 Sheldon Danziger, professor in the School of Public Policy and co-director of the National Poverty Center, and I want to welcome you today to a talk based on a new book, Promises I Can Keep, Why Poor Women Put Motherhood Before Marriage by Catherine Eden and Maria Kefalas. The National Poverty Center was established at the University of Michigan in 2002, and our focus is on promoting research and training on issues related to the causes and consequences of poverty. Today's talk is cosponsored with the Population Study Center, which is part of the Institute for Social Research. I'm very pleased today that both Catherine Eden and Maria Kefalas can be here. Catherine is going to do the presentation. Catherine is associate professor of sociology and research associate at the Population Study Center at the University of Michigan. She's written a number of books. Yes, at the University of Pennsylvania. Wishful thinking. Too many population studies reminds me of the Michigan. She's best known for her book, co-authored book, Making Ends Meet, How Low-Income Single Mothers Survive Welfare and Low-Wage Work. We had a conference today for young researchers, and they were asking about how you get good exposure for your work, and I think the simple answer is write a book like Making Ends Meet, which has sold widely in academic courses and was also featured in The New York Times, as was the early research for today's talk. And in fact, I guess there is a link because it was Jason DeParel who wrote about the studies in Camden, and so our featured speakers this year who are going to be on our webpage are both Jason and Catherine. So I don't know, is this independent or correlated? Kathy is currently writing a new book this time about men titled Marginal Men, Fatherhood in the Lives of Low-Income Unmarried Men. Her previous honors are long, but include being a visiting scholar at the Russell Sage Foundation and being a W.T. Grant faculty scholar. Maria Kefalas is assistant professor of sociology at St. Joseph's University and a faculty fellow at the Institute for Violence Research and Prevention. She got her PhD from the University of Chicago and worked as a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Pennsylvania. Her first book is called Working Class Heroes, Protecting Home, Community, and Nation in a Chicago Neighborhood. This is her second book, and I know a little bit about her third book, which is a fascinating study in process now about the transition to adulthood in a small Iowa town. So again, for the young scholars it's a privilege to introduce two people who have just published one book and have their new books in process. So with that as introduction, let me turn it over to Kathy. I'm exhausted already. Great to see you all here. How many of you are students of one sort or another? Okay, quite a few of you. When I was in graduate school, they told me, read the literature, and that will lead you to your question. I have to confess today that this question did not come from reading the literature. It came from doing radio talk shows. After publishing my first book with Laura Lane making ends meet, we did literally dozens and dozens and dozens of radio talk shows, so many that in fact, and we started doing a lot of late night radio. So I used to just go to bed and wait for the phone to ring and then wake up, do the talk show, and go back to sleep. And one night my husband was getting a little annoyed with this, obviously, but it was kind of subconscious. So as I picked up the phone, he snored very loudly, right into the receiver, then rolled over, hitting all the buttons of the phone, and all over Brooklyn, New York, we heard the sounds of our redial button going doot, doot, doot, doot, doot, doot, doot, doot, so anyway. The book that I wrote with Laura Lane was about how tough it is to make ends meet economically, regardless of whether you receive welfare or you try to make a go of it in a low-wage drop. And as I was presenting these results with Laura across the country, and we got into this radio and TV talk show bit, which is a lot of fun to do, because you actually find out what real Americans think about real things, not what academics think about things. The same two questions kept coming up over and over and over again. First they'd say, Dr. Eden, if things are so tough for these single mothers, why don't they just get married? And then they'd say, Dr. Eden, if things are so bad, why do they have the kids in the first place? And I would say, after spending six years in low-income neighborhoods in four cities, I had no idea what the answers to those questions were. But I'd spent enough time in the households of low-income single mothers to know that if given the chance, they would probably have a very good answer to the questions that so many Americans seemed to be asking about them. So that was the origin of this study. When I got the idea for this study, this is before I met Maria, I went to the National Science Foundation and was told this was not an issue of national importance. I then went to the W.T. Grant Foundation, who must have been hallucinating because they decided it was and funded it. So we'd like to thank the W.T. Grant Foundation under the spectacular leadership of Bob Granger for funding every aspect of the study, including the photographs that you'll see throughout this presentation. Okay, I'm not going to go over this slide too much, just to say that the spread of single parenthood, which is really the larger topic that we're talking about here, has probably generated more social science research than any other question over the last 20 years. Do you agree with that, Sheldon? Possibly? Maybe? Close? At least in the one of the top four, one of the top five. We've got lots and lots of ideas about what might be the cause here, the three most popular. But in a recent review of the study of these theories and the empirical evidence to go with them, David Elwood, who's dean at the Kennedy School at Harvard, and Sandy Jang, who teaches at Harvard, write, Indeed, it is only a slight exaggeration to say that quantitative social scientists mean contribution to our understanding of single parent families has been to show that nothing caused them to become more common. Nevertheless, they did. What an opportunity for a qualitative social scientist to step in and try to do something different. This study, which Maria joined me on in 1998, I actually began the study in 1995. Studies take a long time. Don't give up. We entitled the social role of marriage and children in low income communities. And then we did that because we really wanted to take a different view rather than asking why do they have the children and why don't they get married? We wanted to look at the social role that marriage and children played in the lives of low income residents of poor communities. The data we're going to draw from today include intensive participant observation in eight poor neighborhoods. This is kind of the tool of ethnographers. We hung out, talked to everybody. I actually lived in one of these communities, East Camden, for three years with my family. Maria spent almost all her time even while pregnant in another one of these communities, Kensington. And in addition to this participant observation, we conducted repeated interviews with 162 residents of these communities all low income single moms earning less than $16,000 a year. I'm also going to talk a little bit about three other studies that are kind of similar. I'll point to those studies when we get to them. These are the neighborhoods. These are the two white neighborhoods, Kensington and Pensport. If you're familiar with Philadelphia, you can probably identify where they are. Pensport is the home of the famous Philadelphia mummers. Kensington is the home of the richest drug market on the east coast, I'm told. This is a picture of, I believe, Pensport. A great image of these white low income Philadelphia neighborhoods. This is Kensington. The parks are too dangerous to play in, so oftentimes kids use the streets instead in front of their row homes. These are the Hispanic neighborhoods. We studied all of our respondents from Puerto Rican. That is the largest Hispanic group by far in Philadelphia. This is a picture of West Kensington, one of the poorest neighborhoods in all of Philadelphia, and the home to most of Philadelphia's Puerto Rican population. Finally, these are African American neighborhoods. You notice some overlap here. Some of these communities had both blacks and Puerto Ricans or Puerto Ricans and whites in them. You can see East Camden, which is the neighborhood that I lived in for three years. Here are some pictures of these neighborhoods. Here are some of our families. We can't tell you exactly who they are, but they are in the book. These are our cover girl. She's featured on the cover of the book and in the poster you saw. Okay, so I'm going to take you on a journey in the next 35 or 40 minutes from courtship through conception to pregnancy to birth and beyond. And on this journey, we're going to learn a lot of interesting things. You're also going to hear the voices of the mothers that we spoke with. I'll warn you, sometimes when people hear these quotes, they start trying to do a little bit of rudimentary statistics mentally, and they try to assign people by race or by age into different categories. You don't have to do that because we'll