IT TAKES A TWO PARENT FAMILY TO RAISE A CHILD

Family disintegration has hurt America

COMMUNITY LEADERS across the U.S. find themselves struggling with rampant tardiness, high truancy rates, high dropout rates, low educational attainment, widespread drug addiction, crime, a degraded work force and more.
It’s as if society is disintegrating.

That’s because many poor American families have.

Some social scientists contend that War on Poverty programs intended to help the poor actually led to what they call “family disintegration” instead.

“The core feature of the U.S. welfare system, and its central problem, is that it subsidizes and thus promotes self-destructive behavior,” the Heritage Foundation said in a 1995 briefing paper. “Specifically, the welfare system promotes: non-work, illegitimacy and divorce.”

The current system “transformed marriage from a legal institution designed to protect and nurture children into an institution that financially penalizes nearly all low-income parents who enter into it,” the foundation said.

In 2011, almost 41 percent of children born in the United States were born to unmarried women.

This has consequences.
“Welfare insidiously creates its own clientele; by undermining work ethic and family structure, the welfare state generates a growing population in ‘need of aid.’”

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