eradicate”. If that isn’t thought police or censorship, what is it? We are all going the the re-education camp.
That children grow up better with the (preferably biological) father around is a well studied fact. Of course this might change with the caliber of biological father most women are likely to choose if they don’t need them to support their sproglings anymore.
NZT said
Here in Chicago there are neighborhoods where 90+% of the locals are from single parent families. Maddy should go live there for a few months, she might learn a few things they don’t teach at Harvard.
Women have no problem promoting sluthood, but don’t want to live in a place that is a place that is a consequence of sluthood
How much of my life should I work to pay for your kids?
How much? My answer? Only as much as I care to offer. They don’t like my answer. They want to use the power of the state to change it.
Interesting to note her twitter feed (God, I should stop this distraction exercise). The very measure of a pretentious grad-school prig. Apparently she’s now at Oxbridge and couldn’t wait to sneer at the proles after all of a month (as any committed egalitarian rad-fem would).
My favorite tweet:
“Composer Hans Werner Henze died last week. I saw his 111-character socialist opera, “We Come to the River,” in September and was blown away.”
There must be another circle of Hell for this degree of affectation. Perhaps the unintentional humor will save her….
https://twitter.com/mmschwartz
Reading her article, my brain kept saying that it HAD to be a parody! WOW! Is no one taught critical thinking anymore?