talk about race and age differences at the end of the presentation. But the quotes do add a lot, and they're really the bulk of what is in the book. When we started asking these women about their courtship situations, the situations that they produced children in, we learned something really interesting, and I think really important about this population. That is, in the typical case, a young couple conceives within a year of beginning to date, or as they sometimes put it in low-income communities, began kicking it or began talking to each other. Brianna is a typical example. She's an African American 18-year-old with a one-year-old child. She tells us we was always going out to the mall and going window shopping for baby things. We talked about having a baby. We used to always talk about having kids and everything. What this quote really illustrates is the salience of children and the positive valence that children have for men and women in low-income communities. How even young people like Brianna, who's only 18, is talking with her very, very new boyfriend about having children and actually going window shopping for baby things within weeks and months of the courtship starting. We also learned in these communities that the phrase, I want to have a baby by you, is viewed as a high form of social praise. In my daughter's middle and high school, this would not be a very effective line for a young man to try to use with the young women, but it tends to be very effective and is sometimes, though not always meant sincerely in these low-income communities. Madeleine, an 18-year-old Puerto Rican woman with a four-year-old child, tells us a very quintessential quote in the beginning when you first like a guy a lot, you want to have his baby. Lisa, 32 white with two teenage kids, is thinking back on how she got pregnant with her first child. She tells us from day one, I'd say within a week of being with him, he wanted to have a baby with me. He talked about how pregnant women are beautiful and it would be beautiful if we had a baby. Again, a very different discourse than you would hear in most middle-class communities and we heard this across African-American, Puerto Rican, and white respondents. We also learned, at least from the mother's point of view, that the fathers tend to think it's very important to establish a blood tie with the mother. Listen to Lena, a 15-year-old white mother with a 15-month-old child. She says, my boyfriend wanted me to get pregnant so that I won't leave him, so that I'll always stay with him forever. Then he said to me, when you have kids by somebody, they'll always go back to you. Zeora, 15 white newborn child, I should say here that the average age for the sample is 25. I just happened to be quoting a couple of 15-year-olds in a row here. She says, I asked my 19-year-old boyfriend, Tom, what do you want from your birthday? For your birthday? And he was like, for you to be pregnant. Lisette, 18 African-American, two-year-old child. She's talking about her boyfriend, Sean, who was 17 at the time. She tells us that's all he kept talking about is having a baby. I actually got pregnant even though I was only in the ninth grade on purpose because he wanted a baby so bad. And we're going to talk about this very positive, strong positive valence of children throughout the talk. We also learned something really interesting about contraception. When I give these talks, Maria talks about this research around the country, people typically ask us, do these people know about birth control? Yes, they do. In fact, in Philadelphia high schools, virtually every Philadelphia high school has a family planning clinic on site. I was recently talking to a student who's researching one of these family planning clinics. And the average clinic sees, in the average high school, apparently sees 40 kids a day. These kids have ready and frequent access to birth control. We also learned that in the relationships themselves, most of the couples used contraception. Initially, he used a condom. She used some form of birth control. But when the relationship reached another level, when the couple defined themselves as an exclusive pair, these practices stopped. In terms of condoms, ongoing use of condoms connotes sexual mistrust. It means somebody is not sure of the other person's fidelity because condom use is associated with sexually transmitted diseases. But in the case of birth control, it's kind of harder to explain. Nonetheless, contraception stops. This doesn't mean there is a decision to try to have a baby, but the practice of contraception lapses. It's also important to note that these young women are generally quite confident of their ability to raise children. And because they've been enmeshed in rich networks full of children that they've helped to raise. Just to give you a couple of examples, Sonya, 23, Puerto Rican with a three-year-old child, tells us, I was the responsible one. I was already a mom. I would cook, clean, do everything else. I've always been a mom. That's why it wasn't nothing new to me. The destiny, 18 white with two toddlers, says, I was taking care of my little sister and my little brother anyway. I got patients, a lot of patients. It wasn't like I wasn't able to take care of no kids anyway. So let's talk about the pregnancy. As I said before, cobbles usually move from courtship to conception in less than a year. Thus it may not be surprising to you that very few of these births result from a conscious plan between two people. However, it is also true that very few of these births result from contraceptive failure. In fact, 65% of these mothers' most recent births were characterized by them as neither planned nor avoided. What do I mean by this? Let me show you with some representative quotes. Violet white 16 with a five-month-old child. We ask her, did you plan to get pregnant? She says, no, not really. In a way I did, in a way I didn't. I was confused. I wanted to be a mom and I didn't not want to be. It was back and forth. I don't know. I just wanted a baby, I guess. Alina 17 white two-year-old child. As I got older, around 14, I was on the pill, so I couldn't get pregnant. But I was confused. I wanted to have a baby, but just not at that time, you know. But I always loved kids. I would go through a time where I would try to get pregnant. But then I would figure, well, how am I going to raise this baby? I didn't know whether this week I wanted to try or next week I didn't. But I was always thinking about it. Always. Okay. So what these quotes really tell us is mothers feel a profound sense of ambivalence about whether and when they should have children, but also a powerful desire to have children. Why that is, is something I'll discuss in a moment. However, once the conception occurs, most mothers tell us that they decided that the responsible way to deal with a pregnancy even in unplanned pregnancy is to carry that child. Listen to Michelle, 31 African American with a seven-year-old and two-year-old twins. I don't believe in having abortions. If I didn't want it to happen, I would have protected myself better. It's here. I have to deal with it. So that's what I did. I dealt with it. Because if I didn't want to get pregnant, I should have done something to prevent it. This is a very, very common quote across all of our racial and ethnic and age groups. Brianna, who we heard from earlier, 16 African American, a one-year-old child. Even though it was a mistake, I didn't want to take it out on the baby and be like, oh, I'm going to get an abortion. He's a mistake. That's just not me. You know, that's just not how I go about doing things. Now, this is one of the most interesting things from a middle-class point of view. Because for a middle-class girl growing up in Philadelphia's main line, who got pregnant by accident at 16 or 17, as these young women did, the responsible thing to do would probably be not to carry that child deterrent. However, in these social milieu, carrying a child deterrent is a way to establish adult competence, to show that you're willing to stand up to the challenge that fate has placed at your feet. So again, a very, very striking contrast to what might be happening in a lot of middle-class communities. So we now know how women respond to unplanned pregnancies or less than perfectly planned pregnancies. But what about men? In about half of the cases, women said men reacted fairly positively and were fairly supportive throughout the pregnancy. But in the other half of the cases, and this was even true for men who had encouraged women to get pregnant, who had used lines like, I want to have a baby by you. The response was very much evidence of their strong ambivalence toward becoming fathers. Denial of paternity, pressuring the woman to terminate the pregnancy, abandoning the woman, domestic violence, infidelity, and what I call ripping and running or kind of just general wild behavior, going out and drinking with your brothers, your buddies, doing drugs, selling drugs. All of these kinds of behaviors escalate during the pregnancy. So the pregnancy is a time that's very, very fraught for these young couples. She's decided to deal with it. She's moving on, and he is oftentimes subverting her efforts to do that. A very, very tense time in the couple relationship. Nevertheless, most of these couples reach the moment of the baby's birth intact. Fathers seem very, very attached to