American Dreams

by Marco Rubio

  As bad as things were, India says, it was in eleventh grade when things “really started to fall apart.” It was Christmas Eve, and India had finished her shift at the Publix supermarket and returned home. When she knocked on the door to their apartment, her mother didn’t answer.

  “I was knocking on the door, knocking on the door. Tears rolling down my eyes,” she says. “I eventually realized around twelve o’clock in the morning that she was not letting me in. I was kicked out. I was homeless.”

  This began a period in which India spent her days wandering the streets and staying with friends at night. Her goal, she says, was to do what she had to do to be able to go to school in the morning. School was her refuge from the chaos in her life. She didn’t tell her teachers she was homeless, but still she managed to attend classes—and not just any classes, but difficult classes, such as precalculus and honors English. Somehow, despite the shambles of her life outside the school walls, inside them she found enrichment and stability, even excellence.

  India challenges us to think about what matters in preparing children for happy, successful lives. I have always felt that I had a privileged childhood. Not because we had a lot of material things or knew a lot of important people—we didn’t. But I was rich in the things that matter. I had a strong, stable home, a place where I was loved. I had parents and grandparents in my life who encouraged me to dream big, and who supported me as I pursued those dreams.

  India had none of these things. There was no encouragement in her home to go to school and succeed—quite the opposite. Presented with India’s report card full of A’s, her mother typically responded by staring at her without emotion and then telling India to “clean my house.” Worse yet, there was none of the unconditional love a child needs to have confidence that she has a future and a purpose on the planet. India tells a heartbreaking story about one day when she was homeless, talking to the police about finding a place to stay. As they were talking, her father happened to ride by on a bicycle. She remembers telling the police officers eagerly, “That’s my dad! He’ll take me in. Ask him.” So the police told India’s father that she needed a place to stay. He looked at her, then at the police officers, and said the words India has never forgotten: “She’s not my daughter. Do what you want with her.” And then he left.

  To hear India’s childhood stories and to see the successful, confident woman she has become is to ask, How? How could a girl with so many strikes against her rise to achieve her dreams when so many others can’t? Social scientists are in virtually unanimous agreement that, considering the odds, India shouldn’t have succeeded in climbing out of poverty. Children like her—raised in poverty by single parents—get in more trouble with the law and perform more poorly in school than kids of two married parents. They are less likely to finish high school, let alone college, and are more apt to get pregnant young. In short, the children of single parents are more likely to be born poor and they are more likely to stay poor—four to five times more likely than children raised by married parents.1

  In truth, we’ve known for some time the disadvantages suffered by children in single-parent homes. What is less appreciated—but more relevant today than ever—is how the decline of the family has affected social and economic mobility in America. That is, how the rise of broken, single-parent families has affected the American Dream. Few people in Washington like to talk about it, but the decline of the family is a major factor limiting the ability of many Americans to get ahead. Elizabeth Sawhill of the left-leaning Brookings Institution reports that of the children born to low-income women, the children born to never married mothers are three times more likely to stay poor than children born to continuously married mothers.2

  A landmark study that looked exclusively at the ability of Americans to move up the economic ladder in different communities found that the strongest influence on upward mobility is family structure. More than racial segregation, more than education, more than inequality, the number of single parents in a community is most determinative of upward mobility. The study found that in a city like Salt Lake City, with low numbers of single parents, children in the poorest families have an 11 percent chance of making it to the top level of income. In a city like Atlanta, with high numbers of single parents, they have only a 4.4 percent chance of making it.3

  So why aren’t all the politicians and reporters who claim to be concerned with the gap between the rich and the poor concentrating on the family? One reason is that the left spends a lot of time and resources creating government substitutes for the family. But if the state could simply step in and fill the role of two committed, caring parents, then India’s story wouldn’t be so special. The poor in America have plenty of government interventions in their lives. What they too often lack is something government simply cannot provide: a source of unconditional love that transmits the values of hard work, self-control and self-esteem. No one is born with these values, yet in order to find real success—truly rewarding and happy lives—people need them just as much as they need an education and a job.

  India, too, has had plenty of government involvement in her life, from welfare to food stamps to government literally putting a roof over her head after her mother kicked her out. But the thing that made the difference—the reason we are able to celebrate her story today—is that she found a source of love and direction. Ask India why she was able to rise above homelessness, an abusive mother and an absent father, and she cites two things: her faith in God, and a mentor—a red-haired, blue-eyed woman who came to regard India, an African American, as her daughter.

