About stigma and shame: (1) It may actually be kinder to say, for example, "You're a single mom, we respect you for doing your best, but don't expect miracles, because what you are doing is astonishingly difficult." That way, if it doesn't work out as she had hoped, she doesn't beat herself up quite so much. "Anyone can do it" is not only a lie, it's a cruel lie that puts burdens on people.
(2) I can't shake the feeling that complaints about stigma and shame are not really made in good faith. Plenty of people have no problem shaming me for having too many children. Plenty of people have no problem shaming those who are lazy. I'm not sure they actually do care about stigma and shame as such--what's really going on is that they want to support the idea that the sexual revolution was a good idea. They aren't against stigma and shame in general--they are against stigma and shame *for things they have already decided are acceptable*.
Also, not in response to your questions, but still, and at risk of saying something obvious: A big reason why you can't just unbundle a father's tasks and distribute them to government or market providers is that when they are all done by one person, a person who keeps showing up and feels he has a duty to do so (rather than doing it for remuneration), is that it then becomes a relationship. Children need a relationship to a father--the playing catch, driving you to your activities, etc. etc. are little bits and pieces that go into the relationship, but the important thing is the relationship that they constitute. Also, I'm quite sure it matters that this person is indeed your biological father--but the prior point stands on its own.
Finally, I think the retrospective/prospective things is a very good point. And we do have to care about what happens in the future. No one thinks it bad to tell children to work hard in school, on the grounds that it will shame those who didn't. We just have to tell people--gently and kindly--that it's foolish to have sex with someone if you don't to spend your life with him or her, looking after kids and dealing with the day-to-day. (It's like one of those rules of gun safety: Never ever ever point your gun at something unless you're ok with shooting that thing.)
"'You're a single mom, we respect you for doing your best, but don't expect miracles, because what you are doing is astonishingly difficult.' That way, if it doesn't work out as she had hoped, she doesn't beat herself up quite so much. 'Anyone can do it' is not only a lie, it's a cruel lie that puts burdens on people."
I think it frames hardships as much more the mother's fault, if you argue it's always possible to transcend the absence of a father. If there's a real wound in the family, there will always be points of pain, even when she does a good job. If you deny the wound. who are you casting as at fault when it stings?
The relationship point is so key. When I was a new mom, I clearly realized that no amount of community support makes up for not having someone there in the middle of the night when baby needs something other than breastfeeding, or first thing in the morning when I need to sleep in and the kids still want breakfast.
I already knew marriage and two parents are important, and I made my decisions accordingly. But it just became so much more real in the trenches.
Yes. Any replacement for my kids' father - whether a series of nannies, or friends, or grandparents - would have to be there almost 24/7 for spontaneous tag-teaming. Market solutions for that are incredibly expensive, and not many friends or grandparents want to sign up for that either.
This, a million times: “A big reason why you can't just unbundle a father's tasks and distribute them to government or market providers is that when they are all done by one person, a person who keeps showing up and feels he has a duty to do so (rather than doing it for remuneration), is that it then becomes a relationship.”
Fathers are to be duty-bound shepherds, giving their lives for the sake of their weak, vulnerable children. They are not to be like middle managers, shuffling resources from one spot to another. Managers can and do walk away; fathers should sacrifice and stay.
Thanks for this post and the thought provoking questions at the end.
I teach vocations to high school aged students and, when we start the marriage unit, I usually have my students think of and reflect on their experiences of marriage in their lives (most focus on their parents, but depending on the family situation, I've seen other students talk about grandparents, aunts/uncles, cousins, siblings, parents of friends, etc.). I have them do this to recognize just how different marriages can be based on their own experiences and, instead of stigmitizing what has happened to them in their lives so far, focus on both the positives and the reality that there is not a "perfect" marriage or family. I teach the reality of the Church's teachings on marriage and also try to focus on providing students with opportunities to learn about dating for discernment and the reality that both informal and formal preparation for marriage are necessary. Lastly, one thing I am always sure to be repetitive about is that a marriage is between two people and that they will constantly be learning how to love another person and themselves throughout the entirety of their lives.
For the second question, I think most of my expectations for my wife and I's marriage were buttressed by observing what did and didn't (and indeed, does and doesn't) work for my parents while also learning that they are doing their best each day to love one another. My wife and I also had many serious conversations about marriage (finances, children, etc.) before doing our formal marriage prep with the Catholic Church and I think that helped us go into pre-Cana with more open/realistic eyes. Last but not least, prayer for my wife and son helps fill in the cracks of knowing that I can't control everything and that it's ultimately His will that must be done, not mine.
Whilst I'm not religious, I've seen friends and family go through the Catholic marriage prep and think it's great, and took inspiration from that in pre-marriage conversations with my partner.
I admit to being stunned regarding what people who were about to get married *hadn't* discussed (kids, home ownership, etc).
To answer your second question, "How did your expectations about marriage and being marriageable shape how you approached dating and discernment?", I was raised by a single mom and honestly, I had a great childhood. I had good friendships, a mom who took me to fun places (all free, as I later found out) on Saturdays and we had community members (literal neighbors, and also school peers' parents) help out with carpooling, etc.
