 Well, thank you all so much for being here. I just wanted to introduce briefly our three panelists. Unfortunately, Congresswoman Moore had a vote today and couldn't be here. The bill, she was sponsoring. But anyway, to my left, we have Jason de Parle, who is a staff writer at The New York Times and a Bernard L. Schwartz fellow here at New America. In the middle, Katie Royce. Katie's the author of several books, including In Praise of Messy Lives, which discusses, among other things, her experience as a single mother. And she's also a professor at the Carter Institute of Journalism at NYU. And on the end, we have DeVira Cohn. DeVira was a journalist herself for many years at The Washington Post. And she's now a senior writer at the Pew Research Center who has frequently studied marriage patterns and other aspects of changing family life in America. So thank you all so much. So we're all familiar with some of the recent numbers that have come out relating to single motherhood. The CDC report in March that showed that the number of American children born to single mothers in America is at an all time high. The Pew report that came out a couple of weeks ago at the end of May that showed that record numbers of female breadwinners, especially in households that are female-headed. And I guess I was hoping we could start by discussing some of the factors that might be driving this trend. Maybe this is the question for Dee. Well, I guess one thing to say upfront is that there are many different kinds of single moms. The average numbers that you see hide a lot of variety. And so that also helps explain some of the factors that are driving the increase. So on the one hand, you do see an increase in children being born to women who've never married. Well, to some extent, that reflects the fact that marriage is becoming less prevalent in US society. People are marrying later. There's some evidence that a smaller number may ever marry, although many people say that they would like to be married. So that's one factor driving that population. There's also been a growth in cohabitation or unmarried partners, people living together. That is also driving the numbers in so-called single moms. In fact, a lot of the increase we're seeing in children living with mothers who allegedly are single involve kids who actually are living with two parents, but the parents are living together and not married. And then, of course, there's also issues like divorce, separation, and so forth. And even though divorce has leveled off or decreased in recent years, it still affects a large number of children in their living circumstances. Jason, you've done a lot of work on how these changes in family formation are driving inequality, rising inequality in America. I wondered if you could maybe talk about the origins of that. Well, let's go back to your earlier question about why I think there's a debate that will never be settled about to what extent is it being driven by economic changes on the fall of wages, particularly for low-skilled men that make them seem less marriageable and to what extent it's being driven by cultural changes relating to, among other things, birth control and broader acceptance of unmarried parenthood. And the two things, I think, interact. In terms of the way it interacts with the inequality debate or the inequality trends, the move towards single motherhood varies a lot by education level. So college-educated Americans still marry and have children within marriage at very high rates. Americans with high school education are less, do not by and large have children outside of marriage. Those two trends have been that way for three or four decades. I think what's changed really in the last decade or decade and a half is what's happened in the middle. And the middle used to more closely resemble the top. If you go back, I want to say maybe two decades ago, you look at the top third and the middle third, and the family structure looked pretty much the same. And now there's been an erosion in the trend towards marriage, patting births within marriage. There's been erosion among both thirds, but it's been much steeper in the middle third. So the middle third is shifting more towards the bottom third in terms of the family structure. How that affects the inequality debate is that the people who least need to be married for economic reasons are the most likely to. So the people with the highest incomes are most likely to have two incomes in the household, and the people with the lowest incomes are most likely to have one income in the household. So it exacerbates the trend towards inequality. I mean, what you mentioned at the beginning of your comment, the increasing acceptance of single motherhood. And one of the things that I was discussing with Dee yesterday was that, in fact, given the increase we're seeing in these new patterns of family formation, there's actually less acceptance, less public acceptance of single motherhood than you would think. You can speak to this better than I can, but we're describing some public opinion surveys that had been done. I was hoping you could. Sure. Well, we've been polling about a number of changes in family forms for some time. And what we found is that public disapproval of single mothers or single women having children is still quite high. The latest survey was about 64%. Now, that was down from 71% a few years ago. And disapproval is lower. So single mothers or non-marital births? Well, it has some extent to do with how the question is phrased. If you say single women