  When she was in seventh grade—still doing well in school but starting to act out and develop an angry, bad attitude—India met the woman who would change her life through a program called Take Stock in Children. The program targets poor middle school–aged kids and gets them thinking about their futures. It provides ninth graders with a scholarship for higher education, but, more important in India’s case, it sets them up with a mentor. It was her mentor, Sharon, who gave India the love and guidance that more fortunate children get from their parents.

  Sharon literally made a better future a possibility for India. She would drive her around Venice to a nice area of town, point to a big, expensive house and say, “India, someone owns that. You could do that one day. Couldn’t you see yourself in a house like that?” No one in India’s family had ever gone to college. Sharon was the first to introduce the possibility to India. “It was a completely foreign idea to me,” India says. “But she put hope in me. She never let me feel sorry for myself and she never let me feel like I was incompetent or I couldn’t succeed.”

  So India poured herself into school because she knew it would please her mentor. When the other kids at school teased her and accused her of acting “white” because she studied and read books by Laura Ingalls Wilder, India found the strength inside herself and from her mentor to ignore them. She found a peer group who shared her ambitions and she emulated them. And when India eventually went to the University of Florida on a full-ride scholarship from the Gates Foundation—she literally went overnight from a homeless shelter in Sarasota to a dorm room—it was her mentor’s house she went to for Christmas and spring break.

  “In spite of my failures, my downfalls and my weaknesses, she still loves me,” India says of Sharon. “She’s shown me love even when I’ve made mistakes. She’s shown me love.”

  Through the grace of God and the generosity of people like Sharon, India is achieving her American Dream. I was a supporter of Take Stock in Children in the Florida legislature and I continue to support programs that help lift disadvantaged kids. But the void they are being asked to fill is huge, and growing. The problem of children being born without two married parents is no longer confined to an underclass of Americans. A significant portion of the American middle class is now teetering on the brink of the cultural chasm of single parenthood.

  More important than the demogra
phics of this problem is its moral urgency. We can no longer plead ignorance to the effects of single parenthood in the lives of children. Many single mothers are heroic in their efforts to provide for their children, and many succeed. But our responsibility is to prevent women and children from being forced to struggle alone in the first place—and we know what it takes to do that. It is now unacceptable—if it ever was otherwise—for a politician who claims to care about income inequality to ignore the plight of the American family. And it is unacceptable—and it was ever so—to attempt to shout down those who express concern about the family with charges of racism and sexism. The children of single parents start life disadvantaged and the overwhelming majority of them never catch up. They are the face of the decline of the American Dream.

  One statistic rarely captures the dimensions of a major social, cultural and economic crisis as well as this one: the average age of an American woman’s first marriage is now higher than the average age of her first birth. Unwed childbearing, in other words, is the new normal. Of the roughly 450 births that have occurred in America in the last hour, 180 of them were to unwed mothers.

  Having children outside marriage has grown among all kinds of Americans, but it has not grown equally. For the most educated, the percentage of births to never married women is still small, just 6 percent, compared with 2 percent in 1982. For the least educated, the rate has grown to 54 percent from 33 percent. But the greatest increase has been among the moderately educated—high school graduates with some college education but no degree. Not coincidentally, these are the Americans who are struggling most in the new economy. For them, the percentage of children being born outside of marriage has climbed from 13 percent in 1982 to an astounding 44 percent today.4

  Brad Wilcox of the University of Virginia describes the group of mostly working-class Americans who are experiencing an explosion in out-of-wedlock births as being at a tipping point: Either they can continue to have more and more children out of wedlock and dim their prospects for success, or they can hang on to the institution of the family and begin to reverse the declines they’ve suffered.5 Which direction they choose—and it is, still, a choice—will be a critical moment in the history of the American family. Single parenthood—with all its attendant poverty and chaos—tends to replicate itself through the generations. The daughters of single parents have higher rates of early pregnancy themselves, trapping their children in the same seemingly never-ending cycle of poverty that they themselves are caught in. Once lost to generational poverty, these Americans will be difficult to bring back. And the data are telling us that time is not on our side. Younger Americans are growing less and less attached to the institution of marriage. While the rate of unwed childbirth is around 40 percent for all women, for the members of the millennial generation, those now eighteen to thirty-three years old, 47 percent of births are outside marriage. Today, an astounding one third of our children live apart from their fathers. One in three.6

  It’s not an exaggeration to say that the breakdown of the family is the single greatest challenge facing America. The question is, what can be done about it? As Ronald Reagan used to say, there are no easy answers, but there are simple ones. The first step is pretty basic and surprisingly controversial: just admitting we have a problem.