My mom one time told me something to the effect of, "Consider yourself an adult when you start having sex. You will have full responsibility of the outcome, whatever that looks like". It was, essentially, a warning to be cautious about having sex before marriage, but also the very real consequences (that we both lived with) of having a child with someone who was unable to be a spouse and father. It still is to me the most logical reason for abstinence before marriage: you can deal with hardships and surprises much easier when you're a team, it's harder if you're by yourself. If you've made 'an adult choice', you will potentially have to live with 'adult consequences'. I just don't see a lot of people (male or female) who are ready for these responsibilities at young ages, or before a commitment is in place and confirmed by marriage.
I'm not trying to shame anyone by stating it so bluntly, but I do feel like I was much better off seeing what it looked like and course-correcting as opposed to making similar mistakes and learning from them with unnecessary hardships.
Just a hypothesis; father's bring bravery and apathy to situations that many mother's wouldn't in similar situations. What if high anxiety and depression is imprinted - in part - because mother's reactions (by accident or design) taught the child that the world is always an unsafe place. That 'second influence' allows many things to shift from "this is bad" to "this is just inconvenient" thus remodeling the world for children to be more at peace with life's obstacles.
Yes yes yes. Our boys are very little (3 under 4 years) but I already see this exact thing playing out. Always grateful for my husband's balancing presence and approach. This will certainly serve our kids well in the future.
I have really been struck by how much of the conversation about marriage right now is focused on the idea that working class and poor dads must be terrible fathers and that's why they're not getting married. I find that really frustrating. One stigma that's not talked about - but which is really important -- is that if you're a young dad who doesn't make much money, too many people are quick to assume you're a "deadbeat" or a "failure." That must be really depressing and hard to deal with for these fathers. Dads are so important. I hate to see so much discussion minimize their role.
I agree. But one thing I think about a lot is that poverty really influences how people parent. I hate to admit it, but I'm pretty convinced that if I was a single mom working full time, I would have even less patience with my kids than I do now. If I couldn't afford to order out sometimes, I'd be even more stressed. If I couldn't take maternity leave, I'd be even more annoyed waking up at night and so on. The point is, it all hangs together. Being married makes you less likely to struggle with poverty in America. Having a partner there every day makes you more accountable than not having one. At the end, it's not so much about good people or bad people. People who benefit from a mix of right choices+right conditions+right disposition do better.
This is one of the reasons many conservatives give for not expanding the safety net. Because if we make it easier to be a single parent - "if government plays the role that a father should" - then people won't get and stay married. I find that reasoning horrific, since it obviously so severely impacts the kids.
Yeah, but I struggle with this one too. At the end of the day, needy people need to receive help. But I do think all the help in the world is only a Band-aid to cover up the absence of a dad. So it's always a balance. How do we promote marriages and good choices? Is it too easy to cohabitate, have children out of wedlock and all these things we know aren't good if everyone does them? How do we help folks but also promote the ideal? If we don't agree on what the ideal is it's hard to find solutions.
I think one of the lovely things about living in a pluralistic democracy is that we don't all need to agree on the ideal to make ethical policy choices. When people are exposed to beautiful idyllic lives lived out by their friends and neighbors they might choose them! Living out loud - talking about your choices and why you made them - imo that's how you change culture for the better. Not coercion (and esp. not the type of state coercion we have now).
I'll admit though that I wholeheartedly agree with Reeves on this point - encouraging men to be present fathers even if they aren't married to a mother is critical for their children's wellbeing, which must come first. And any policy or culture of shaming that interferes with men being present (unmarried/remarried) fathers is a mighty mighty public shame.
But that's the difficulty! It's not all just easy, objective choices! Should I help a parent feed their child when they can't? Of course! Should we give tax incentives for married people as opposed to treating them as just single people? Well, I don't know. Why do we? Is there an ideal we are trying to nudge people towards? Or is there no ideal since we can't agree on it? I don't think it's all objective. There are always some presuppositions we are working off of.
I had an experience with someone I'm close to where the police had to be called to the house for a marital argument that got out of control. The assumption on the part of the officers that the dad in the situation was to blame, and that he was scared of losing his "carefree" lifestyle (he was a Stay-at-Home Dad) made me so angry. He was a good dad, and it was in no way about him not wanting to lose his lunch ticket.
I'll expand here on what I said when this came up on Twitter: I (a single and childless conservative Christian woman) worked in the Christian pro-family movement for more than 20 years. I learned firsthand that it is filled with people who deliberately use shame and stigma as a weapon without a single qualm. (It was weaponized against me, a person who was on their side and working to help achieve their mission!) Indeed, they believe it their righteous duty to do so, and pride themselves on it.
We will never get rid of shame and stigma and the harm that they do unless we directly address the problem of having a movement full of people who consider it a feature, not a bug.
Your first question is one that I spend a lot of time thinking about, especially as a person who is divorced and is married to a man who was divorced with kids when I met him. I was also unmarried when I had my first child, although his father and I are married now. My entire marriage is an illustration of how very, very hard it is to navigate the aftermath of the trauma of divorce (both for the adults involved and for the kids who had no part in the rupture of the family). And I also know firsthand what it’s like to be an unwed mother (and the shocking degree of expectation many progressives have that abortion is the obvious and only choice when a professional woman has an out of wedlock pregnancy.). It’s especially hard because a lot of pro-family public conversation feels like it’s entirely populated by people who only made correct choices - they’re all parents of multiple lovely children conceived in their long and happy marriages to their first and only sexual partners, who happily and uncomplainingly attend church with them every Sunday (probably after eating wholesome breakfasts that absolutely, definitely, do not include Lucky Charms).
