The World Needs More Ninjas

Interesting statistics about the correlation between poverty and single parents. Unfortunately, the proposed solutions in the article are a bit of hand waving:

Isn’t it worthwhile to spend more time and resources helping young people to understand the economic implications of single parenthood before they become single parents?

This makes the debatable assumption that people generally make rational decisions when it comes to marriage. I think there’s a significant portion of times in this situation when decisions are made based on reasons beyond pure logic.

Wouldn’t it make sense to rethink our relatively recent easy acceptance of out-of-wedlock parenting?

When can rethink a lot of situations, but that really does nothing to alleviate the problem.

And might it not be a good idea to work at restoring the influence of the community institutions, religious and civic, that used to help strengthen families?

Seems to me religious institutions in particular are very strong right now. I don’t really think they’re going to get much stronger. Plus, this approach requires the rather unpopular action of telling people they’re wrong and need to re-evaluate their decisions until they get them “right”.

Strengthening marriage is by now means an easy problem. It’s kind of like the extremely low savings rate in America. Statistics can tell us what’s more likely to be “good”, but getting people to do it is something completely different.