having children, is that a big problem? That was the way our question was worded. But if you ask about unmarried parents living with children, disapproval is a lot lower. And it is also a lot lower for same sex couples raising children than it is for, if you frame it as a single woman by herself without a man involved. So there is a little wiggle room in the disapproval. And there is some, as we've said, softening of disapproval. And of course, disapproval is much lower among younger people, who lives have reflect a much greater prevalence of this kind of single parenthood. So what they're seeing may be reflected in their attitudes. Did you look at what single parents say about what the disapproval rate would be among people who are themselves single parents? The 42% are having children outside of marriage. It's much less, but it's not zero. I don't have the numbers right at hand. But there's still some disapproval, but it's not nearly as good. It's not quite a majority, as I recall. I think when we talk about the disapproval, it's important to look at the crudeness of the terms, as you were saying. So to me, the term single mother itself is the fiction of a fundamentally conservative society. And in England, JK Rowling's organization Gingerbread has this movement called Lose the Labels. And the reason being, and her point, which I think is quite valid, that women move in and out of singleness in the course of a lifetime. People get divorced and suddenly find themselves a single mother for a year. People have babies on their own with sperm donors, as you're saying. These are very different circumstances. People have babies on their own living together with their father. And so these terms are pretty unuseful, actually. And the term single mother, to ask people if they disapprove of it, is already entering into a very charged language to talk about these things. So I think one of the problems is that the term itself is it conjures all these stereotypes and ideas for people that may not really reflect the kind of variety of human experience. But it seemed to be the case when you were describing the public opinion surveys, when we spoke yesterday, that other social trends, such as gay marriage and such as cohabitation, public opinion has more kept pace with that. People have become much more accepting of gay marriage very quickly as it's become more common. And they know people in the institution. People have become much more accepting of cohabitation. For some reason, it seems that public acceptance of single motherhood has not really kept pace with the increases. Well, that's not my impression. That's not your impression. No. I don't think I ever meet anybody who expresses any surprise or disapproval about single parenthood in these days. It seems it's almost a norm. You and I were talking. I've been spending a lot of time at a public school in Texas. And in the second grade class, I've been monitoring. I've noticed that when the teacher sends home permission slips, she says quite unselfconsciously, have your mom or your mom's boyfriend or your aunt or your grandmother or whoever sign it. It's not a pejorative thing. It's just I think there are maybe one out of five kids in the class if that has a two-parent family. Well, certainly the numbers, as we've said, there's no disputing that the numbers of children of single parents is high. However, we do live in a country where one of the presidential candidates recently blamed the increase in violence, essentially, on single mothers. So we are living in a world in which it's OK to say that for a politician to say a quite prominent politician of one of the major parties to say that. So I think I mean, I live in New York City, and I could just wish that I lived in that Texas school because I don't see that kind of totally warmhearted acceptance around me. And obviously, the numbers bear out, even though it's gone down slightly, that huge numbers of Americans do say they disapprove of children being raised by single mothers. But again, they don't disapprove of children being raised by two unmarried parents. And one of those unmarried parents is also a single mom. So it really depends on, I think, the definition of single mom. We also have research, and I think this bears on the single mom definition, where Americans have a strong belief that children benefit by having both a mother and father present in the household. And I think that that's part of what's going on in the high disapproval for moms raising children on their own. And the lesser disapproval, I mean, really only a minority disapprove of unmarried couples raising kids. Is that do you think due to the practical difficulties or the sense that there are fewer resources, or is it just about the fact of having a father in the home? I don't know, it'd be interesting to test that. We actually did ask a question recently that we'll be publishing some data about what the role of a dad is. Because I was curious about that as well. I don't know whether it's the fact that it helps to have two people if you're trying to run after a toddler, or whether having two incomes is more helpful than having one, or whether there's a moral component. And we certainly know that among people who describe themselves as religious, or who have conservative political views, there is more disapproval of the single mom on her own than there is. But by any measure over the last two decades, there's got to be a trend towards greater public acceptance of single parents. A pretty surprisingly low, I mean, if you look at the