the idea of having a child once that child is a reality, and they could no longer do anything to prevent that child from coming into the world. Mothers very much want their children to have fathers. One mother told us, I really want my baby to have a father, even if he's not a very good father. They don't want especially their children to be fatherless in the way that they were fatherless. So the baby is a very powerful motivation for these young couples to stay together, and many do either survive this very rough period, or they reunite at the baby's birth. When the Fragile Family Survey that many of you are familiar with, this is a nationally representative survey of non-marital births, interviews these couples right after the baby is born. We learn that most see a good chance of marriage. When these couples, both the moms and dads, are asked, what are the chances you're going to get married? The vast majority say there's at least a 50-50 chance of getting married, and a fairly large majority say there's a good or certain chance they're going to marry each other. But as we interviewed a subset of these Fragile Families couples in a qualitative study, we call TLC3, that my graduate student Joanna Reed and I have been working on. She's here in the audience. We learn that they see marriage as four, five, or more years off. They also evidence a very strong rejection of the shotgun marriage norm, but see that a shared child is a powerful reason to stay together. For them, a shotgun marriage indicates you're not really taking the marriage seriously. You're only getting married because of the baby, and this is seen as a very bad reason to get married. Let me just read you two quotes that kind of illustrate this reuniting at the moment of birth. Milly, age 27, Puerto Rican, three children, and this was between her second and actually during her third birth that this quote is in reference to, tells us, he left me when I wouldn't have the abortion he wanted. He said he fell out of love. He couldn't deal with it, and he left. And he was with a couple of girls out there. After the whole pregnancy by myself, he came back after the baby was born. He wanted to be with me again. Angelica 19 white with a two year old child. She's been in a three year relationship with her son's father who cheated on her during the pregnancy. She tells us, I believe like people do change when our son was born, it just kind of fell into place. He changed. She did a 360. Like granted, he's still an asshole sometimes, but he can be saved definitely. There's something worth saving. Another woman said, you got to weed through the weeds and there's a lot of weeds. Just to give you a flavor of that. These are data drawn from the fragile families. And child well-being study. Hope that didn't get on tape. These are baseline results for romantically involved couples. These are couples interviewed right after the birth. About 80% of the couples in their fragile family studies said that they were romantically involved at the time of the birth. Look at the characteristics of the mothers and fathers who have nonmarital children. And again, this is a nationally representative sample of such couples in large cities. 40% of the dads have already been incarcerated. 30% of the dads are in less than $10,000 last year. 25% currently unemployed. And really the most striking thing about this table is the last line. 61% of nonmarital children are born into a relationship where either he, she, or both already have a child with a previous partner. Thus, despite the very high hopes for marriage are couples evidence at the time of the baby's birth, it is not that surprising that the fragile family study also shows that only about 15% of such couples, of all of the couples in this study, had married by the three-year mark, whereas 50% had broken up. We're going to now return to Philadelphia and the eight Philadelphia neighborhoods to try to understand why there are so many breakups and so few marriages among young couples who seem so committed to staying together, at least for the sake of the baby, and so hopeful about marriage. First of all, I think one of the main conclusions that really permeate the data are that childbearing and marriage are not decisions that go together. If you read chapter four in the book, it's really, really vividly clear that when women are talking about marriage, they're really not thinking about children at all. And in fact, in Joanna Reed's analysis of the data from TLC3, we almost never see any reference to children when adults are talking about marriage decisions, except when adults say, of course, having a child isn't a very good reason, isn't a good reason to get married. However, we argue that this doesn't indicate a disinterest in marriage, but rather the very high symbolic value couples hold for marriage. In response to the first point, the childbearing and marriage are not decisions that go together. Listen to Melissa, a 19-year-old white woman with a three-year-old child. She tells us, and again, this is a very typical quote, you should get married when you're 40. This way you got everything situated, and you know what you're getting into by then. She then pauses, reflects, and says, Maria did this interview, I guess the kids come first. I don't know, I guess that's just the way it goes. Yes, you really see this disconnection of marriage and childbearing. Couples hold a very high bar for marriage, and this marriage bar has both economic and relational components, and we'll talk about each of those. For the young woman we spoke to, marriage was the equivalent of making it. It was the frosting on the cake of a working-class respectability already achieved, whereas young couples in the 50s might have seen marriage as the beginning of a journey toward working or middle-class respectability. These young women see marriage almost as a consumption item, almost as something that marks that they've reached the end of a trajectory. When we ask couples what they see as necessary for marriage, they have a very similar laundry list of things they would like to accomplish before they get married. By the way, we did these interviews, we asked these same questions in the TLC-3 study, and one of the sites for TLC-3 was New York City. And even in New York City, couples would say, I want a white picket fence. Now I haven't seen very many white picket fences in Brooklyn lately, but this cultural notion of having the white picket fence before you get married is incredibly powerful across these studies. What is the white picket fence lifestyle about? It's about a mortgage on a modest home in Philadelphia. You can buy one of these in some of these neighborhoods for $5,000, very cheap housing market. In New York City, obviously, we'd pay a lot more. Some furniture, at least a car, maybe two, a car note, some savings, payment of debt, and are now left over to host a decent wedding. And this decent wedding notion is very, very powerful. Couples who don't marry in this way, but just go to the justice of the peace, are often derided by friends and relatives for not doing things the right way. We have couples in TLC-3 who get married by going to the justice of the peace, and they come home and tell their relatives, and they're told they didn't do it right, and they should be ashamed of themselves. So it's a very powerful cultural notion. Champagne, 17 African-American, six-month-old child, offers a quote that's very typical. After everything is situated the way I want it to be situated, then I'll be ready to get married. After I have a house, and a car, and everything, and I'm financially stable, just a job and everything, and can pay for the wedding, then I'll get married. Okay. We used to assume the reason couples weren't getting married was because they couldn't afford to set up a household together. This is definitely not true for these women, many of whom have managed to set up households, co-habiting houses with their boyfriends already, and indeed in the fragile family study, half of all of the couples are already to living together when the child is born. This white picket-fenced lifestyle is about something much more culturally significant than just being able to set up a household together. It is also very strong in these interviews that it is not respectable to meet before meeting this economic bar. Some people say to us, well if the men just babysit it instead of work, would the woman marry them then? No, they wouldn't because that's not respectable. And the more respectable the couple, the more they hold on to these notions that they're going to meet this economic bar first because that's the right way to get married. Now, the part of this talk I love the most is this slide. When we typically think about a white picket-fenced lifestyle, we think of mom at home and dad going to work. This is not at all the vision the vast majority of our mothers held. In fact, they believed it was vitally important and emphasized to us over and over again that both they and their partners be economically set before marriage. And in fact, I would go so far as to say is that many of these women have a strong aversion to economic dependence on a man. Now, there are several reasons for this. First of all, women are very worried about their partner's patriarchal sexual expectations. And they're worried that if they don't earn money, they won't have the power to negotiate for equal