Single motherhood is just a symptom

Published 8:53 pm Tuesday, August 6, 2013

Sympathy can be found in several forms. Sometimes, it’s found in coming alongside another in his or her troubles. Other times, it’s found in simply denying those troubles exist.

Conservatives are coming under fire lately for “demonizing” single mothers, as Americans engage in important conversations about deep problems including race and poverty.

But recognizing a problem is the first step to solving it. The left, rushing to the defense of single mothers, is just delaying any solution.

Writing for The Daily Beast, the online remnant of Newsweek, Amanda Marcotte says conservatives are placing “unjust guilt” on women who have children but no husband.

“It appears that it’s open season on single mothers again,” Marcotte says. “Granted, open season is called on single mothers a few times a year and can be spurred by anything from a politician trying to punt a question about gun control to polling data showing women are frequently breadwinners for their families, so this isn’t unusual.”

She takes issue with the portrayal of single mothers as women whose children have no active father — that’s not always the case. And she claims there’s a racial subtext here.

And she adds that a big percentage of single mothers are single because of divorce, not always of their choosing.

“It’s easy to understand why commentators simply fail to mention the role divorce plays in all this, because divorced women are the ones who tried to follow the rules,” she writes. “They got married, they had kids, they did everything they were supposed to do, but it still didn’t work out. They don’t fit into a neat little narrative of panic about premarital sex, and so even as they constitute a large percentage of single women raising children, divorced women are rarely discussed when we talk about single mothers.”

In many ways, Marcotte is right.

Single motherhood isn’t the root of the problem; cultural collapse is. Children are growing up without fathers, not necessarily because their mothers choose this, but because that’s the reality they find themselves in.

And to be fair, that’s how most conservatives have portrayed it. When Marcotte scolds George Will for blaming single mothers for the failure of Detroit, she’s taking him out of context. He sees single motherhood as a symptom, not a cause.

“You have a city, 139 square miles, you can graze cattle in vast portions of it, dangerous herds of feral dogs roam in there,” he said recently. “Three percent of fourth graders reading at the national math standards, 47 percent of Detroit residents are functionally illiterate, 79 percent of Detroit children are born to unmarried mothers … They don’t have a fiscal problem, they have a cultural collapse.”

Still, Marcotte’s main point is valid. While single motherhood is generally bad, we can’t say that about single mothers. They don’t need our condemnation; they often need our help.

But when Marcotte claims there’s no real problem at all (aside from income inequality), she does a disservice to single mothers. That’s not sympathy. That’s not compassion.

That’s denial.