So yes, in my imperfect present-day existence, I do sometimes feel a degree of stigma and shame - and even despair - that my life and marriage can never achieve that perfection that so many people pro-family people have. But we live in a fallen world, and while that highest good - the lifelong marriage - and all that it entails is now impossible for me, I can still strive for the best that remains within reach. Which is all that any of us can do this side of paradise, I suppose.
"In the past, we had this vision of the role of the husband and father that centered on financial provision and physical protection. With children, you said, 'Okay, maybe they don’t need that anymore, but they still need something else.' But with women you say, 'Okay, they don’t need that anymore. Women can provide for themselves, and therefore, women just don’t need men at all anymore.' So it sort of seems like the gist of your argument is, “We can just move on from marriage, accepting that feminism and the sexual revolution are here to stay in their totality. It’s not like we can say there are good parts and bad parts. We have to just accept them wholesale and then do what we can about the consequences.”
I really like Richard Reeves' retort later, after he celebrates most of Sigillito's description of a beautiful marriage,
"The middle ground, where most of us probably are, is that we are careful what we’re prescriptive about, and we’re careful about how universal we assume these lessons are. We do not presume that what works even for the majority works for everybody. That’s, in the end, what makes us liberal pluralists. It isn’t that we don’t strongly believe in traditions and covenants and all of that, in our own lives and faith traditions. We celebrate all of that. But we’re just very, very, very cautious about prescribing a formula.
The question is, what’s the role of the state in particular? Should it wield coercive power in promoting a particular formula for the good?"
To answer the first question (re stigma), I think that lowering expectations is key to reducing stigma (or, more accurately, the self-perception of stigmatization). There's a ton of pressure around marriage (particularly weddings) and parenting. I think we need to make it clear that it's OK to be just an OK parent. I acknowledge that women get this pressure much more than men, but it's still very real. And when there's a ton of pressure, it sometimes feels easier to opt out.
I'm not sure you can actually lower expectations any more in some segments of society. There's literally no stigma for things that might have been stigmatized in previous generations. There's almost the opposite, where some things, (including single motherhood, divorce, cohabitation, children with multiple fathers or children with multiple mothers...), are so unstigmatized they're borderline celebrated or vaunted.
But in other segments of society, there is a lot of undue pressure from, largely, other parents, and exacerbated by social media. Once I put a kid in a car seat in my vehicle when I was getting ready to leave a restaurant, then went back in to get the other kids. (Parking lots are dangerous and it's hard to wrangle a lot of littles all at once.) As I was buckling in the others, a cop came up behind my vehicle checking on me, a bit sheepishly, but he had been dispatched because of a call I had "left my kid unattended in a car." I could have easily been photographed doing that, or videoed, and publicly shamed. That kind of stress is real for parents these days. Though I have discovered in my many years of parenting, that the kinds of people who make comments or would make a call on you are unhappy people, and often, unhappy with how their own kids turned out.
There are absolutely unrealistic standards around parenting today. And lots of those standards are actually backfiring (see rising rates of anxiety thanks to parents over sheltering their kids).
But I also think that might be a trend among the most visible parents. What's going on with the parents who don't care how their kids are doing in school, or the parents who don't care if their kids are bullies?
How many parents do you think there actually are like that, i.e., who don't care how their children are doing academically or how they're developing morally? I don't imagine it's too many. And of them, how many are just too busy or exhausted to care - in other words, how many of the non-carers are single parents who would care if they had another parent in their child's life and could, collectively, spend more time and energy raising the child?
Probably more than you think, and probably depends on where you are looking at. In a small rural school district my friend teaches in, there are kids who show up just because they have to for their parents to get their welfare checks. They don't do any work and often cause disruptions because they don't actually care. More importantly, their parents don't care. They're actually proud when their kids disrupt things. The city schools locally have the same issue with some kids. The parents do not care, and the culture around the kids tell them it's not good to try to be better but to bring others down to their level. And it actually doesn't matter if it's only a few kids because they do bring the atmosphere down for everyone.
I taught middle school ELA briefly at two different schools and I hate to say it but you're absolutely correct here.
It's honestly a different world for people to wrap their minds around if they are only surrounded by like-minded people.... who only send their kids to schools where children receive the same general effort of parenting..... but I can assure you I was constantly frustrated by lack of parental *care* and sometimes hostility. Made it hard for everyone. The most stressful work years of my life.
It's actually really hard to say how many there are of each, but I certainly hear teachers complain about all kinds of parents, ranging from controlling to indulgent to apathetic.
Of course some significant fraction of those parents are yes, just maxed out and doing their best and they don't have the capacity to care.
16 years ago, I mentioned in passing to a new father that it is the mother's role to nurture the children, and the father's role to civilize them. He was very struck by this, to a degree that surprised me, and he thanked me for it profusely. It seemed odd to me at the time that this was such a new idea to him. Now I understand why it was. But what strikes me most profoundly about it now is that fidelity is at the heart of the the father's role in civilizing his children. To civilize them means to make them acceptable to society so that they may thrive and take their place in it. And the first and foremost thing that society expects of us it to keep our promises. If you cannot teach your children to keep their promises, you cannot civilize them. And if you do not keep you own promises, how can you expect them to do so?
As to shifting the culture, we are committed to living on one income, which is think is very difficult for the vast majority of people, but also worth the sacrifice. It involves sacrificing many things we would like to have, even what are considered features of “the good life”. I think a culture built on the expectation of two working parents disadvantages everyone.