say in the relationship. They're also very worried about many of the bad behaviors that they suffered during pregnancy. The cheating, the beating, the ripping and running. And they think money will buy them power. And in fact, they can threaten to leave unless the man shapes up and does his share. If you read the book, the story of Dominique is a perfect example of how important it is to women to have earnings of their own in order to control the behavior of their male partners. And finally, of course, having money of one's own is insurance against breakup, even though these mothers very strongly believe they're only going to marry once. That's why they want the big wedding, right? They're going to do it once, and a big wedding symbolizes that. And that marriages for life, they're still very mistrustful of men. And in the back of their minds, they're already constructing the bailout plan at the same time that they're thinking about constructing a relationship that's going to last for a lifetime. Marie 35, white with three middle schoolers says, I think you should have your own self-established definitely. Realistically, it doesn't matter how religious you are, marriages end. So yeah, you definitely should have your own life just in case. As I said, there were two parts to this bar, the economic bar and the relationship bar. And this is actually the more interesting of the two. Young women believe that they, their partners, and the relationship itself needs to be ready for marriage. Now keep in mind that these women have had children already with these male partners, okay? But they believe that after the birth, it's going to take them as a couple years to attain the sufficient relational maturity for marriage. Why is this? First of all, mistrust is high. If I would choose one word to describe my experiences in these communities, and I think Maria would agree, it would be the word mistrust. Mistrust permeates almost all social interactions in these communities, as my three years in Camden taught me, and it permeates romantic relationships as well. But women want more than just a trusting relationship. They also want a best friend, a partnership of equals. They've really taken on this middle-class notion that they should be able to have it all, a really fulfilling relationship with their male partners. And they also believe that the normative demands of marriage are higher than those for cohabiting couples. Joanna Reed is in a wonderful analysis of this looking at the TLC3 data. And what she has found is that behaviors that couples deem acceptable within cohabitation are not acceptable, not deemed acceptable within a marriage, and in fact would break a marriage up. So if Joanna is right, cohabitation allows couples to stay together even when their relationships don't meet the standards for marriage. And there may be trouble in those relationships, both economic and relationship trouble. Sandra tells us she's a 21-year-old Puerto Rican with a five-year-old and an 18-month-old. She's very typical. Look at me. I've been with my boyfriend for six years and we have two kids and I'm not ready yet for marriage. I wouldn't marry somebody until I knew that person really good. I just don't go to the church and say I'm going to marry some guy. And then later I'm going to break up. No. We also see in these interviews that women worry that men will feel more right to control them. If they marry, they're again worried that marriage will somehow activate these patriarchal sex role expectations that their men hold. And they strongly believe that divorce is a sacrilege. Most of our women are not particularly religious, but we hear this word sacrilege over and over and over again in these interviews. It's really interesting. And it's a very important way of constructing the self as a moral self and as a respectable self. Nikki, who's 18, African-American and the mother of a newborn, says, the vows tell you everything. You have to be there for that person until death do you part. When you get to a marriage, you have to understand that it's a big step that you're taking and that that is the person you've chosen to be with for the rest of your life. And if you really know the words the rest of your life and you start getting that voice in the back of your head, oh, that's a long time. Maybe you shouldn't get married. Okay, here we bounce back just for a moment to the Fragile Family Survey. The Fragile Family Survey actually followed couples and looked at the factors that predicted marriage one year after birth. And we see here that the first two categories are really about that relationship bar and really give evidence that this relationship bar is real. The last four categories, however, are really about this relationship bar, the first part about the economic bar, the second about the relationship bar, mistrust, the quality of the couple relationship, pro-marriage attitudes, okay, all are important in predicting transition to marriage. So this is apparently not true. Apparently not just lip service, but these are real barriers that once couples surmount, do tend to lead to more marriage, okay. So we know from the Fragile Family Survey that only 15% of all women get married within three years of a birth of all couples, I should say, but that 50% breakup, we looked at our data to see the reasons mothers gave for breakup and found that the much touted financial reasons for breakup were indeed important. However, usually when mothers talked about finances, they didn't talk about the amount of money their man made per se. Rather, they talked about the source of his income, i.e. crime is not a good source, it's not very family friendly way of earning money. They talked about the stability of his income and they talked about his willingness to stay steadily employed. Okay, but beyond that, the more salient reasons, and in fact, almost all women gave one of the bottom five reasons, even if they named a financial reasons. Finances, I think, were only in one case the sole reason for breakup. Criminal involvement and the incarceration that so often follows, substance abuse, infidelity, infidelity is a huge story in the breakups of our fragile families, couples in TLC3, and domestic violence. And again, the infidelity and domestic violence reported here are usually repeated and chronic, not episodic. Couples seem to be able to recover from a one-time incident, but these are generally chronic cases. Some people say to us, these couples have too high of a bar for marriage. And sometimes when I read these quotes, I think that's right, but then I go back to this slide and I think, wow, many of these women are in relationships of really dangerously low quality. And so the liberal critique of the Bush plan to try to restore marriage among the poor has a lot of substance to it as well. These are often relationships that are plagued with very, very serious problems. Some people say, well, maybe, since the men aren't able to make a family wage, they're exerting their masculinity in all of these inappropriate ways, kind of compensate for what they aren't bringing into the family. And there may be some truth to that. You may be asking yourself at this point, what about the kids? These women have such high standards for marriage. Why don't they addition their male partners as carefully, for fatherhood, at least as carefully as they addition their male partners for marriage? What we learn from the story that promises I can keep tells is that marriage is viewed as a lifelong quest. Well, kids are something that kind of naturally occur along the way, as the quote I read earlier said, well, I guess kids come first. That's just the way it goes. These women hope that the men who fathered their children will become the loving life partners they've always dreamed about and wanted. They hope this will be the case, but they're not counting on it. In the meantime, children provide these women with very, very valuable socioemotional resources, socioemotional resources that are in short supply elsewhere. And I'll read you some quotes in a bit, just to illustrate this. When we sorted out these quotes, Maria did this analysis. We learned that four themes come up over and over again. We asked women, what would your life be like with your children? We thought they'd say, oh my gosh, I'd be an MBA right now, or I would, you know, there are really high aspirations typically among poor teens. I'd be a lawyer or even I'd have a steady job, but instead they say, my baby saved me. I would be nowhere without my baby. I would be ripping and running the streets. I would be going nowhere fast. And in fact, they achieved everything that's positive about their lives to the fact that they've had children. Children provide them in particular with order. Now middle-class women who've had kids, who look at this slide, say, my life is not orderly since I've had children. But what we're talking about here is structure, kind of a sense of meaning, a sense of, you know, if you think about a typical young woman from 18 to 21 years old and growing from a very poor community who's experienced in school failure and lots of other problems in her life, a baby brings order. You've got to get up at a certain time in the morning. You've got to go to work. You've got to be responsible. You've got to diaper that infant. You've got to feed that infant. Some suddenly your life has order, personal validation, a sense