acceptance of gay parents is surprisingly higher among even conservative people than the acceptance of a single mother. And I think that's what the interesting thing is, why do we still have this particular pocket of kind of traditional conservatism, and why does it endure? And I think there is, frankly, a moral component. Obviously, it's impossible to measure, but I think if you look at the language that people use to talk about single mothers, you see that in a certain way this country has not evolved as far as we think from the days of Nathaniel Hawthorne and Hester Prynne, our kind of original puritanical town with its single mother with the Scarlet A. And some of that feeling of suspicion, and I do think it's a sort of irrational moral issue, not just the kind of practical concerns, I think. Well, there's certainly been an evolution of academic evidence over the past several decades that suggest all else equal. Kids do better in two-parent families, on average. So kids are gonna be more likely to do well in school, more likely to stay out of trouble in a two-parent family. So I think the consensus among liberal academics has shifted over the past two decades, but I wouldn't say it translates into a moral disapproval. I would say that there's been a shift among liberal academics. I'm thinking of somebody like Sarah McClanahan, Christopher Jenks, Elle Sawhill, towards a view that the two-parent family, the kids do better in two-parent families. It's interesting you say that, though. I mean, it's interesting because I think that there's a lot of class issues at work in some of these conversations, and that, especially in the work of Professor McClanahan, who I've talked to extensively, her evidence shows that the biggest difficulty or obstacle for children of single mothers is financial insecurity. And I actually asked her question, partly, obviously, due to my own special curiosity. As the single mother of two kids, two different dads. Whether absent financial insecurity, does a child have a better chance of doing well? So financially equal situations. Neither family has financial insecurity. In a married home where there's stress and conflict, is that gonna be more or less destructive than a child with a single mother, no stress and conflict in the home? She very categorically said, it is much more destructive for the child to be in the home with two parents, and stress and conflict, than the one parent without stress and conflict. And her evidence and her research points up. The one that doesn't have stress and conflict. I'm talking about stress and conflict in the home. So that's parents fighting, and parents, you know, adults fighting around you. So that's the specific stress and conflict she was referring to. And so I have to say, I think that some of the, I know people love to kind of quote these studies, and even people who know nothing and not you, of course, but many people who know nothing about these studies love to kind of wave them around to say, like single motherhood is gonna cause your child to be a shooter like Mitt Romney. But actually, I think people's understanding of what these studies actually say, which are really complicated and go into many definitions of what is these different varieties of single mothers. So I think the research is a bit more complicated. And we also don't know, sorry, I'll stop talking in one second. We also don't understand the world, which is our new world. So the world in which 53% of babies born to women under 30 are born to single mothers, we don't know what's gonna happen when those children get older. Because part of the problem that children of single mothers have is that they are sort of outcasted or different or other in a world in which they are no longer that. I think our idea of what family is may be refreshed and renewed and may evolve with the times as we can see with gay marriage and other issues. Well, thank you. Katie, you spoke in one of your recent pieces about single motherhood about sort of support, the question of support for single mothers. And you gave the example of European countries, which approached the issue much differently. Mentioned preferential daycare admissions. And are there ways that you believe that we should be thinking creatively about how to provide support for families so that at least the economic inequality aspect is... Well, I'm not, yeah, I mean, I don't feel qualified to make policy proclamations, but I do see and what I said in that piece is that obviously we can sort of all agree that being a single mother can be more challenging than having two parents in the home. And I was just pointing out in a place like France, the response to that added difficulty is preferential access to excellent daycare. In England, the response is to use, with various kind of amendments to the tax system to penalize single mothers and make it much more expensive than it would be otherwise. And in America, our response is kind of moralism. Like our response is not to help single mothers in various ways, but to judge them. And I think that there are more constructive attitudes and obviously we are faced with this incredibly, rapidly changing demographic. And rather than think about how can we help this situation, we immediately carry all these kind of charged assumptions about who these women are and what they're doing and the children in danger and all of these fantasies in our heads. I guess I'm wondering a little bit whether it's a chicken and egg problem, like in a society where there are greater social supports across