  In his 2014 State of the Union speech, President Obama dedicated his remarks to combating income inequality and immobility. He went on to talk about many things—taxes, trade, job training, global warming, the minimum wage. He even brought up my name when he talked about the Earned Income Tax Credit. But never once did he mention the health of the American family. He and his liberal colleagues have declared income inequality the defining challenge of our time, but they have had little to say about what might be its greatest cause. This is a man—himself the child of a single mother—with a unique ability to reach the poor and minority communities most affected by the breakdown of the family. That he has chosen not to address this crisis is a tragically wasted opportunity.

  Truth be told, no one in Washington has been very effective in addressing the crisis of marriage and the family. On the right, there are many voices raised in promotion and defense of two-parent families. But these advocates have often been portrayed, for reasons both fair and unfair, as judgmental and moralistic. The left has been worse. When those on the left have been forced to acknowledge the problem, they’ve tended to either deny that there is anything that can be done about it or to insist that poverty is driving the breakdown of the family rather than the other way around. But America has gone through tough economic times before without also seeing our families destroyed. The Great Depression, for instance, didn’t result in families breaking apart at the rate they have been in the past four decades.

  The fact is that the cultural and economic forces behind the decline in marriage and the two-parent family are complex. There is little doubt, for instance, that the decline of work among young men is a factor in declining marriage rates. For young mothers, men who are broke and out of work—despite the fact that they are the fathers of their children—are less attractive marriage prospects. Policies that encourage work, such as the Wage Enhancement Credit I described in Chapter Three, will allow these young men to better provide for a family. But to argue that poverty is the only thing driving the decline in marriage is to engage in deep denial. It is to deny the incentives built into government programs that discourage marriage among the poor. It is to deny the powerful pull of a culture that regards unwed childbearing as nothing more or less than a lifestyle choice—and vilifies those who would criticize it as perpetrators of a “war on women.” It is also to deny millennia of human history and hundreds of years of American history that put the family at the center of human progress. Throughout our nation’s history, when families and the values they teach have flourished, so has our culture—and our economy.

  The first step in restoring the American Dream for American families, then, is to simply recognize the link between strong families and a strong America. If we are willing to say that smoking causes cancer or that childhood obesity leads to serious health risks later in life, then we must also be willing to acknowledge that broken families cause poverty and diminished futures for our children.

  Second, we must recognize that bad government policies are a contributing factor in the decline of families and the values they teach. Instead of fortifying our people through pro-family policy making, government has done the opposite. Consider the case of Darnell and Charlotte, a couple in Baltimore.

  Darnell and Charlotte thought they were doing it right. Six months after they met, they married. A few months later, Charlotte was pregnant with their first child. She had been supporting a daughter from a previous relationship, along with a young cousin, with the $824 she made each month by working three jobs, plus food stamps and welfare benefits. But when she married Darnell, his additional income from a construction job made their family income too high to continue to receive government assistance. So when the new baby came, Charlotte failed to disclose that she was married to Darnell on her application for assistance for her new baby. She also had to report Darnell to another state agency as the father of her child in order to receive other assistance, which alerted the state that he owed child support for a daughter from a previous relationship. The rules are there for good reasons—to keep people from gaming the system and to make fathers support their children—but the net effect was to penalize Darnell and Charlotte from doing the right thing—getting married.

  Incentives matter. Earlier, in Chapter Three, I talked about the way our existing poverty programs discourage moving from government assistance to work and independence by leveling an extremely high tax—in the form of decreased benefits—on the poor as they begin to work and earn more money. The example of Darnell and Charlotte shows that the same disincentives to work that are built into our government assistance programs are also a disincentive to marry.

  These government-create
d disincentives to marriage affect the dependent poor and the working poor alike. In testimony before Congress in 2014, Robert Doar, who oversaw welfare reform for New York City, talked about the perverse incentives against marriage in the Earned Income Tax Credit, the refundable tax credit designed to boost the incomes of the working poor. A single parent of two children who earns $15,000 a year receives an EITC benefit of around $4,100. But if she marries, her benefit decreases by over twenty cents for every dollar the family earns above $15,040. So if she marries a man who earns just $10,000 a year, her EITC benefit drops by almost 50 percent, from over $4,000 to just over $2,000.7

  The same kind of work and marriage tax is embedded in our other poverty programs. That’s why I have proposed reforms that would build on the success of the EITC in encouraging work among the poor. My federal Wage Enhancement Credit, explained at length in Chapter Three, would give workers making less than $20,000 a year a 30 percent credit, making a job that might not make ends meet on its own a realistic alternative to welfare. A critical difference with the current EITC is that the Wage Enhancement Credit would be directed at the individual, regardless of family size. This means that a couple like Charlotte and Darnell wouldn’t lose benefits when they combine their income in marriage. My proposal would also encourage marriage by encouraging work among young men, making them better prospects as husbands and fathers to their children.