of purpose, and for many of these relationally impoverished women companionship. Let me read you three quotes that will really give you a flavor of how powerful children are in the lives of the women who bear and raise them. Aliyah 27, African American with a 10-year-old child. Some people may say it was for the wrong reasons and she's explaining how she got pregnant. But it was like too much was going around, going on around me. I guess it was my way out of all these situations. I wanted a child because it was mine. It was for love. Pamela middle-aged white mother of seven talking about her first pregnancy. I think I got pregnant mainly because I wanted to be loved. I went through my childhood without it. Somehow I knew that I would grow up and have kids. Nobody could take that away from me. It was something that would love me. I would be able to love it unconditionally. There was no strings attached to it. And Dina 20 white with a two-year-old child and about to give birth to her second. I wanted to have a baby. It wasn't like everybody else had a baby. I really wanted to have a family. I wanted to have somebody to take care of. My mother wanted me to get a diploma first and live my life. But to me, that baby was life. As I said before, we thought mothers would mourn lost opportunities. Instead, they credit their children virtually. Everything is positive about their life. They characterize their lives before children is marred by school failure, depression, drug and alcohol abuse, volatile personal relationships. Oftentimes they say, my life is just spinning out of control. Children, babies come into that picture. And in some sense, at least for a child, offer a powerful solution, a powerful sense of meaning and identity that combat some of theonomy that these women experience in late adolescence and early adulthood. The stresses of an impoverished adolescence, and if you spent any time in these communities like we did, this would become clear to you, really breed a deep need for something positive to look to, something positive in life. And this sense that life is spinning dangerously out of control creates a profound drive to make life more meaningful. And just one more thing on that point, and that is children rise to the top of the list of potential meaning-making opportunities. Clearly, for lack of competition. Right, there's really no other clear avenue for most of these young women, at least in their view, for establishing meaning and identity. I'll talk about the racial differences in the Q&A. There are very few of them, although some of them are kind of interesting. So let's just conclude and revisit this issue of the spread of single parenthood. We argue based on these data, which are admittedly cross-sectional and not longitudinal, that the poor are responding to a redefinition of marriage that has been evolving over the last half-century, changing most dramatically since 1950. Consider the huge changes in family values that people like Arlen Thornton have spent the last 10 years helping us to document, 10 to 15 years. Opposition to premarital sex falls from two-thirds to one-third. Opposition to cohabitation falls from two-thirds to about 40 percent. I believe this is from 1970 to 1990. Opposition to non-marital childbearing falls dramatically. And oppositions to divorce with couples with children fell from half to one in five. Huge changes in family values among all Americans. Marriage, therefore, is no longer a cultural imperative. We could name a whole laundry list of things that have led to the weakening of this culture imperative, including the sexual revolution, the invention of the pill, and so on. But as marriage has lost much of its practical significance, we argue that the culture at large could afford to make marriage more special, more rarefied, and significant in its meaning. We argue that the rich and the poor are both adapting to this new high symbolic value for marriage. You guys, most of whom are in the middle class, are delaying marriage more. You're participating in serial cohabitations, and you're divorcing when your marriages aren't satisfactory. I hate to tell a tale on some of my graduate students, but you also seem to still be committed to the notion of waiting to have your children until after you're married. Only 5% of college educated women have children outside of marriage today. It's really quite amazing. Perhaps that's why on the third floor of the building at Northwestern University, where I used to work, where the computer lab is, sometimes the computers were logged on to the mainframe, but oftentimes they were logged on to eHarmony or match.com. The biological clock is ticking, Joanna is married. She wasn't one of those people, but now I'm going to get in trouble because this is going to be on the web. What are the poor doing? They're delaying marriage too, and in fact, demographers are showing us they're delaying marriage almost as much and among subgroups even longer than the middle class. They're also divorcing more too, but they're marrying less overall. Why? We argue the answer is pretty simple. That the poor and the middle class have a similar standard for marriage, and by the way, if you don't believe this, read an absolutely amazing paper by Pam Smock, Wendy Manning, and Meredith Porter that shows that among a working and lower middle class group of women, you see almost the same exact standards, economic standards anyway, for marriage that you see in our sample. We use this study as evidence that the poor have adopted a largely middle class, or at least a lower middle class standard for marriage, but they're far less likely to meet this standard, so they marry less. Meanwhile, there's a high rate of nonmarital childbearing among the poor, but not among the middle class. Why is this so? We argue that it's about meaning making and identity. For these young women, it is very clear that children not marriage, education, or career are the center of their meaning-making activity. And again, this doesn't mean that middle class women don't love children. I have two of them, but children can rise to the top of the list of potential meaning-making opportunities for mere lack of competition, and they often do in these low-income communities, and this will become crucial for the policy point I'm going to make in just a moment. But first, listen to this quote, my favorite. This is a young woman. I believe she's in her late 20s, Maria. She is engaged to her baby's father and about to get married. In an interview just very close to the wedding date, she says to Maria, passionately, my son is my heart. When I have hard times, I always tell myself I wanted him. Even if I get that rock on my finger, and she shows us the rock on her, the actual rock on her finger, that white-picked fence, that deed that says the house is mine, I'll still have my son in case anything goes sour. I'll say to my husband, you leave. This boy is mine. Just a couple more slides. The moral hierarchy of the works in reverse in some of these low-income communities, in comparison to a middle-income community on Philadelphia's main line. For the poor, it is better to have children outside of marriage than to marry foolishly and risk a divorce. Three quotes. One woman says to us, I'd rather say, yes, I had all my kids at a wedlock and say I married this idiot. It's like a pride thing. So white woman, one of Maria's interviews. Another white woman from South Philly says, I'm not going to make any promises I can't keep. This is where the title of the book comes from. She can keep the promises to her kids, but she's not sure she can keep the promises to her kid's father. And finally, this is actually a quote from the TLC3 study. I don't believe in divorce. That's why none of the women in my family are married. So let's get to the policy message because the best part of all presentations like this is the Q&A. Our policy point is that meaning is really essential to this story. And as long as young women in poor communities have few avenues of forging meaning and identity, they'll probably continue to look to children as sources for meaning activity. And they'll probably continue to have children far sooner than people think they should and in less than ideal circumstances. Just to give you a little hopeful nugget to take home with you, Belsaw Hill and a collaborator have looked at a wide range of after-school programs for teenage girls. And they found that some of these after-school programs have been very effective at preventing teenage pregnancy. But it seems that a crucial ingredient to these very high-quality programs is a service learning component. This is in the book, the edited volume, 1% for kids if anyone wants to look this up. Why would a service learning component be so crucial? To these programs. Well, Brianna and Elia and Dina would tell you that it's precisely the opportunity to make meaning to give of yourself and to serve someone else that creates such a powerful drive to have children in the first place. Find another way, another avenue to provide for meaning and identity, both by giving young people a sense that they have some hope of a piece of the American dream and they have some chance of giving meaningfully to others. And perhaps things can be different for the next generation of mothers and kids. Hey, questions? We've got a microphone here and a portable mic and it will be very helpful if you'll