A new five-part series, recently released by the Maine Center for Public Interest Reporting, examines two troubling trends: the exponential growth of families in poverty and the percentage of children born to unmarried women.
The center called this correlation “a crisis that goes unnamed” and concluded that too many single parents in this state are having children they can’t afford.
The series starts with some blockbuster headline statistics: “In 2013, 41 percent of all births in Maine were to unmarried women. In 1970, it was 7.1 percent. That’s a nearly 500 percent increase in just a few decades.”
In addition to this, the center worked with public policy researchers in New Hampshire to evaluate the cost of this trend. If the percentage of unmarried women in Maine having children stayed constant in Maine since 1970, it found, poverty today would be about a third less.
(It’s an interesting, if implausible, point. A lot has changed in the world since 1970 — see the Bangor Daily News of that period for details.)
The series goes on to connect the dots between kids raised in poverty and various deleterious effects — hunger, learning disabilities, emotional problems, abuse and neglect, among others. A wealth of research, much of it explored in the series, supports these connections.
Yet the key point of the series — that more women having babies out of wedlock is causing poverty to rise in Maine — has faced some pushback. Some advocates say it’s a simplistic explanation of a complicated issue.
“One of the concerns that our organization and a few others have about the series is that it focuses so much on individual choice rather than the structural/systemic issues that create poverty,” Claire Berkowitz, executive director of the Maine Children’s Alliance, said. “Single parents are not the cause of poverty. Poverty is about income and wages, and the series doesn’t seem to address that piece.”
Which isn’t to say the series makes no mention of systemic problems. In a profile of one single mother, Joanne R., the center’s reporter, Naomi Schalit writes, “Here’s the trap for Joanne R. and many other single mothers: They can only work or go to school to position themselves for better jobs when they have child care. But they don’t have enough money for child care so that they can go to work or back to school. Or else they don’t have a car that can get them to the job that can pay for the child care.”
On the whole, Maine is neither unusual or unique in the percentage of its births to unmarried mothers. The rate of births to unmarried parents nationally (40 percent) is almost exactly the same as the rate here (41 percent).
While the connection between single mothers and poverty is rarely addressed so directly in Maine, it’s omnipresent as a subtext. Maine Gov. Paul LePage alluded to it in his comments about out-of-state drug dealers impregnating white women in Maine. Other commentators have described the trend as the “ single mom catastrophe.”
Some, notably former president Ronald Reagan, have chastised “welfare queens” as dishonest women who use the social services system to their advantage. Local experts warned us several years ago about the pressure that the rise in single parenthood would exert on that system.
In the series, Tony Cipollone, head of the John T. Gorman Foundation, put it starkly.
“If you look at the data, it takes you five minutes to realize that single moms are a significant portion of what drives disadvantage in communities in the state of Maine,” he said.
(It takes fewer than five minutes to spot the other responsible party implied in that statement: the absentee dads who brought those children into being. The series calls them “childless fathers.”)
The series contains striking observations and anecdotes of the effect of poverty on children and single mothers.
One of the most troubling testimonies was from Althea Walker, a recently retired principal of Farwell Elementary School in Lewiston, who explained that students’ home lives are so chaotic that they simply can’t learn.
“It’s gotten to the level that students in kindergarten are coming in, there’s no guidance, they’re almost feral. They don’t know how to sit at a seat to eat, they don’t say please, they don’t say thank you,” she said.
Living in poverty causes many of those problems. And a large share of Maine’s poor families are headed by single mothers, the series points out, which is a heavy burden.
One expert, however, argues that there are some advantages to being a single mother.
“I would be cautious about implying that the rise in single-parent families is completely negative because it increases poverty rates,” said Andrew Schaefer, a research scientist at UNH’s Carsey Center. “Economic and social changes that took off in the 1970s allowed for many women to end marriages who otherwise couldn’t control their economic future, their fertility, or it was socially unacceptable to leave. For these women (and many of the women who conceive out of wedlock today), being single can have many benefits (including benefits for children) and can be empowering, even though they are far more likely to be in poverty.”
Joanne R. is an example of this. She says in the series that the father of her child became abusive toward her, beginning when she was nine weeks pregnant.
Despite what the statistics may say, it’s hard to imagine she’d have been better off if she’d married him.