the board and you were mentioning people who have a deep economic need to be together. In a society where there's universal access to healthcare or state provided daycare, you have obviously less of an economic, people's decisions about partnering are less driven by economics. I'm phrasing this question very poorly, but I guess I wonder whether in it- What Katie was saying is right, I think in that it's very hard to disentangle in the studies, if you have studies that show that all else being equal, kids in two parent families do better than kids in single parent families, the all else being equal is a big problem because all else is never equal. Maybe marriage works for those who are married that doesn't mean it would work for those who aren't married. So that gets back to the question is are there enough marriageable men? Is there enough, is the real root of the trend towards single parenthood economic? If you had better paying jobs for low and medium skilled men, would the men therefore be more appealing marriage partners with those marriages work better? To say that kids who are in two parent families are doing better than kids who are not doesn't mean that you can somehow marry up the other people and those kids are gonna do as well. And I would argue, nor does it mean you should. I mean, I just feel like the assumption here that the only acceptable way to raise children kind of are bringing some Eisenhower era assumptions to the table here, which is two married parents, two children in their nuclear family in their separate house. And I just, that's not what America is anymore. And I don't even know if that's what America should be. And I think to possibly change the parameters of the debate and say, maybe there are, maybe some of these people should live together and not be married. Maybe some of these people should, maybe some of these things like our assumption that there's one thing we want people to do and that's get married and anything else is bad. I just, it's outdated and I also don't think it's necessarily true. I think that there are families that work and families that don't. There are married parents as we all know, and we can read like any book, poem or play or watch a movie and we know that not every child in a household with married parents is happy or flourishing. And even if you wanna protect your children and do the best you can and not harm them, you can't. You might be able to, you might not be able to. So this idea that we can create a perfect childhood and a perfect childhood looks one way, which we in America very, we like that idea, I just, I think it's a flawed assumption. I just don't know where all this, who you're talking about with all these moralizing people. I mean, it seems to me there's been a revolutionary acceptance of a redefinition of America. Well, we've just been talking about the coup polls, which are like documenting higher numbers of disapproval. So, you know, you too can discuss this, but it's a pretty, you know, I think where these people are is everywhere. Where these people are are, you know, it's not really, for me to say there are people who disapprove of single mothers, that doesn't seem to me like a controversial or obscure claim. I think it'd be very odd for somebody to beam into a New America panel in 2013 and find it taking as a given assumption that there's a moralism in America towards single parenthood. I think what there is is a huge change in single parenthood and you can debate what its effects are and what its causes are, but. Well, do you mention that there is in fact public disapproval, I mean, fairly, I forget the figure. There's public disapproval in the sense of people feel that it's bad for society and it's not necessarily the best way to raise kids, having one parent, one mother, as opposed to a mother and a father. So, again, public does not disapprove or majority does not disapprove of unmarried couples living together, which would include a single mom and a single dad. There is some sense that it's not the best for society to have a single woman having a child on her own without a man in the picture. That's, again, a societal attitude and I think some people may be reconciling that in their day-to-day reality with people they know and they may well like and think they're doing a great job and, again, as I said, disapproval is ebbing and most young adults do not disapprove, so I suspect we'll see that attitude permeate society. It's interesting, I mean, I just think about it from my strange warped universe as a single mother and in my writing on single motherhoods and I've written a lot of pieces, obviously, about single motherhood and I get a lot of letters from single mothers who are really all over the country in different demographics than me, different education levels and different economic levels and all of these letters, some of them are very long and very detailed and nearly all of them express that they do feel that there is a prejudice against single mothers, that they experience it every day in their daily lives and I think, you know, living within the world of single mothers, I mean, I could name like 16 things that happened to me in the last six months and it would bore everyone in the room to tears, but no, but I mean, I'm willing to do it, but rather than list that, I can tell you that I and all of these single mothers who write to me feel those things and it may be that when you're kind of like stepped outside of this experience, you don't see it or you don't understand it or you don't experience it, but