Taranto’s The New Legitimacy
Solving social problems by redefining our terms points to new low on Census Bureau definitions: now anyone who lives with a child is a “parent”.
According to the NY Times
The Census Bureau attributed an indeterminate amount of the increase to revised definitions adopted in 2007, which identify as parents any man and woman living together, whether or not they are married or the child’s biological parents.
The article then cites a number of experts (what would we do without experts? as Taranto frequently asks) who don’t appear to notice the new definition at all.
One of the most intractable and devastating problems affecting minorities, not just blacks since a large number of Latinos are also being raised by single mothers, most of them very young, has been swept aside with a change of terms.
Are these children being raised by both parents? Are the consequences of irresponsible adults’ actions solved? Of course not.
I share Taranto’s frustration:
So here’s a more modest idea: Why not redefine together to mean “on the same planet”? So long as at least one man and one woman live on Earth, whether or not they are married or the child’s biological parents, every child is being raised by two (or more) parents, and this will remain true at least until we begin colonizing space. Hey, it takes a village!
For a more realistic assessment of the problem of children being raised in poverty, read Kay Hymowitz’s excellent article, The Black Family: 40 Years of Lies:
More than most social scientists, Moynihan, steeped in history and anthropology, understood what families do. They “shape their children’s character and ability,” he wrote. “By and large, adult conduct in society is learned as a child.” What children learned in the “disorganized home[s]” of the ghetto, as he described through his forest of graphs, was that adults do not finish school, get jobs, or, in the case of men, take care of their children or obey the law. Marriage, on the other hand, provides a “stable home” for children to learn common virtues. Implicit in Moynihan’s analysis was that marriage orients men and women toward the future, asking them not just to commit to each other but to plan, to earn, to save, and to devote themselves to advancing their children’s prospects. Single mothers in the ghetto, on the other hand, tended to drift into pregnancy, often more than once and by more than one man, and to float through the chaos around them. Such mothers are unlikely to “shape their children’s character and ability” in ways that lead to upward mobility. Separate and unequal families, in other words, meant that blacks would have their liberty, but that they would be strangers to equality. Hence Moynihan’s conclusion: “a national effort towards the problems of Negro Americans must be directed towards the question of family structure.”
No amount of redifining “parents” will change that.
UPDATE
Chicago Boyz:
Such obfuscations have consequences. First of all, comparisons over time become pointless. Distinctions are lost. The often-discussed and often-proven differences between a nuclear family and one that shifts through a series of “fathers” and sometimes “mothers” can’t be measured. Difference in achievement, health, happiness will be irretrievable. (One suspects that is the point.) Second, such shifts affect our definitions of family. I have no problem with the commitment between two gays partially because I have long suspected it does a lot less to undermine the definition of “family” than a high rate of divorce and bureaucratic decisions/definitions like this. Third, this undercuts the biological. We forget such lessons at our peril – in this case, peril to children. We worry about the dangers of jungle gyms and slippery slides, but ignore those understood for millenia.
Why does feminism talk about empowering women in sports, in the work force, and in politics, but not in choosing the situation in which her children will be raised? I remember school retreats where priests would come for 3 days and talk to us about all sorts of spiritual matters. There was inevitably one afternoon on sex (which back in the paleolithic seemed confined to French kissing–no kidding). Anyway I do remember being told that it was the woman who controlled things and that men needed to be controlled. Today, it seems that many people are willing to tell boys they must be responsible for their actions and for their children. What if the boys were being told this by the girls they they are trying to seduce? Somehow it seems that a no from one girl after another might be more effective. It also seems that girls knowing the power of no might be less insecure and less likely to seek love by having a baby.
The power of No is a concept that unfortunately seems to have gone out of the narrative, hasn’t it?
Am I missing something? Perhaps instead of saying biological child, legal child would be more appropriate – I’m adopted, all this talk of biological or not kinda bugs me –
Parents are those who raise the children. Legally.
So if the kids are in a home where no one is a legal parent, they should not be in that home!
Again, maybe I’m missing something – biology has nothing to do with it.
I must clarify that to me, adoptive parents are parents, Beth. What the census has done is erase the distiction of who’s a parent. The Census definition does not specify at all; essentially any adult sharing a household with a minor is considered a “parent”.
Fausta, read Mistress Manners over at NRO. It hits on women’s authority from a male point of view.
Beth, I think it is the commitment of both adoptive parents to care for the child that differentiates adoption from the any-adult scenario. Each has a real relationship to the child. In revolving-door situations, the relationship is between the adults and the child comes in last. Technically you are right about adoptive parents being legal parents, but they are so much more. “Biological” is a kind of imprecise shorthand. I have adopted cousins, and no one sees them differently from other cousins. They are part of a real big family.