This is our personal choice, because these are the values we believe in. We have members of our family who do not do this, and we support them. I watched our niece at our home for the first year of her life so that she could be with family instead of at daycare. The words of stigma and shame are one thing, but the actions of stigma and shame, i.e. the avoidance, the refusal of relationship, the refusal of help and support, are even more damaging. We can love and support those who we disagree with, and we MUST.
It’s often difficult to discern the difference between supporting someone you love and enabling choices you think are harmful to them, but discernment must be done. Just because, for example, you think one parent should be at home if possible, doesn’t mean “screw them if they don’t”.
Something I've been pondering since one of your posts around Father's Day, is the barriers we put up against those men who WANT to be good fathers. There are some terrible women out there who use the laws against the fathers of their children (because most laws favor mothers) for monetary gain, however little, but also petty power trips. And some just use emotional manipulation on the children. I know a number of men who want to be involved and active in their children's lives but are severely hindered by their exes. My opinion is the majority of them should have been more prudent about who they slept with, but most of them come from the lower rungs of society where it's currently a miserable cultural mess. Not having strong cultural norms that point towards "best social practices", even while allowing for the imperfect or deviant, hurts the ones at the bottom the most.
Per marriage: my mother used to tell us kids that we needed to look for someone who shared the same fundamental values so we could build a life together, and, apparently, that was more advice than many of my friends got! But I took that to heart and my approach to marriage was simple: I was looking for someone I could build a life with, mainly a practicing Catholic open to a big family, two things that were most important to me. And I found a great guy, even though I had to subsequently work through the unfortunate cultural messaging I unintentionally absorbed about marriage primarily being a vehicle for one's personal happiness. I now tell my kids it's important to look for someone with shared values, but also shared faith as it's challenging to raise kids in a mixed environment, and I encourage them to develop a strong sense of personal identity and realistic expectations. Secure people make better spouses, IMO
"Not having strong cultural norms that point towards "best social practices", even while allowing for the imperfect or deviant, hurts the ones at the bottom the most."
I think there's another kind of anxiety underlying the pushback against naming single parenthood as second-best, in addition to the fear that it's cruel to tell people that their children may suffer as a result of something they can't change. It's maybe best summed up as an anxiety that human societies are bad at living in a messy middle between two extremes--here, the extremes being roughly "any kind of family structure is equally good and should be held up as such" and "single parenthood is so bad that it must be feared and punished to extreme degrees." That if we try to live in such a messy middle, we'll inevitably gravitate towards one of these two poles, and so we should just pick the one that's less bad and live with it. I think there's something to be said there insofar as over the past 50-100 years, we have kind of pivoted from one extreme to the other (also, imo, very true of most arguments about the sexual revolution). And I don't have anything overly profound about how to get there, only a strong conviction that the messy middle is where human flourishing is to be found, so we have to just keep trying to muddle our way into staying there.
I'm a divorced mom of three. I married within my faith, and with all intention to be married for life. No one in my family of origin has ever been divorced.
I know it's not ideal!! But stuff happens. Sometimes husbands leave their families. I have made the best of it, and my children are wonderful people. I don't think anyone needs to walk on eggshells around me about married parents being better for kids. I know it is! But shit happens, and you do the best you can to deal with it.
In terms of reshaping the culture I don't have any big policy objective. I do believe that to change anything social in a positive way you have to act in the present in accordance with the values you hope will be the guiding principles in the future., otherwise you will recreate the current world in new guises.
As for my own choices, I am a transgender woman born I the 1940's when people like me were seen through the worst of stereotypes and my choices were constrained by my attempts to hide who I was, including from myself with serious consequences to my mental health. Whatever I did that was positive I attribute more to being the change I wanted to see than to anything else.
"I do believe that to change anything social in a positive way you have to act in the present in accordance with the values you hope will be the guiding principles in the future., otherwise you will recreate the current world in new guises."
I think your response to the critics' point a - the exhortation to be cautious about who you procreate with - is spot on. Too often I look at dysfunctional relationships and can't help but wonder, “why on earth would you have children with this person?” The problem is, I don't know how we can implement that in practice.
"I think part of what is shaping the pushback to Kearney’s book (and, in a much kinder register, Reeves’s pushback to me) is the idea that it is wrong to point out that some living situations (and sometimes parental choices) are not so good for their kids if you can’t fix the problem."
My thoughts: This points to why I have a problem with the Kearney calling two parent households "privileged." Goodness knows I hate that word with a passion. Two-parent households aren't a privilege, it's just doing what people have done for centuries: marry and raise families. Fixing the problem? It has to come from families, because families are the primary socializers.
But too many policymakers and social scientists don't preach what they practice (ie., marrying before having children). They are too cowardly to, or they caught up in a relativism that people should be free to make whatever choices they want, because that's empowering, even though those choices might not benefit them in the long run. They don't want to be seen as paternalistic or patronizing.
Yet, I really think that they are patronizing, insofar as they believe "those people" aren't like them and shouldn't be expected to be. My favorite phrase for it: the "bigotry of low expectations."
How did your expectations about marriage and being marriageable shape how you approached dating and discernment?
Dating men who came from stable two-parent homes who were looking to get married, and not dating men who were all about being casual. Of course, being Christian was important as well.