I think it's pretty clear, as I say, not just where I live in New York City and not just here in New America and one of the things that I think is a challenge in thinking about this debate is that we're not just talking about right wing conservatives who have these prejudices, we're talking about the nice New York Times liberal reader who has these prejudices and so one of the things that to me is so important and why I think like J.K. Rowling's like lose the labels campaign and all of that is important is because the way we think about this debate is extremely moralistic, extremely puritanical, extremely irrational even in educated liberal circles. I wanted to open things up to questions. I think that there was, yeah, you had a mic. Is there anybody who'd like to ask one of our panelists? You would not bore me giving me some examples of when you feel the prejudice and or what other single mothers have told you would be very interesting to me. Okay. Okay, I mean, I feel like there's so many stories I could mention, one single mother friend of mine for instance went to a party with lots of kids around and there's sort of kids running around, grownups having a party, Brooklyn liberal educated circles and the host says to my friend, let's call her child Finn. I just want you to know, Finn is always welcome in our house which I just submit to you, you would not say about a one year old child with two parents. You wouldn't feel like you needed to make that special extra welcome articulated. When I was pregnant, somebody said to me with my son and I guess I was sort of, he was trying to give me some advice and he was said, you know, why don't you just wait till you have a regular baby? Why don't you wait and have a regular baby? Now, these are little small things. You could be like, she's crazy and oversensitive or you could see that some of this is a little bit, it's articulating something like why is this child irregular? If you look at the word bastard which we would not use in polite society, one of the definitions of bastard is an irregular child. Okay, so this is our language that we're using today and I think a lot of it you see in language. When I was pregnant, same period, pregnant at my daughter's kindergarten, one of the little kids comes out, hand on her hips, five years old and she looks at me and she goes, when are you gonna get married? And now, I mean, not to say this prejudice is coming from a five-year-old but say it coming from something happening in that five-year-old's home, I'm just guessing. So what I'm telling you is I'm living in the most liberal, most kind of bookish, cultured, tiny corner of the world and I feel it and so I don't feel really comfortable sharing like stranger stories and what they say to me but I can tell you that people feel all of this and I can tell you close friends and relatives of mine will step in and say, that boy needs a man in the home and people will feel that they can ask you and single mothers, all single mothers will tell you this. People feel like they can ask you to account for your circumstances, like you have to kind of apologize or explain, like why did you end up this way? What are you doing? In a way that you would not ask a normal person with two parents married in a traditional circumstance, you wouldn't feel like they needed to explain themselves so elaborately. So I think there's, again, I could sit here for like 40 years and tell you more stories but there are a lot of stories like that and they're little things but they're not little things because the cultural climate exists in these offhand remarks. It's like that thing that five-year-old said to you in the school drop-off, that's what is our cultural climate. That's where the attitudes are. I think right here on the end. Yeah, it seems like one of the interesting things about public opinion on gay marriage is that people's opinions on whether they say they approve or disapprove doesn't necessarily correlate, for example, with how they'll vote on it or just on a personal level how they feel about it. So I was wondering if you're planning on doing any more polling about what brings people to say approval or disapproval or if you move to, if you plan to move beyond this kind of binary into seeing what opinions led to them saying these things? Well, this actually offers me an excellent opportunity to promo a report that we'll be releasing tomorrow that actually is of the LGBT population. So not of the general public, although it compares some attitudes in the LGBT population with attitudes in the public. Pew Research has been doing a whole series of reports in recent weeks about same-sex marriage and related issues. And I invite you to look at those. Some of them may answer your question and also to look at the report we're putting out tomorrow. You hear the gentleman on the end here? I think there's a microphone behind him, yeah. My name is Bob Patterson. I write for the Philadelphia Inquirer. GK Chesterton once said that in assessing any social problem, we have to first identify the social ideal. And I would suggest, I would ask, what is the social ideal in terms of raising children? And a related question would be, we've done a lot of talk about what adults think. What do you think most American children would prefer if they had their magic wish in terms of being raised? Would they prefer one parent? Would they prefer both their parents? Would they prefer both their parents married? Would they prefer adoption? What would most kids consider ideal for themselves? Katie, would you