A
popular critique laments the indolence, irresponsibility and self-destructive
behaviors of the working class. National Review in 20I6 urged "an honest
look at the welfare dependency, the drug and alcohol addiction, the family
anarchy - which is to say, the whelping of human children with all the respect
and wisdom of a stray dog" and concluded that "the white American
underclass is in thrall to a vicious, selfish culture whose main products are
misery and used heroin needles." It's true that too many working-class
students drop out of high school and then have babies out of wedlock and that
this is a prescription for poverty. Ron Haskins and Isabel Sawhill of the
Brookings Institution have found that of people who follow three traditional
rules - graduate from high school, get a full-time job and marry before having
children - only 2 percent live in poverty. So play by these rules, called
"the success sequence," and by and large one can avoid poverty. In
contrast, of those who do none of those three things, 79 percent live in
poverty. Overall, one-quarter of girls still become pregnant by the age of
nineteen, so clearly there has been irresponsible behavior, by boys and girls
alike.
?
Yet
the irresponsibility is not entirely with adolescents. American kids have sex
at the same rates as European kids, but European girls are one-third as likely
to get pregnant - because European countries offer much better comprehensive
sex education and easier access to reliable forms of contraception. So, yes,
teen births reflect individual irresponsibility, but also collective
irresponsibility on the part of society. If we're going to blame the kids, we
should also acknowledge our collective failure to do a better job creating
safety nets so that teenagers overcome by hormones don't damage their futures,
not to mention their children's.
?
Nicholas
Kristoff "Tightrope: Americans Reaching for Hope" (2020)