About stigma and shame: (1) It may actually be kinder to say, for example, "You're a single mom, we respect you for doing your best, but don't expect miracles, because what you are doing is astonishingly difficult." That way, if it doesn't work out as she had hoped, she doesn't beat herself up quite so much. "Anyone can do it" is not only a lie, it's a cruel lie that puts burdens on people.
(2) I can't shake the feeling that complaints about stigma and shame are not really made in good faith. Plenty of people have no problem shaming me for having too many children. Plenty of people have no problem shaming those who are lazy. I'm not sure they actually do care about stigma and shame as such--what's really going on is that they want to support the idea that the sexual revolution was a good idea. They aren't against stigma and shame in general--they are against stigma and shame *for things they have already decided are acceptable*.
Also, not in response to your questions, but still, and at risk of saying something obvious: A big reason why you can't just unbundle a father's tasks and distribute them to government or market providers is that when they are all done by one person, a person who keeps showing up and feels he has a duty to do so (rather than doing it for remuneration), is that it then becomes a relationship. Children need a relationship to a father--the playing catch, driving you to your activities, etc. etc. are little bits and pieces that go into the relationship, but the important thing is the relationship that they constitute. Also, I'm quite sure it matters that this person is indeed your biological father--but the prior point stands on its own.
Finally, I think the retrospective/prospective things is a very good point. And we do have to care about what happens in the future. No one thinks it bad to tell children to work hard in school, on the grounds that it will shame those who didn't. We just have to tell people--gently and kindly--that it's foolish to have sex with someone if you don't to spend your life with him or her, looking after kids and dealing with the day-to-day. (It's like one of those rules of gun safety: Never ever ever point your gun at something unless you're ok with shooting that thing.)
I like this:
"'You're a single mom, we respect you for doing your best, but don't expect miracles, because what you are doing is astonishingly difficult.' That way, if it doesn't work out as she had hoped, she doesn't beat herself up quite so much. 'Anyone can do it' is not only a lie, it's a cruel lie that puts burdens on people."
I think it frames hardships as much more the mother's fault, if you argue it's always possible to transcend the absence of a father. If there's a real wound in the family, there will always be points of pain, even when she does a good job. If you deny the wound. who are you casting as at fault when it stings?
The relationship point is so key. When I was a new mom, I clearly realized that no amount of community support makes up for not having someone there in the middle of the night when baby needs something other than breastfeeding, or first thing in the morning when I need to sleep in and the kids still want breakfast.
I already knew marriage and two parents are important, and I made my decisions accordingly. But it just became so much more real in the trenches.
Yes. Any replacement for my kids' father - whether a series of nannies, or friends, or grandparents - would have to be there almost 24/7 for spontaneous tag-teaming. Market solutions for that are incredibly expensive, and not many friends or grandparents want to sign up for that either.
This, a million times: “A big reason why you can't just unbundle a father's tasks and distribute them to government or market providers is that when they are all done by one person, a person who keeps showing up and feels he has a duty to do so (rather than doing it for remuneration), is that it then becomes a relationship.”
Fathers are to be duty-bound shepherds, giving their lives for the sake of their weak, vulnerable children. They are not to be like middle managers, shuffling resources from one spot to another. Managers can and do walk away; fathers should sacrifice and stay.
Excellent comment!!
Agree!
Thanks for this post and the thought provoking questions at the end.
I teach vocations to high school aged students and, when we start the marriage unit, I usually have my students think of and reflect on their experiences of marriage in their lives (most focus on their parents, but depending on the family situation, I've seen other students talk about grandparents, aunts/uncles, cousins, siblings, parents of friends, etc.). I have them do this to recognize just how different marriages can be based on their own experiences and, instead of stigmitizing what has happened to them in their lives so far, focus on both the positives and the reality that there is not a "perfect" marriage or family. I teach the reality of the Church's teachings on marriage and also try to focus on providing students with opportunities to learn about dating for discernment and the reality that both informal and formal preparation for marriage are necessary. Lastly, one thing I am always sure to be repetitive about is that a marriage is between two people and that they will constantly be learning how to love another person and themselves throughout the entirety of their lives.
For the second question, I think most of my expectations for my wife and I's marriage were buttressed by observing what did and didn't (and indeed, does and doesn't) work for my parents while also learning that they are doing their best each day to love one another. My wife and I also had many serious conversations about marriage (finances, children, etc.) before doing our formal marriage prep with the Catholic Church and I think that helped us go into pre-Cana with more open/realistic eyes. Last but not least, prayer for my wife and son helps fill in the cracks of knowing that I can't control everything and that it's ultimately His will that must be done, not mine.
What a gift to give your students!
Whilst I'm not religious, I've seen friends and family go through the Catholic marriage prep and think it's great, and took inspiration from that in pre-marriage conversations with my partner.
I admit to being stunned regarding what people who were about to get married *hadn't* discussed (kids, home ownership, etc).
To answer your second question, "How did your expectations about marriage and being marriageable shape how you approached dating and discernment?", I was raised by a single mom and honestly, I had a great childhood. I had good friendships, a mom who took me to fun places (all free, as I later found out) on Saturdays and we had community members (literal neighbors, and also school peers' parents) help out with carpooling, etc.
My mom one time told me something to the effect of, "Consider yourself an adult when you start having sex. You will have full responsibility of the outcome, whatever that looks like". It was, essentially, a warning to be cautious about having sex before marriage, but also the very real consequences (that we both lived with) of having a child with someone who was unable to be a spouse and father. It still is to me the most logical reason for abstinence before marriage: you can deal with hardships and surprises much easier when you're a team, it's harder if you're by yourself. If you've made 'an adult choice', you will potentially have to live with 'adult consequences'. I just don't see a lot of people (male or female) who are ready for these responsibilities at young ages, or before a commitment is in place and confirmed by marriage.
