How Do We Help Families?

Erin of Madison, South Dakota writes again with more thoughtful, insightful feedback:

Hi Bob,

I totally agree with you that children are better off with their parents. As a work-at-home mom to a 1-year-old, I live out that conviction daily. However, I think you’re missing the boat on something here. In this post you haven’t really addressed the issue of South Dakota having such a high rate of working mothers. You insinuate that the families with both parents working are doing so merely because they want more things. That may very well be the case for some, but there are many families for whom it’s essential to have both incomes.

I would really like to hear your proposals for making it easier for moms (or dads!) to stay home with their young children. A good portion of these moms are working out of necessity, so I think we need some proposals about how to improve the economic situation for families in our state. Any suggestions on how we can work to “ . . . bring the family back together and provide a healthy, reliable home life for our children”?

Thanks!

I realize that there are some situations where mothers simply must work outside the home, but I believe those instances are more rare than pop culture would have us believe. Still, you bring up a good point, and I believe the solutions lie on two levels. I’ll address the latter level first.

I know for a fact that in many families both parents work full time outside the home when they don’t need to. I won’t name names, but right now I am thinking of several families with whom I’m acquainted that have a combined family income of $50,000 to $100,000 (or more). Now, I have nothing against a family making that kind of money, and most of these folks are good people, but can we honestly say that it’s “necessary” to make that much money, especially when the children have to be left in the company of strangers for the best part of the day to make it happen? I simply do not think so. It wasn’t that many years ago that our family lived on my income only, which was considerably less than $25,000 a year before taxes (without tapping any type of government assistance, I should add), so I know it can be done. I know some families can make even less than that, but more on that shortly.

There are a number of things families can do to help make ends meet without having to send the children outside the home. One option many mothers already exercise is working from home. It could be something they create and market from home, it might be contracted work they can perform from home (such as stuffing envelopes, etc.), it could be work they do on the phone such as telemarketing or selling ads or collecting debts, or it might involve some type of work over an internet connection. Many companies today allow “telecommuting” even when many in that same company still go in to an office.

Other families develop creative schedules where one parent works part of the day out of the home and the other parent goes to a job outside the home after the first parent returns home. Obviously such a schedule is demanding and not a lot of fun, but it won't be forever. Besides, as I’ve asked before, “Aren’t our children worth some sacrifice?”

Family members can often help, such as grandma and grandpa, if they are nearby and are retired or semi-retired. Having family watching the children, even when it can’t be mom and dad, is infinitely better than dropping them off at an institution with people who are paid to take care of them instead of taking care of them because they love them.

Now, obviously these types of solutions are going to be impractical if not impossible for most single parents; there simply isn’t enough of one parent to spread around. This is the part where the state can have its greatest involvement to help get our society out of the terrible state it’s helped create through easy divorce and the so-called “safety net.” It comes down to what might be called “prevention.”

How many of us know people who’ve gotten married to a jerk or jerkess and ended up divorced…when the warning signs were there before they ever got married? I know a lot of people that fit that bill. In fact, I’ve been in a relationship or two in my single days that I now thank God he saved me from ending up in marriage (it wasn’t through my smarts that I was saved, just God’s intervention in scuttling the relationship before it was too late). But I, too, should have been smarter than I was, and not gotten involved with women of poor character.

If most of these people were honest, and a lot of them will admit it, that the warning signs were there before they got married…they just ignored them. So why don’t we exercise more caution and wisdom before getting into a bad marriage? Subconsciously we know we can get out of it. We know we can get an easy divorce. We know that if we have kids and have to get a divorce, that if all else fails, we can fall back on the welfare state to take care of us.

There was a time, not that many decades ago in America, when you couldn’t get a divorce without a darn good reason. In that same day and age, you couldn’t rely on the government to bail you out of bad decisions—you had to live with the consequences of living recklessly. We need to go back to those times. I know it’s no fun and I know it’s not popular to say it, but we human beings are always going to gravitate toward the easy way. If there’s no incentive to motivate us to live cautiously, then we’ll live recklessly because there’s no punishment/reward system that spurs us to do otherwise.

There’s little that can be done with families that are already broken, but we can do a lot to reduce the number of broken homes, going forward.