stand and identify yourself when you ask a question. Okay. Hi, Kathy. I'm Sarah Wabb. My question is this. This seems to me that the story about women is really about men. For example, I'm struck by the new twist on the economic bar. It seems to me that there are middle-class women who also feel that both partners need to be economically set and that's part of the postponing marriage. But what they really mean is that they need to get set. The women, we're still getting our educated, we're still getting our job. We assume that our men will be, but these women are feeling, it seems to me, that their men need to get set and that the likelihood of that is low in these communities. And you said a couple of things about who wanted the babies and that the men were using a line or subverting a woman or whatever. And this seems to impute some meaning. I actually know you, so I know you must have talked to these men in some way, shape, or form. I'd like to know what the men say and agree with the women. We have men in the TLC3 study and we also have a corollary study of over 500 men in four cities. So I know a lot about this topic. I'm in the midst of writing this book. Great setup, Sarah. First of all, in terms of the economically set piece, these women really feel that they need to be economically set and their partners need to be economically set. Again, this very, very middle-class notion that you hear in some of, I think, Pam and Wendy and Meredith's work, or a really middle-class sense of being set, having your educate, you hear themes of having your education completed, of making sure you're in your career. So you hear the kinds of things that you and I, or are, in my case, my younger students, say to each other. So again, this points to this adoption of very middle-class notions of marriage. Now, in terms of wantedness in men, Paula Englund and I, and Joanna are writing a paper about pregnancy intentionality, drawn from the TLC3 data. And we've been working on this paper for two years. We have 75 couples. We have, I think, over 700 pregnancies because we have the whole fertility history, both the man and the woman. And we're trying to look at this in depth from what we can tell. The men are at least as likely to want these kids as the women are. And in fact, are more happy when they find out about the pregnancies than the women are. But yet they act in these very ambivalent ways. Some people say, well, you're just not separating out the really crappy men from the really good men. So if you really understood who is who, you'd figure this story out. But indeed, in many cases, it is the very men who wanted the kids, and were happy when they heard about the pregnancy that began to act in the ambivalent ways. Now let's think about what might be going on for the men. Number one, for them, the rewards go down just as the demands go up. Suddenly, his 20-hour shift at McDonald's, which made him a great boyfriend, and make him a crappy potential father, right? Meanwhile, she's sick all the time. She doesn't want to go out. And her attention shifts more and more to the baby. So he's losing her in some profound sense. Secondly, there's the specter of child support. I've done lots of child support. Sheldon and Sandy have published some of my work on child support. These men are really afraid of the specter of child support. Although they want these children desperately, as one man told us, I just want some evidence I was on the planet. Very strong motivations for guys to have children for meaning and identity, too. They're also aware that at the mother's whim, they could be completely cut off from the child's life forever. And at the same time, the state will go after them for child support. In some states, throwing them in jail if they don't pay. If they flee state lines to avoid child support enforcement, they could also go to prison. So the potential obligations for the fathers are huge. But at the same time, they don't have very much control about what kind of relationship they'll be able to have with those children. And the women really control that, and they know it. So although we usually think of men as much more powerful than women in the family, here's a case in which women really do hold the cards precisely because they're not married to the men. And indeed, in another paper I wrote in Social Problems in 2001, I really argue that this need for control and this low trust of men is really driving part of this process. By remaining unmarried, you remain, you have more legal control, and the men have less legal control. So that will be a big theme for this future work. Hi, my name is Natalie Moore, and I was wondering if you could talk about the racial differences you found. A good question. I've actually, this was really fascinating. We set up this whole study to look at racial and ethnic differences. We chose eight neighborhoods. We did ethnographic fieldwork of each of these neighborhoods. We sampled evenly among three racial and ethnic groups. We used interviewers of both Puerto Rican and African American interviewers. Tishika Henson, who's a student here, was one of those interviews. I don't know if she's in the audience today. She's in the law school here. Wonderful, very gifted interviewer. And we were absolutely astonished at how few racial and ethnic differences we found. Now, what's really interesting is that the African American women in our sample had somewhat higher aspirations for marriage than the other groups. We immediately went to the survey data and found that there's some evidence that that's true overall. There are a couple of really interesting papers that indicate that African Americans actually have very strong marital aspirations. They may be a little bit stronger all-elsequel than those of other racial and ethnic groups. We also found that the evidence, the statistical evidence in general on aspirations shows very few differences by race and ethnicity. So our findings are very much in line with other research, which really shows convergence in aspirations for marriage among racial groups. We also found some differences in the prevalence of problem behaviors that are sort of interesting. The domestic violence was most common among our whites and Puerto Ricans. We think this is partly because African Americans were less likely to cohabit. This is also true nationally. And therefore, the lack of cohabitation might have been a protective factor for these women. We also found that criminal involvement in incarceration was much more problematic for the African American women than for women in the other groups. And we found that for the Puerto Rican, that infidelity was kind of an equal opportunity relationship record. So there are all these kind of interesting things. We also found this fascinating pattern among the Puerto Ricans of going for marriage and of assuming, of a cultural assumption, that if you're living together and you have a child together, you're as good as married. Okay, so we did see these very interesting community patterns. But by and large, this is a story about class and not about race. We've forgotten about class as American social scientists, but we're beginning to pay a lot more attention to it. And the class cleavages in American society, which, by the way, you can see in family attitudes, one survey asks, the GSS asks Americans to their level of agreement to a statement, childless people lead empty lives. Our authority has looked at racial differences. But I looked at educational differences in responses to this question and found that all else equal, high school dropouts are five times as likely to agree or strongly agree with that statement than college graduates. And a similar, I am in another survey, the National Survey of Families and High-Solds, finds also very large differences in this sort of social value of children type item. So I'm very interested in class and class differences because of this kind of amazing finding in the work of these very, very distinctive patterns that seem to cut across racial and ethnic groups. Having said that, we have to realize this study is strange in some ways. It's done in a single locale, and it really only selects people living in poor neighborhoods. Now whites who are poor and live in poor neighborhoods are pretty rare in the U.S. And the reason they're rare is because whites have lots of advantages and it's easy for them to get out of poor neighborhoods because of these advantages. So our white sample is especially disadvantaged. If we had a more diverse white sample, a sample that didn't live in poor neighborhoods, maybe we would see something different. So I'll leave it there. Thank you. I was wondering if there were any differences in the quality of the relationship based on the sex of the baby? That's an interesting question. In the interviews you do hear, and I think we hear this in TLC 3-2, men getting really excited about boys, but I believe the quantitative evidence hasn't found a lot of evidence for differences in fathers' connections or in relationship qualities, depending on the gender of the child. It's certainly something you hear in the data, you think it's going to be really important, but it hasn't tended to pan out in the more quantitative work. Boy, the men definitely see their role as fathers of boys differently and really believe their boys cannot become men without them. Something they don't see as necessary for