I'm not trying to shame anyone by stating it so bluntly, but I do feel like I was much better off seeing what it looked like and course-correcting as opposed to making similar mistakes and learning from them with unnecessary hardships.
Just a hypothesis; father's bring bravery and apathy to situations that many mother's wouldn't in similar situations. What if high anxiety and depression is imprinted - in part - because mother's reactions (by accident or design) taught the child that the world is always an unsafe place. That 'second influence' allows many things to shift from "this is bad" to "this is just inconvenient" thus remodeling the world for children to be more at peace with life's obstacles.
Yes yes yes. Our boys are very little (3 under 4 years) but I already see this exact thing playing out. Always grateful for my husband's balancing presence and approach. This will certainly serve our kids well in the future.
I have really been struck by how much of the conversation about marriage right now is focused on the idea that working class and poor dads must be terrible fathers and that's why they're not getting married. I find that really frustrating. One stigma that's not talked about - but which is really important -- is that if you're a young dad who doesn't make much money, too many people are quick to assume you're a "deadbeat" or a "failure." That must be really depressing and hard to deal with for these fathers. Dads are so important. I hate to see so much discussion minimize their role.
I agree. But one thing I think about a lot is that poverty really influences how people parent. I hate to admit it, but I'm pretty convinced that if I was a single mom working full time, I would have even less patience with my kids than I do now. If I couldn't afford to order out sometimes, I'd be even more stressed. If I couldn't take maternity leave, I'd be even more annoyed waking up at night and so on. The point is, it all hangs together. Being married makes you less likely to struggle with poverty in America. Having a partner there every day makes you more accountable than not having one. At the end, it's not so much about good people or bad people. People who benefit from a mix of right choices+right conditions+right disposition do better.
This is one of the reasons many conservatives give for not expanding the safety net. Because if we make it easier to be a single parent - "if government plays the role that a father should" - then people won't get and stay married. I find that reasoning horrific, since it obviously so severely impacts the kids.
Yeah, but I struggle with this one too. At the end of the day, needy people need to receive help. But I do think all the help in the world is only a Band-aid to cover up the absence of a dad. So it's always a balance. How do we promote marriages and good choices? Is it too easy to cohabitate, have children out of wedlock and all these things we know aren't good if everyone does them? How do we help folks but also promote the ideal? If we don't agree on what the ideal is it's hard to find solutions.
I think one of the lovely things about living in a pluralistic democracy is that we don't all need to agree on the ideal to make ethical policy choices. When people are exposed to beautiful idyllic lives lived out by their friends and neighbors they might choose them! Living out loud - talking about your choices and why you made them - imo that's how you change culture for the better. Not coercion (and esp. not the type of state coercion we have now).
I'll admit though that I wholeheartedly agree with Reeves on this point - encouraging men to be present fathers even if they aren't married to a mother is critical for their children's wellbeing, which must come first. And any policy or culture of shaming that interferes with men being present (unmarried/remarried) fathers is a mighty mighty public shame.
But that's the difficulty! It's not all just easy, objective choices! Should I help a parent feed their child when they can't? Of course! Should we give tax incentives for married people as opposed to treating them as just single people? Well, I don't know. Why do we? Is there an ideal we are trying to nudge people towards? Or is there no ideal since we can't agree on it? I don't think it's all objective. There are always some presuppositions we are working off of.
I had an experience with someone I'm close to where the police had to be called to the house for a marital argument that got out of control. The assumption on the part of the officers that the dad in the situation was to blame, and that he was scared of losing his "carefree" lifestyle (he was a Stay-at-Home Dad) made me so angry. He was a good dad, and it was in no way about him not wanting to lose his lunch ticket.
I'll expand here on what I said when this came up on Twitter: I (a single and childless conservative Christian woman) worked in the Christian pro-family movement for more than 20 years. I learned firsthand that it is filled with people who deliberately use shame and stigma as a weapon without a single qualm. (It was weaponized against me, a person who was on their side and working to help achieve their mission!) Indeed, they believe it their righteous duty to do so, and pride themselves on it.
We will never get rid of shame and stigma and the harm that they do unless we directly address the problem of having a movement full of people who consider it a feature, not a bug.
Your first question is one that I spend a lot of time thinking about, especially as a person who is divorced and is married to a man who was divorced with kids when I met him. I was also unmarried when I had my first child, although his father and I are married now. My entire marriage is an illustration of how very, very hard it is to navigate the aftermath of the trauma of divorce (both for the adults involved and for the kids who had no part in the rupture of the family). And I also know firsthand what it’s like to be an unwed mother (and the shocking degree of expectation many progressives have that abortion is the obvious and only choice when a professional woman has an out of wedlock pregnancy.). It’s especially hard because a lot of pro-family public conversation feels like it’s entirely populated by people who only made correct choices - they’re all parents of multiple lovely children conceived in their long and happy marriages to their first and only sexual partners, who happily and uncomplainingly attend church with them every Sunday (probably after eating wholesome breakfasts that absolutely, definitely, do not include Lucky Charms).