like to take that? Yeah, I mean, I think you can't. The problem is you can't ask that question of vacuum because unfortunately our children can get born on a little desert island where they can come to their fantasies innocently. The problem is they're born into a culture that is very aggressively pushing certain ideas about family on them from when they're six months old. So what their fantasies are, and I think this is what I think we don't know because because our world is changing so rapidly, the fantasies may be changing. But I can tell you, I think children don't want their parents fighting. Children don't want unhappy parents. Children don't want to be sitting there at a dinner table with simmering rage and resentment between their parents. I think we know that. And so children want to be loved. So I would argue to you, I don't think this is the ideal. We need well-loved children. And what I just proposed, and I think I could say could be echoed by children if they weren't reading so many little bear stories about little bear families that looked in a certain little bear way, that the ideal is that they're well-loved and that well-loved children can come from a lot of different kinds of families. That a family, it could be gay parents, it could be single parents, it could be a single dad, it could be whatever it is. The ideal should be well-loved children. And it's frankly the idea that it's anyone's business, how other people are raising their children or all these moral judgments. What I think children want is to live in a secure environment in which they're loved. I've reported on a lot of single-parent families and my experience has been that most children of those, in those families, wanted father. You know, it sometimes comes up in that context, but often it comes up when mom has a boyfriend who moves in and the kid thinks, ah, he'll be the one. So, I don't know, I've never pressed, the kid doesn't have to be your biological father, but you know, I've seen a lot of, I've heard a lot of stories about kids who got their hopes up when mom's boyfriend moved in and then it fell apart. The lady here in the pink. Hi, my name's Samantha Lachman from The Nation. In recent elections, there's always sort of these different terms floating around about moms from you hear about soccer moms to security moms in 2004 to in this most recent election, there was a new term, waitress moms. But in the last election, there was a little bit more of a discussion in the media about unmarried women and what their political preference was were and how they were gonna vote in the election. And I was just wondering, has there been relatively less of a discussion of unmarried women or single mothers because it's assumed that they're gonna vote for Democrats and therefore their votes aren't seem to be up for grabs and is that why the media attention sort of doesn't fixate on them as much as these sort of like mom categories that recur every cycle? It's a very interesting question. Does one of you like to take that on? Well, I think there is the assumption that they're gonna vote Democrat, but as I remember when they were talking about the unmarried woman vote, there was some flexibility. And obviously because we're talking about people from different worlds and different kind of corners of the universe, I think it is to a certain extent up for grabs. And I would think, certainly the Republican parties made a little bit of an effort to speak in slightly more friendly terms about single mothers. But I think it will make a difference obviously moving forward and I bet you will single mothers may be a factor in the next election in that same way where we're talking about waitress moms, soccer moms. I think we have time for just one more question. Let me get this lady here on the end of the row. Yeah. Hi, Liz Peters, Urban Institute. The research, we've been talking a lot about different kinds of family types, but nobody's talked about instability. And the research actually shows that it's instability that is the big factor in affecting children's wellbeing. And I think that the reason that we see, or one of the reasons that we see marriage being in general in the research better for kids is because that's a more stable arrangement on average. If you have a kid being born to cohabiting families, to cohabiting parents, which is happening more and more, that's a very unstable family type. They break up at much, much higher rates than a kid born to marriage. So I think rather than talking about family type per se, I think we need to really think about the stability of the arrangements in which kids are living. Well, there's certainly, what you say certainly is true and for people interested in this topic I'd recommend looking at the work of Andrew Chirlen, especially marriage, go around in which he talks about the fact that many children today are growing up with sequential parent figures in the household. On the other side, I guess it's interesting to note as well that a certain percentage of women who give birth when they're not married do in fact get married later. In fact, some research indicates 60 to 80% do at some point. So that's another kind of transition you see. Get married to the... Some to one else. Some to the father, some to another guy. I think we're about to break for lunch for a little while and there are sandwiches out there which you can all help yourself to. After lunch we're going to be coming back for a panel on divorce led by Casey Greenfield. So look forward to seeing you all after this short break.