their girls, but even in our father's study, the fathers tend to be as involved with their girls as they are with their boys. Perhaps it's because they feel greater pressure with the boys, and therefore, if they can't do the kind of job they want to do, they simply apt out altogether. But we're going to be looking at that thing. Hi, my name is Javier Espinosa, and I was just wondering, do these women think about or know about the psychological and emotional trauma that their children will face when they grow up in a stable environment? These mothers, they will overwhelmingly say to you, children should be raised by two parents, and children should be raised within marriage. They will overwhelmingly espouse that as an abstract view. But at the same time, these abstractions really have very little relevance in their day-to-day lives. They're confronted with a pregnancy which was not exactly planned, although they really wanted the baby, but they were very ambivalent. They decide to do the... It's a very path-dependent story. They decide to do the right thing and carry the baby to term, because that's what responsible moral people do in their view. Then they have to decide, is this marriage the best thing for this baby? Well, during the pregnancy, their boyfriend has been running around, selling drugs, beating them up, seeing other women. No wonder they take a wait-and-see attitude. No wonder they say, wait a minute. Maybe we should wait three, four, five, six years before we decide whether this relationship is really ready for marriage. And when you really ask them and press them about these questions, they really believe they can do just as good of a job as a two-parent family. And they're very confident about their abilities as mothers and as parents. The survey data also seem to indicate that their own life chances will not be hurt much by this baby because they're so bad already, but there's some survey evidence that indicates that indeed this might not be the best thing for kids. The single parenting, certainly, but also the young childbearing, and they don't realize this. They really don't think their kids will be harmed by the choices that they're making. Yes, I'm not in control of this. I love the talk. It was great and really interesting, and I wish I'd already read the book, but I had two... It's only $16.50 on Amazon. Right, there are copies for sale in back. Great independent bookstore right here. But I had two comments, one of which is probably going to be something you'll bring out more, I think, when you're in this book, you're writing on the men. But another thing that seemed to me to be relevant in terms of women's kind of maybe superior power vis-à-vis the child is that women often would have housing, I would think. They would be the ones in control of the housing because women access some subspace housing. But then the other thing is something completely different. And by training, I'm a social worker as well as an anthropologist, and so I'm kind of putting a little bit of a biological anthropological kind of spin on this, which is not something I necessarily am training, but it's interesting to me because this argument has been so kind of co-opted by the right and under Bush's agenda, you know, pro-family, pro-marriage. Yet in so many other cultures, the idea of not having children would be what would be pathologized, not the idea of having children. That's what these women pathologize. Right, exactly. And so it's interesting to me because instead of asking the question, your talk today seems to really lend support instead of asking the questions what's so pathological about these women having children. It's almost like, well, what is... Why is it that middle-class women aren't having children or middle-class girls aren't having children? Well, actually, we start the book by kind of playing off of Sylvia Hewlett's book, which talks about this, you know, it's a very controversial book. I'm not espousing the book in any way about this creeping non-choice among middle-class high-flyers who wait too long to have a baby, you know, and we sort of juxtapose that with these low-income women who seem to have more children than they know what to do with at least from middle-class observers' eyes. And while most Americans think that the ultimate tragedy is that these women had children too soon, from these women's point of view, the ultimate tragedy is missing. Your chance to have a child, one of the women in the book, an honor student at Strawberry Mansion High School who gets a scholarship to college and gets pregnant in the middle of her freshman year, has a boyfriend campaigning her to get an abortion. She's from a very middle-class family, although she lives in this poor neighborhood, and her grandmother says to her, and she's 19 at the time, you better have this baby because you never know. You don't want to miss your chance of having a child. And we hear that again and again. Not having kids is unthinkable. Marriage, that's a luxury. That's kind of a consumption item. But childlessness is inconceivable because who are you? And what are you, and what is your life about if you don't have these? So great, great comment. You could probably write the book. Thanks for that. Hi, I had a question. In your interviews, did women talk about their reliance on extended family members and kinship networks with regards to childbearing and childrearing help, and were there any differences by race? This is, I think, one of the biggest myths propagated in the social science that poor women, and particularly African-American women, can simply rely on multiple generations of kids to raise their kids, and they don't need the help of their parents. We did find that the grandmother played a very powerful role across all three racial and ethnic groups. Maybe a little bit more among the African-Americans but a fairly important role. However, that grandmother was willing to help a little bit with a first baby for a while. But no decent mother keeps living with her mother. A decent mother provides a home for her child. A decent mother takes care of her child by herself. And in fact, these women would even say that it wasn't okay. Good mothers don't leave their children with their mothers unless they're going to work. Certainly not to rip and run the streets with their boyfriends. And those mothers who do that are scorned by good mothers. So what you can get out of your mother is fairly limited. And everybody in your community expects you to grow. I mean, you're having these kids. You better grow up and step up to your responsibility, particularly since you're using this pregnancy to construct yourself as a trustworthy and responsible moral person. So grandmothers crucial but not a substitute for independence or for relationships with kids' dads. Not in these mom's eyes. Hi, it was over 40 years ago that Daniel Patrick Moynihan identified that the Black families were coming unraveled and here we are in 2005. And a third of all children are born to single mothers and it's not just the Black community. It's the White community. It's everyone. Right. That's right. It's a very interesting historical moment. And yet, well, I'll say a couple of things about that. There are really two streams of entry into single parenthood, right? Middle-class women divorcing and lower-class women either divorcing or not married at all. From what we can tell, at least if you believe McLanahan and Sandifer, there are not many differences in the outcomes for children depending on the route that you get to unmarried to single parenthood or to becoming the child of a single parent. So when we typically look back at Moynihan, we think, isn't it terrible that lower-income people of all classes are now behaving in this way? But we also have to look at what's happening to the larger meaning and structure of marriage in our society and that, in fact, kids are streaming into single parent families in a variety of ways and no matter how they get there, they're doing more poorly on average than kids in two-parent married families. This is not to say that many single mothers aren't exceptional. We met amazing mothers in our times in these communities. But on average, kids do do worse. But, you know, the poor are not the soul. They're only half the story of what's happening in that, in this really profound demographic shift for children. Hi. My name is Emanuel. I'm in political science. I was really interested in what you said at the end about girls or young women making meaning through service and I was wondering if anyone in your survey, maybe some of the older women did find meaning through work or as they worked more, came to see work as something that was part of their sense of identity and how it came to evolve. Certainly. I mean, what's really interesting, I've spent most of my career stunning women in work, not women and family. This is relatively near to me, but women, even in the kinds of menial jobs that these kinds of women usually have, do tend to find meaning in their work and enjoy work and find work is a very important part of their identity. But what's interesting in these stories is that children provide the motivation to take these meaningful jobs, to take these menial jobs. And they in a sense infuse these menial, mindless, boring jobs that none of us would want. How many of us have held one of these jobs? I have. I wouldn't want to do it again. That's