So yes, in my imperfect present-day existence, I do sometimes feel a degree of stigma and shame - and even despair - that my life and marriage can never achieve that perfection that so many people pro-family people have. But we live in a fallen world, and while that highest good - the lifelong marriage - and all that it entails is now impossible for me, I can still strive for the best that remains within reach. Which is all that any of us can do this side of paradise, I suppose.
I want to highlight Serena Sigillito's critique from this Public Discourse interview with Reeves: https://www.thepublicdiscourse.com/2023/01/86960/
"In the past, we had this vision of the role of the husband and father that centered on financial provision and physical protection. With children, you said, 'Okay, maybe they don’t need that anymore, but they still need something else.' But with women you say, 'Okay, they don’t need that anymore. Women can provide for themselves, and therefore, women just don’t need men at all anymore.' So it sort of seems like the gist of your argument is, “We can just move on from marriage, accepting that feminism and the sexual revolution are here to stay in their totality. It’s not like we can say there are good parts and bad parts. We have to just accept them wholesale and then do what we can about the consequences.”
I really like Richard Reeves' retort later, after he celebrates most of Sigillito's description of a beautiful marriage,
"The middle ground, where most of us probably are, is that we are careful what we’re prescriptive about, and we’re careful about how universal we assume these lessons are. We do not presume that what works even for the majority works for everybody. That’s, in the end, what makes us liberal pluralists. It isn’t that we don’t strongly believe in traditions and covenants and all of that, in our own lives and faith traditions. We celebrate all of that. But we’re just very, very, very cautious about prescribing a formula.
The question is, what’s the role of the state in particular? Should it wield coercive power in promoting a particular formula for the good?"
To answer the first question (re stigma), I think that lowering expectations is key to reducing stigma (or, more accurately, the self-perception of stigmatization). There's a ton of pressure around marriage (particularly weddings) and parenting. I think we need to make it clear that it's OK to be just an OK parent. I acknowledge that women get this pressure much more than men, but it's still very real. And when there's a ton of pressure, it sometimes feels easier to opt out.
I'm not sure you can actually lower expectations any more in some segments of society. There's literally no stigma for things that might have been stigmatized in previous generations. There's almost the opposite, where some things, (including single motherhood, divorce, cohabitation, children with multiple fathers or children with multiple mothers...), are so unstigmatized they're borderline celebrated or vaunted.
But in other segments of society, there is a lot of undue pressure from, largely, other parents, and exacerbated by social media. Once I put a kid in a car seat in my vehicle when I was getting ready to leave a restaurant, then went back in to get the other kids. (Parking lots are dangerous and it's hard to wrangle a lot of littles all at once.) As I was buckling in the others, a cop came up behind my vehicle checking on me, a bit sheepishly, but he had been dispatched because of a call I had "left my kid unattended in a car." I could have easily been photographed doing that, or videoed, and publicly shamed. That kind of stress is real for parents these days. Though I have discovered in my many years of parenting, that the kinds of people who make comments or would make a call on you are unhappy people, and often, unhappy with how their own kids turned out.
There are absolutely unrealistic standards around parenting today. And lots of those standards are actually backfiring (see rising rates of anxiety thanks to parents over sheltering their kids).
But I also think that might be a trend among the most visible parents. What's going on with the parents who don't care how their kids are doing in school, or the parents who don't care if their kids are bullies?
How many parents do you think there actually are like that, i.e., who don't care how their children are doing academically or how they're developing morally? I don't imagine it's too many. And of them, how many are just too busy or exhausted to care - in other words, how many of the non-carers are single parents who would care if they had another parent in their child's life and could, collectively, spend more time and energy raising the child?
Probably more than you think, and probably depends on where you are looking at. In a small rural school district my friend teaches in, there are kids who show up just because they have to for their parents to get their welfare checks. They don't do any work and often cause disruptions because they don't actually care. More importantly, their parents don't care. They're actually proud when their kids disrupt things. The city schools locally have the same issue with some kids. The parents do not care, and the culture around the kids tell them it's not good to try to be better but to bring others down to their level. And it actually doesn't matter if it's only a few kids because they do bring the atmosphere down for everyone.
I taught middle school ELA briefly at two different schools and I hate to say it but you're absolutely correct here.
It's honestly a different world for people to wrap their minds around if they are only surrounded by like-minded people.... who only send their kids to schools where children receive the same general effort of parenting..... but I can assure you I was constantly frustrated by lack of parental *care* and sometimes hostility. Made it hard for everyone. The most stressful work years of my life.
It's actually really hard to say how many there are of each, but I certainly hear teachers complain about all kinds of parents, ranging from controlling to indulgent to apathetic.
Of course some significant fraction of those parents are yes, just maxed out and doing their best and they don't have the capacity to care.
16 years ago, I mentioned in passing to a new father that it is the mother's role to nurture the children, and the father's role to civilize them. He was very struck by this, to a degree that surprised me, and he thanked me for it profusely. It seemed odd to me at the time that this was such a new idea to him. Now I understand why it was. But what strikes me most profoundly about it now is that fidelity is at the heart of the the father's role in civilizing his children. To civilize them means to make them acceptable to society so that they may thrive and take their place in it. And the first and foremost thing that society expects of us it to keep our promises. If you cannot teach your children to keep their promises, you cannot civilize them. And if you do not keep you own promises, how can you expect them to do so?
Excellent points.
As to shifting the culture, we are committed to living on one income, which is think is very difficult for the vast majority of people, but also worth the sacrifice. It involves sacrificing many things we would like to have, even what are considered features of “the good life”. I think a culture built on the expectation of two working parents disadvantages everyone.
