Politician Blames Poverty on "Dysfunctional" Single-Parent Families

Every day, as I walk through the streets of downtown Berkeley, I am confronted with the concrete reality of poverty. Elderly men lie wrapped in blankets in front of empty storefronts; homeless teenagers huddle in circles, asking passers-by for money or marijuana; hordes of men and women appear at seven o'clock sharp as food banks open their doors to the hungry.

In this environment, poverty can feel like an intractable problem, too pervasive to conquer. Imagine my surprise, then, to discover that there's an easy solution to eradicate poverty completely. Just ask Representative Spencer Swalm, a Republican state legislator from Colorado, who argued on Monday that families can stay out of poverty by avoiding having kids outside of marriage.

"Those children are almost guaranteed to be in poverty," Swalm remarked in an interview after speaking out against House Bill 10-1002, which would provide much-needed tax relief for Colorado's poor. "You don't want kids in poverty? Don't have kids out of wedlock." Demand that Rep. Swalm apologize for his ignorant comments and ask him to accept and act on the true causes of poverty.

House Speaker Terrance Carroll rightly identified Rep. Swalm's comments as "an insult to every single person who lives in poverty, who works their butt off every day just to keep their head above water." The problem isn't necessarily that Swalm associated single-parent families with poverty; as the Denver Post points out, more than a third of Colorado children from single-parent families live in poverty, compared to 8.6 percent of children living in married-couple families. It's that he got his causation all mixed up. These statistics shed light on a real problem: single-parent households (and not just in Colorado) struggle with low incomes disproportionately more than families led by two parents.

But whether a child winds up living in poverty can't be boiled down to the number of parents he lives with. Countless factors, like unequal access to affordable health care and educational opportunities, play a huge role. What's more, Rep. Swalm's prized statistics in no way justify his flawed idea that "intact families do better than dysfunctional or broken families" (a slap in the face to Speaker Carroll, who was born to an unwed mother). A 2009 study conducted by an Ohio State professor found that family stability, not the number of parents in a given household, was the determining factor of a child's educational and life success. "Based on this study," explained Professor Kamp Dush, "we can't say for sure that marriage will be a good thing for the children of single mothers, particularly if that marriage is unhealthy and does not last." So much for Swalm's idea that two parents are always better than one.

It's time that elected officials like Rep. Swalm (who, might I add, serves on House Committee of Health and Human Services) stop twisting statistics to fit their political agendas. Tell Rep. Swalm to offer a sincere apology to hard-working single-parent families. After all, what single-parent families need definitely isn't an extra dose of unfounded criticism. They need the resources to help their children succeed.

Photo credit: Beth Rankin