Giuliani Tackles Illegitimacy
By HEATHER MAC DONALD
For decades, New York's mayors have responded to the challenge of the
city's swollen welfare rolls with the tired plea: Washington, send money! If
there remained any doubt that the current mayor, Rudolph W. Giuliani, is
different, he erased it on Wednesday, when, in his annual State of the City
speech, he took on one of the touchiest subjects in urban America today:
illegitimacy. He made explicit the connection between family breakdown
and the suffering of children, something few political leaders have had the
courage to do.
In 1996, Mr. Giuliani noted, more than half of all
births in New York City were out of wedlock; in
some neighborhoods the proportion reaches 80%.
These figures are stunning but not surprising, since
the city's official ideology has for decades treated
single "parenting" as simply one "lifestyle" choice
among many. Such a view is profoundly mistaken.
Illegitimacy is at the very center of the welfare
tragedy, dooming mothers to a life of poverty and
their children to far worse. Prisons, foster-care
homes and homeless shelters teem with fatherless
children. Unless two-parent homes again become
the norm, no amount of clever welfare-to-work
strategies, and certainly no amount of social services, will dent long-term
poverty and its social pathologies.
Natural Limits
As Mr. Giuliani noted, government faces natural limits when confronting a
problem as vast, complex and personal as out-of-wedlock pregnancies.
Yet the arena for action is large, and Mr. Giuliani can make New York a
welfare-reform model for the nation if he follows through on his strong
words. Here's what he should do:
Remain unequivocal in declaring that the most pressing issue
affecting child welfare is family breakdown. It may seem a
truism that marriage is the proper environment for raising children.
But in this city in this day and age, it will amount to a declaration of
war, spurring fierce opposition from liberal elites--including,
perversely, many self-styled child-welfare advocates. It's worth
taking them on. The persistently lagging well-being of inner-city
children--from low birthweight to school failure--is inextricably
linked to the prevalence of teen pregnancies and illegitimate births.
Imagine the public health benefits, not to mention the social benefits,
if just one-quarter of the energy now dedicated to preventing teen
smoking could come to bear on illegitimacy. The mayor should urge
church, school and community leaders to reinforce the message that
bearing a child out of wedlock is irresponsible, and, for men,
cowardly.
Abolish programs that encourage illegitimacy. Rather than
easing the way for single mothers, welfare reform must restore the
burden of having a child out of wedlock. New York City's public
schools actually have day-care facilities, known as LYFE centers
(an acronym for Living for the Young Family Through Education).
High school girls leave their infants in these extravagantly funded (at
$10,000 a student) nurseries while they go to class. The schools
demand nothing of the young mothers, who don't even have to feed
or visit their children during lunch period. Center advocates say
allowing the girls to hang out with their friends helps them preserve
some of the "giddiness" of adolescence--just what a teen mother
should lose as quickly as possible.
The existence of these centers sends precisely the wrong message: that
unwed motherhood is a normal adolescent rite of passage. Reformers
should replace them with special schools for unwed mothers that impose
the highest standard of responsibility and include a mandated curriculum in
child care. As my colleague Myron Magnet has proposed, they should
also experiment with closely supervised residential programs for single
teen mothers and their children, aimed at instilling in the children the skills
and the ethical sense that may have been missing in the mothers'
upbringing. Would such an arrangement stigmatize teen mothers? If it
does, so much the better. After all, the aim is to prevent illegitimacy.
Withhold additional benefits from mothers who have more
children while on welfare. In New Jersey the birthrate among
welfare mothers has fallen by more than 20% since the introduction
of such a policy.
Reward marriage, not illegitimacy. Each year New York, like
other urban centers, sets aside thousands of public-housing
apartments and federal housing vouchers for homeless
families--almost all of which, almost by definition, are families
without fathers. Reformers should instead give preference to
married parents, explicitly articulating the reason for doing so: that a
home in which both parents have publicly committed themselves to
each other and to their future children is the best environment for
children. So, too, with day care and other public benefits: Marriage
should be an advantage--or at least not a disadvantage.
Hold fathers accountable. In theory, the law requires welfare
mothers to cooperate with officials in establishing paternity. But this
requirement is seldom enforced, and less than 25% of New York
City's welfare recipients have child-support orders. Welfare
reformers should zealously pursue and enforce child-support
orders, strengthening the idea that fathers, not the state, bear
responsibility for children. If a father has little or no income, he
should be made to participate in the workfare program; if he is
already in it, his hours should increase. If a mother is on welfare, she
should have the option of requiring the father to perform her
required workfare duties, increasing her incentive to identify the
father.
Unparalleled Legacy
No single urban reform could have a greater effect, if successful, than
attacking the culture of single parenting. If Mr. Giuliani continues speaking
honestly about illegitimacy, if he adopts policies that match his words, and
if the city sees even a modest reduction in the number of children born out
of wedlock, he will leave an unparalleled legacy to the city and the nation.
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