One is to make divorce a hard thing to get again: keep it reserved for major things like infidelity (and even this can be worked through, if the perpetrator is willing to reform and the wronged spouse can find a way to forgive them, for the children’s sake), spouse/child abuse, and debilitating addictive behaviors that cripple the health of the family.

Another thing is to get rid of the welfare state completely and go back to what we used to have in this country: private charity. Private charities and churches are in a much better position, both by moral disposition and proximity to the hurting people, to help…and help with discrimination. By helping with discrimination I mean checking out the situation to make sure they aren’t being scammed. Private institutions are also much better equipped to address the root causes of what brought people to be in need in the first place. And perhaps most importantly, if people understand that a ready, no-questions-asked handout is unlikely, most of them will think twice before hooking up with a loser or someone they can’t stand once the joy of sex with someone new wears off.

I’m for as little government intervention as possible in matters such as this, but as I said before, it was government’s dereliction of duty that made it easy for many in our society to get into this position. So I think it would be reasonable for government to mount an education campaign—once it’s cut off the flow of largess—to encourage people to date and marry wisely. We spend millions on ad campaigns to get people to stop smoking, eat right, exercise, etc., so why couldn’t we spend some money to make it clear to folks that the gravy train isn’t running anymore? Why not make it clear to people that no-fault divorce is a thing of the past, so they’d better not marry a dirtbag or some loser with a lousy work ethic, and they’d better not date someone they wouldn’t want to marry, and they shouldn’t be having sex outside marriage and putting the resulting children in a bad position.

But oh, you might say, we can’t tell people how to live their lives!!! We can’t? We do it all the time: don’t smoke, stop smoking, don’t do drugs, don’t drink and drive, buckle up, talk to your kids, be a good dad…the list is almost endless. If we can tell people they shouldn’t smoke and they should wear their seatbelt, why can’t we tell them they shouldn’t marry some jerk that they’ll hate in a year or two and by then have children that will be left in the lurch? There’s absolutely no reason whatsoever we couldn’t encourage family responsibility in our society. There is every reason from a religious foundation, and every reason from a “practical” societal perspective.

Essentially the same thing goes for unwed pregnancies and sex outside of marriage. Quit telling kids we expect them to screw around, so just wear a condom! Quit treating them like animals and expect them to act like people that can think and control their urges. And let them know that the state isn’t going to make it easier for them to land in a safety net if they ignore caution; they’ll have to take care of this child on their own, and the father will at least be held financially responsible, and if they don’t “do the right thing” and get married, then they’ll likely have to live with their mom and dad, and mom and dad will have to help raise their own grandchild. Maybe this would motivate parents to teach their children better about sex outside of marriage, and maybe motivate them to not let their teenagers run wild and end up in trouble.

Having children and taking care of them requires the same responsibility of married folk as unmarried folk. As Dr. Laura says, "Don't Have Them If You Won't Raise Them." And no, you don't have to abort them. Don't have sex if you're not married. Don't get married if you know you can't afford to raise children (because whether you plan them or not, children are the natural consequence of human sexuality, and they'll often happen despite the pill and other contraceptives). Children are more than something to make your Christmas postcard look warm and fuzzy, and they're more than just a vehicle to "carry on your family name." They're more than just a pet you can feed and scratch behind the ears when you come home at night. They're real people and they deserve far more than they're getting from us so-called adults.

You’ll never solve 100% of problem families; problem families have been around since the beginning of the human race. Sometimes people will become single parents through no fault of their own, and sometimes some families will hit poverty through no fault of their own. But with the right safeguards and incentives to encourage sacrifice and responsibility, we can keep the casualty figures low.

It comes down to caution, consideration, facing the consequences of our mistakes, and making the sacrifices that are necessary to give our children the stable home life they need to grow into healthy, productive people.

Nice cars and career plans can wait until the nest is empty. We’ve raised a generation (or two) of thoroughly screwed up and hurting people because we believed the lie that we could have it all (both parents having the satisfaction of an outside-the-home career, nice house, new car, cell phones and big-screen TVs, recreational spending money) without sacrificing a single thing. And in believing the lie, we’ve sacrificed the healthy, happy lives of too many of our children.

I hope that’s provided some of the clarification you asked for, Erin. Thanks for asking.