Yet Again, "Choice For Men"

Several days ago I posted an essay about “Choice for Men.” Turns out I’m not the only blogger stuck on Men’s Rights. A bit of a four-way debate is going on between Diane E, Richard Bennett, Win Fitzpatrick, and Meryl Yourish. Mr. Fitzpatrick has already posted a good reply to Diane E.’s most recent contribution, but I have a few thoughts to add.

Diane E writes:
If you believe that the woman should have 100% of the life and death power over the fetus, then you cannot believe that the man has 50% of the responsibility of the free choice she has made.

Why on earth can’t I believe that? The process as a whole requires two decision-makers (ignoring, for the purposes of this discussion, the possibility of rape); why should the end result be only one person’s responsibility? In Diane’s argument, responsibility is like a game of “hot potato”; whoever is the last one to make a decision gets saddled with 100% of the responsibility. But we don’t use “hot potato” logic to allocate responsibility in any other area of life, so why should child-rearing be the exception?

For example, imagine that I and my partner purchased a house together. Although we initiated the process together, an inconveniently timed bat-signal called me away and the transaction was all-but-closed in my absence, requiring only my final signature on the papers to be completed. Once the papers are in my hands, a curious situation has been created – the others, having signed the papers, are locked in to their decision. But I could still close the purchase (by signing the papers) or cancel it utterly (by ripping them up). I have 100% of the life and death power over this house purchase. If Diane’s logic held true, then once I made the sole decision to sign the papers, my partner would be morally justified in saddling me with 100% of the house payments.

So what makes a house different from a baby? One difference Diane E. might focus on is legalities; the law requires my partner, having signed an agreement to pay half, to actually pay half. But the same thing applies to a baby: the law requires a non-custodial parent to provide support for his (or her) children. It’s not as if the possibility of sex leading to childbirth is a secret that men don’t know going in.

(There is, of course, one enormous difference – the baby is a person, not a thing, and therefore has some rights. I’ve discussed the importance of this in my previous essay.).

Diane E:
Laws that make unmarried “dads” responsible for their kids obscures the differences between marriage and shacking up, a difference which I believe to be crucial to the maintenance of society. Why get married if the state forces Daddy to pay without marriage? You see, I really believe that women have brains and understand the consequences of their actions, actually, more than men do. Especially with regard to sex and reproduction.

So in Diane E.’s theory, child support payments reduce the incentive for women to marry before having children.. Why get married if you can get child support without a ring? (Diane doesn’t appear to be a romantic!)

Diane has apparently forgotten that women aren’t the only ones whose incentives are altered by child support laws; what about men? Well, the stronger and better-enforced child support laws are, the greater men’s incentive to avoid becoming unmarried fathers. In fact, child support laws probably have a larger impact on men’s incentives than women’s. Without child support laws, a man could potentially pay none of the costs of child-rearing, giving him very little reason to avoid single fatherhood. However, with child support laws in place, a single mother will still pay most child-rearing costs (plus the work involved), and so with or without child support she still has a strong incentive to avoid single motherhood. Given those incentives, we’d expect well-enforced child support laws to reduce single parenthood, not increase it.

Unsurprisingly, that’s what the data shows. According to a study by Chien-Chung Huang (Social Service Review, June 2002, p 275-301), data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth shows that states with strong child support enforcement have lower non-marital birthrates, even after controlling for differences in income, religion, schooling, family structures, etc. “Improved child-support enforcement reduces nonmarital births by 9.9 percent and increases marital births by 7.2 percent. The estimated proportional improvement in nonmarital birthrates for women age 20 or older, white women, and African-American women is 17.4, 3.8, and 13.4 percent, respectively. The increase in marital birthrates for these groups is 7.4, 6.9, and 3.8 percent, respectively.” (This is a much larger measured effect on the unmarried/married birthrate than welfare has, by the way).

Diane E. seems to say that her primary goal is preserving the traditional, married family. If that’s really the case, she ought to reverse her position and support strong, well-enforced child support laws.

