How Schools Can Help Push Back the Age of Childbearing

In this article in Education Next, Michael Petrilli of the Thomas B. Fordham Institute asks what U.S. schools can do about the growing number of out-of-wedlock births and the well-documented travails of children raised in single-parent homes. “This may seem like a ridiculous question,” he concedes. How can schools possibly affect a problem with such deep roots? Shouldn’t schools limit themselves to persuading disadvantaged teens to put off having children, graduate, and get into college? 

Actually, great progress has been made on two of those steps: teen pregnancy has fallen 50 percent from its 1990 peak, and high-school graduation rates have risen from 65 to 80 percent. But one-third of low-income students start college and don’t finish – and the number of unmarried mothers, now mostly in their early 20s, continues to rise. The problem is that too few young people are following the “success sequence” outlined by Isabel Sawhill and Ron Haskins: Get at least a high-school diploma, work full time, and be married and at least 21 before having children. Sawhill and Haskins estimate that 98 percent of those who follow this sequence will not be poor and 75 percent will be solidly middle class. Conversely, those who don’t follow any of those norms will be poor, and almost none will make it into the middle class. 

Researchers believe that young people who fall off the sequence don’t intentionally plan to do so; instead, they “drift” into early parenthood by not working very hard to prevent it and not seeing the almost inevitable hardships and handicaps they are setting up for themselves and their children. Many have naïve ideas about babies. According to Johns Hopkins University sociologist Kathryn Edin, parenthood is seen as a chance to “start over” and do something good with their lives. For men, fatherhood may seem like a magic wand to neutralize the negativity around them. And for their partners, say Edin and her colleague Maria Kefalas, “Children provide the one relationship poor women believe they can count on to last. Men may disappoint them. Friends may betray them. Even kin may withdraw from them. But they staunchly believe that little can destroy the bond between a mother and child.” 

“Unfortunately, and not surprisingly, these hopeful attitudes eventually give way to the grinding reality of daily life,” says Petrilli. “Most of the romantic relationships between the parents fall apart within a few years. The dads desperately want to spend time with their kids – but not with their kids’ mothers – an arrangement that eventually proves untenable. And so another generation of children is raised in poverty, with single mothers doing most of the child care and trying to make ends meet, and fathers having additional babies with other women in a fruitless quest to ‘start fresh’ and ‘do the right thing.’” 

The most effective way to break this cycle is for young people to have hope and purpose – a realistic plan for a life trajectory that is more attractive than babies – and the essential first steps are higher education and decently paid work. For young women on this track, having a baby in their early twenties becomes a catastrophe, robbing them of fun, travel, living in the big city, enjoying the singles life, climbing the ladder of success – providing a powerful incentive for the effective use of birth control. Schools can help disadvantaged young women get on this success track, while doing the equally important job of producing “marriageable men” who are on the same track and understand the need to defer children. 

This push for higher education needn’t be limited to four-year colleges. Petrilli says that 30 percent of employment opportunities in the coming years will be “middle skills” jobs in fields like health care and information technology, requiring community college and career and technical education (CTE) degrees. “Employers regularly struggle to fill these roles,” he says, “in large part because of America’s underdeveloped – and often ignored – technical training system.” One successful model is small CTE learning communities within comprehensive high schools with strong links to local businesses. One downstream study of the Manpower Demonstration Research Corporation (MDRC) found that career-academy graduates were 33 percent more likely to be married and living with their spouse than those in a control group. 

The prior preparation necessary to succeed in a CTE program is the same as for a college-prep program, says Petrilli, so the role of elementary and middle schools is absolutely essential. Their mission has to be sending all students to high school with the necessary academic skills, as well as character traits like grit, prudence, and the ability to defer gratification. These personal qualities can be developed through old-fashioned methods like those used in Catholic schools or new-age approaches like yoga and mindfulness.

Petrilli mentions one more thing schools can do to tip the balance on early childbearing: robust extracurricular activities that keep students busy after hours, involve them in meaningful athletic, service, and creative roles, and leave them so exhausted they can’t possibly get in trouble. 

“All these actions, done well, are almost certain to help push back the average age of childbearing,” Petrilli concludes, “which will help the next generation do better academically and economically.” 

“How Can Schools Address America’s Marriage Crisis?” by Michael Petrilli in Education Next, Spring 2015 (Vol. 15, #2, p. 56-62), 

http://educationnext.org/schools-address-americas-marriage-crisis-c...

From the Marshall Memo #577