why we're here, right? They infuse these jobs with meaning and in fact this work takes on greater meaning because of the fact that they're not just doing it for themselves, but for their kids. Now certainly, you know, the best predictor of whether a woman will have a non-married birth is her chances of going to college. I think that's still true. So the sense that one can find meaning through work is presumably a very powerful route out of the kinds of decisions that these young women are making, but these women really don't, don't see that. And most of these women were already doing poorly in school when they had their children. And so they're responding to a set of closed doors they've already seen shutting in front of them. So we've got to do something different and we've got to restore a sense of hope. In it, the Camden City Hall, which is right on the river between Camden and Philadelphia, has these quotes from Walt Whitman on it. And Camden, you know is now the poor small city in America and the most dangerous city in America. Realize that when I moved in there. On one side of the tower it says, in a dream I saw a city invincible. I think that's a quote from Leaves of Grass. On the other side of City Hall it says, without hope, the people perish. Okay, so I always thought that was very profound and I think the sense of hope is really what's lacking. And children give hope and then fuse other activities like work with meaning and give motivation in a way that I think is really real and genuine for a lot of women. Can't they really enjoyed your talk and I look forward to reading the book. You told a really nice story I think about kind of a path that makes a lot of sense and even a lot of things bring true to me about why you, of course, want to have a child and why to a certain degree it makes sense to hold off on marriage. It all rings very true to me and I enjoyed listening to it. On the other hand I have a two-and-a-half-year-old and so I was wondering if you could say a little bit and yes it's the most, it's amazing experience it's the most meaningful thing I'm sure I'll ever do. But where I was going with that is I have a two-and-a-half-year-old and could you say a little bit about the decision to have a second, a third, a fourth, a fifth, a seventh child. That seems unfathomable to me. I mean it's amazingly hard. Right, it is amazingly hard. Now of course the average total lifetime fertility Phil Morgan tells me among women in this socioeconomic group is between 2.1 and 2.3 only a little higher than about 1.9 on average. But there are women in the extremes in this population and we found them in Philadelphia. This second child is interesting. You have the second child because you're a bad mother if you let your child remain an only child. Good mothers provide their children with playmates. So once again very path-dependent process once you have that child then you're obligated to provide. There's a child, oh my gosh Tashika one of our interviewers and her daughter. But once you have that first child you're obligated to give that child a playmate. Okay. For your child. Right after that I mean these women seem to get great enjoyment. Tashika interviewed a lot of our really young African-American moms in North Philly. But women really seem to get a great deal of enjoyment. Sometimes it's just solidify a new and hopeful relationship. Right? With a new partner there's a tremendous amount of multiple partner fertility in this population. So once you know you lose hold of that first relationship and you have a new and hopeful relationship sometimes you want to seal that relationship with a child. And so these are the kinds of things that go on. There is a small group who just seem to be living such high risk in desperate lifestyles that they're just not thinking and they may have pregnancy after pregnancy after pregnancy. These are the women that end up on the news. They're fairly rare. They're there. Okay. And they oftentimes have mental illness. They're extremely depressed. Depression is very common in this population. So it's hard to take proactive measures to prevent pregnancy. It's pretty hard to prevent a pregnancy actually. Right. You've got it. And you have to have a very systematic set of behaviors and so on. So you can get to the point if you're living a very high risk lifestyle that you really don't care. And we have mothers saying this just you'll see these stories in the book. I really didn't care one way or another. I didn't care if I did and I didn't care if I didn't. And again, that's not the typical story but it can happen. So those, you know that part of the population is is interesting. And that's the part we usually hear about but it's not it's not the typical story. Hi, Dr. Eden, Tony Perez. More of a comment really than a question I enjoyed the talk quite a bit. I was struck by how what odds so much of your findings are with current policy admin initiatives, mainly the administration's big pro marriage push that they're on. Given the characteristics I think the young men you identify they're not exactly prime marriage material. In fact, if anything else maybe the last thing these women need to do is be thinking about marriage given some of the statistics you quote. And yet you seem to have a lot of compelling evidence in support of education. Namely that these women need more sources of meaning making, more things to hinge their hopes on in their life, something besides the children for them to have this sense of purpose and order and validation. And I think you'd mentioned some effective after school programs that might have been useful in those regards. And yet I say this and with great cheer and tour the current round of budget cuts the current proposals that are essentially getting the Department of Education I think an overwhelming share of the proposed cuts seem to be for the very programs it would be most effective in giving these women additional sources of meaning. Well at the same time we have the right lining up at the gates with the flurry of pro marriage initiatives. I don't see how we could be in a more wrong headed direction giving. Let me say two things about the marriage initiatives. I've actually learned a lot about the marriage initiatives because of this research and spent a lot of time especially in Oklahoma which is the national leader for marriage initiatives. I actually saw a curriculum test last Saturday of one of these marriage so-called marriage initiative programs. Fascinating stuff. First of all my critique of these programs is they start too late. They're focusing on this magic moment of birth. The pregnancies have been so painful and when you see that slide back there of all the guys that have already been incarcerated and out of work and stuff by the time the baby comes into the world obviously we have to start teaching young people how to have healthy meaningful safe relationships much younger than the magic moment of birth. So that's my main critique of these initiatives. But secondly I will say that these couples do have very poor relationship skills and they're desperate to have better relationships. What these now these marriage initiatives to the extent that they take money from poor children right are very distressing but the opportunity they offer low income couples to build skills that will lead to healthy relationships not only with their partners but with their employers and with their neighbors and with their mothers and with their relatives are I believe I cannot even believe I'm saying this very promising these from what I've seen this curriculum have almost nothing about marriage in them in fact the curriculum test I saw I did not mention the word marriage once and in fact the commissioner of the state got a little worried about this at one point and he said Dr. Eugen will you go up and ask them something about marriage so we can have something about marriage in this curriculum. They're really about building skills about the stuff I saw was about anger management we have 10 low income couples about to have babies this particular state is taking a prenatal approach because of all the problems and pregnancy and these guys were saying I've got to learn to start beating stop beating my partner some of the women were saying I've got to stop beating on my partner and one guy came out to the hall and said get me into domestic violence prevention program I'm out of control so what am I to conclude from this you know these couples have problems these problems can spill over to the kids this is not a bad thing what is a bad thing is not paying attention to the larger set of circumstances that are producing what we're talking about here not investing in opportunity in working almost none of these marriage initiatives pay any attention to these couples economic predicaments or to infusing couples with a sense of the hope they need to prevent pregnancies that you know that are coming in in less than ideal circumstances so this little piece of the puzzle in my view is not a bad piece but it's it's an exclusion to a lot of other pieces that we should also be paying attention to and given our financial situation as a country that's going to be hard to do good great comment thank you please join us please join us in the back there are copies of the book which you can buy from shaman drum and get a signed copy from kathy and maria there's also refreshments thanks again