Richard Bennett and I actually agree on some things, which might cause anyone who regularly reads both our blogs to die of shock (fortunately, I doubt such a reader exists). Political discourse has focused too much on the so-called “deadbeat dad”; in fact, when non-custodial parents (of either sex; there are nonpaying moms, too) don’t pay up, it’s often because they are legitimately too poor to pay, or because a needlessly complicated state bureaucracy has made paying child support difficult. But just when it seemed there’d be nothing to fight over, Richard wrote this:

The amount due is calculated according to a rigid formula that yields numbers way too high; it’s hard to get the number changed when employment circumstances change, and the payer has no guarantee that it’s actually spent on the child.

Ideally, the noncustodial parent should be paying half or more of the costs of raising a child. (After all, the noncustodial parent, not having to raise the kid(s), has more time to devote to a career). There’s certainly no reason for him or her (but let’s face it, usually him) to pay less than half; the custodial parent is already doing nearly all of the work, so it’s unfair to have her (or him, etc) pick up most of the costs as well.

But that’s exactly what typically happens. According to the U.S. Census (warning – it’s an acrobat file), the average child support award due a custodial parent in 1997 was $4200, or $350 per month. However, even the most optimistic estimates suggest that only 80% of that actually gets paid – so the real average figure may be $3360 a year or lower. In comparison, an average middle-income family spends $8,500 a year taking care of an infant – and the expense goes up as the child grows older. (See “Expenditures on Children by Families” in Family Economics and Nutrition Review vol 12 1999 p. 56-74). So in the best-case scenario – full payment, only one infant – slightly under half of the custodial parent’s direct expenses will be covered by child support.

Of course, in real life, it’s not always the best-case scenario. What if a middle-income couple had three children? In that case, child support payments – if paid in full – will only cover one-quarter of expenses. (see “Do child support awards cover the cost of raising children?,” in Family Economics & Nutrition Review, v11 1998 p29-40).

So it’s hard for me to buy that noncustodial parents are paying too much – if anything, they’re not paying enough.

Richard wants to streamline the process for adjusting child support levels as the non-custodial parents’ income changes, and I agree. However, non-custodial parents should actually be losing a higher percentage of income (although a lower real amount) to child support as their income drops; otherwise, non-custodial parents could lose the incentive to pursue a higher income.

As for making sure “it’s actually spent on the child” – since less than half the expense of parenting is covered by an average child support award, obviously the money is spent on the child. Noncustodial parents don’t have any right to monitor or control the custodial parent’s budgeting, and the sooner they quit trying the better.

Finally, Richard claims that a book, He Works/She Works, shows that fathers and mothers spend equal time with their children. However, He Works/She Works isn’t peer-reviewed, and it shows; it does not have a representative sample; all the parents studied were from the same liberal Northeastern city, and two-thirds of them have a college education or higher. Furthermore, the methods used are poorly described. As the reviewer in Journal of Marriage & the Family wrote, “With limited or no information on the methodology of these studies, it is difficult to judge the validity of the generalizations.”

Overwhelmingly, peer-reviewed studies show that women on average do more of both the housework and the child care – even when both members of the couple work. For just a handful of dozens of examples, see American Sociological Review v59 p327-347; American Sociological Review v59 p 348-364; Social Science Research v25 p260-280; Journal of Family Issues v12 p158-180; Journal of Family Issues v11 p115-135; Journal of Marriage and Family v64 p743-755; Journal of Marriage and the Family v63 p1099-1112, Family Relations v50 p143-153, Journal of Marriage and Family v63 1134-1145, Social Forces v79 p191-229, etc, etc..

Maybe – maybe – Richard is able to come up with an argument for believing that the vast majority of research should be ignored. (If he does, I hope it’s better than a single reference to a non-peer-reviewed book). But it’s ridiculous (and condescending) of him to imply that anyone who disagrees with him is “not well-informed on… patterns of childcare among the American middle class,” when Richard’s own views contradict what nearly any informed scholar would say..