Transcript
RON HASKINS: Here is the question before us: Is it possible to increase marriage rates among African Americans? And what role in promoting marriage could and should be played by black churches?
Here's the problem. Here we have from the Census Bureau the record of nonmarital births for whites, and for Hispanics, which we haven't been collecting data that long, and for blacks, and we now have reached the point where one out of every three American children is born outside marriage. Almost 70 percent of black children are born outside marriage and about 45 percent of Hispanic children.
Fortunately, as you can see, this has leveled off, in each case, in about 1994, '95, '96, right in that area. It's declined some years, gone up a little bit, but there's clearly a break in all of these data series. So we at least have mitigated the increase, but we haven't really turned it around and made it go down yet.
And then the second thing, of course, is that we have monstrous declines in marriage rates, both among whites, but even more among blacks. So we have very, very low rates of marriage, very high rates of births outside marriage and, as a result of that, well over half of America's children spend some time in a single-parent family during their childhood and perhaps 85 percent of black children spend some time during their childhood in a single-parent family. So what difference does that make?
Well, the first thing is that has a huge impact on poverty. Poverty rates are six, in some years, eight times as much among single-parent families as among two-parent families. We also now have a fairly substantial literature that shows that there are definite effects on children's development so that children who are from single-parent families have worse education records, are more likely to be arrested, to commit a delinquent act. The young ladies are more likely to have a child outside marriage and several other effects. So marriage is a protective factor. It promotes children's development.
· Transcript of the Introductory Remarks and Panel One with Q&A (PDF—103KB)
· Transcript of Panel Two with Q&A (PDF—83KB)
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