This is our personal choice, because these are the values we believe in. We have members of our family who do not do this, and we support them. I watched our niece at our home for the first year of her life so that she could be with family instead of at daycare. The words of stigma and shame are one thing, but the actions of stigma and shame, i.e. the avoidance, the refusal of relationship, the refusal of help and support, are even more damaging. We can love and support those who we disagree with, and we MUST.
It’s often difficult to discern the difference between supporting someone you love and enabling choices you think are harmful to them, but discernment must be done. Just because, for example, you think one parent should be at home if possible, doesn’t mean “screw them if they don’t”.
Something I've been pondering since one of your posts around Father's Day, is the barriers we put up against those men who WANT to be good fathers. There are some terrible women out there who use the laws against the fathers of their children (because most laws favor mothers) for monetary gain, however little, but also petty power trips. And some just use emotional manipulation on the children. I know a number of men who want to be involved and active in their children's lives but are severely hindered by their exes. My opinion is the majority of them should have been more prudent about who they slept with, but most of them come from the lower rungs of society where it's currently a miserable cultural mess. Not having strong cultural norms that point towards "best social practices", even while allowing for the imperfect or deviant, hurts the ones at the bottom the most.
Per marriage: my mother used to tell us kids that we needed to look for someone who shared the same fundamental values so we could build a life together, and, apparently, that was more advice than many of my friends got! But I took that to heart and my approach to marriage was simple: I was looking for someone I could build a life with, mainly a practicing Catholic open to a big family, two things that were most important to me. And I found a great guy, even though I had to subsequently work through the unfortunate cultural messaging I unintentionally absorbed about marriage primarily being a vehicle for one's personal happiness. I now tell my kids it's important to look for someone with shared values, but also shared faith as it's challenging to raise kids in a mixed environment, and I encourage them to develop a strong sense of personal identity and realistic expectations. Secure people make better spouses, IMO
"Not having strong cultural norms that point towards "best social practices", even while allowing for the imperfect or deviant, hurts the ones at the bottom the most."
TRUER WORDS HAVE NEVER BEEN SAID
I think there's another kind of anxiety underlying the pushback against naming single parenthood as second-best, in addition to the fear that it's cruel to tell people that their children may suffer as a result of something they can't change. It's maybe best summed up as an anxiety that human societies are bad at living in a messy middle between two extremes--here, the extremes being roughly "any kind of family structure is equally good and should be held up as such" and "single parenthood is so bad that it must be feared and punished to extreme degrees." That if we try to live in such a messy middle, we'll inevitably gravitate towards one of these two poles, and so we should just pick the one that's less bad and live with it. I think there's something to be said there insofar as over the past 50-100 years, we have kind of pivoted from one extreme to the other (also, imo, very true of most arguments about the sexual revolution). And I don't have anything overly profound about how to get there, only a strong conviction that the messy middle is where human flourishing is to be found, so we have to just keep trying to muddle our way into staying there.
I'm a divorced mom of three. I married within my faith, and with all intention to be married for life. No one in my family of origin has ever been divorced.
I know it's not ideal!! But stuff happens. Sometimes husbands leave their families. I have made the best of it, and my children are wonderful people. I don't think anyone needs to walk on eggshells around me about married parents being better for kids. I know it is! But shit happens, and you do the best you can to deal with it.
In terms of reshaping the culture I don't have any big policy objective. I do believe that to change anything social in a positive way you have to act in the present in accordance with the values you hope will be the guiding principles in the future., otherwise you will recreate the current world in new guises.
As for my own choices, I am a transgender woman born I the 1940's when people like me were seen through the worst of stereotypes and my choices were constrained by my attempts to hide who I was, including from myself with serious consequences to my mental health. Whatever I did that was positive I attribute more to being the change I wanted to see than to anything else.
I think this is right on:
"I do believe that to change anything social in a positive way you have to act in the present in accordance with the values you hope will be the guiding principles in the future., otherwise you will recreate the current world in new guises."
I think your response to the critics' point a - the exhortation to be cautious about who you procreate with - is spot on. Too often I look at dysfunctional relationships and can't help but wonder, “why on earth would you have children with this person?” The problem is, I don't know how we can implement that in practice.
"I think part of what is shaping the pushback to Kearney’s book (and, in a much kinder register, Reeves’s pushback to me) is the idea that it is wrong to point out that some living situations (and sometimes parental choices) are not so good for their kids if you can’t fix the problem."
My thoughts: This points to why I have a problem with the Kearney calling two parent households "privileged." Goodness knows I hate that word with a passion. Two-parent households aren't a privilege, it's just doing what people have done for centuries: marry and raise families. Fixing the problem? It has to come from families, because families are the primary socializers.
But too many policymakers and social scientists don't preach what they practice (ie., marrying before having children). They are too cowardly to, or they caught up in a relativism that people should be free to make whatever choices they want, because that's empowering, even though those choices might not benefit them in the long run. They don't want to be seen as paternalistic or patronizing.
Yet, I really think that they are patronizing, insofar as they believe "those people" aren't like them and shouldn't be expected to be. My favorite phrase for it: the "bigotry of low expectations."
How did your expectations about marriage and being marriageable shape how you approached dating and discernment?
Dating men who came from stable two-parent homes who were looking to get married, and not dating men who were all about being casual. Of course, being Christian was important as well.