Three Cheers for Stigma and Shame

Started my life in an old, cold, rundown tenement slum
My father left, he never even married Mom
I shared the guilt my mama knew
So afraid that others knew I had no name

I heard Diana Ross’s voice clear as a bell driving down a state highway a couple of weeks ago. The song was in my head, not on the radio. It popped in there and rattled around for a while after passing a billboard that caught me up short.
Love Child was a #1 hit for Diana Ross and the Supremes in 1968. The song painted an indelible picture of a young woman who wasn’t going to follow in her mother’s footsteps and have a child out of wedlock. How times have changed.
In those eyes, I see reflected
A hurt, scorned, rejected
Love child
The billboard I passed was an advertisement for NH Healthy Families. It featured a young woman looking into a baby carriage. Next to her was the tagline: “I decide which Medicaid plan is right for us.”
Is it churlish to point out that the photo was one proton shy of a “nuclear family”? Maybe this wasn’t a love child, but it sure looked that way. It looked like this mother (with no father in the picture) needed medical welfare – Medicaid – to have her child. And there was not an ounce of gratitude in the caption, no “Thank you for helping me raise a healthy child.” Just raw entitlement.
I’m all for protecting children, but without some old-fashioned, 1968-style stigma and shame, our social safety net has become a hammock; an overly-comfortable, overfull hammock at that.
Stigma and shame were once the guardrails of life. They kept us on, if not the straight and narrow, at least the long and winding road of life. Without them, many people veer off the path and wander aimlessly, too often taking innocent children with them.
In their 2013 study, Ron Haskins and Isabel Sawhill of Brookings Institution developed “the success sequence”: 1) earn at least a high school degree, 2) get a job, 3) get married before having a child. According to their research, following this sequence increases the odds that both parents and their children will succeed economically and socially.
Fifty years ago illegitimacy and single-headed households were rare. Today, “more than 40 percent of American children, including more than 70 percent of black children and 50 percent of Hispanic children, are born outside marriage.” Haskins and Sawhill showed that this “unprecedented rate of nonmarital births, combined with the nation’s high divorce rate, means that around half of children will spend part of their childhood—and for a considerable number of these all of their childhood — in a single-parent family” and that while “single parents try to give their children a healthy home environment, children in female-headed families are four or more times as likely as children from married-couple families to live in poverty.”
Children born to parents who are incapable of raising them without taxpayer support deserve our compassion and our help. But providing that help is requiring ever-greater sacrifices by people who have made good life choices and live lives in accord with the eternal truths. When people are forced to choose between their own families’ welfare and supporting a welfare state that subsidizes people who have made bad choices, resentments will build. It’s human nature.
If the problem with socialism is that you eventually run out of other people’s money, the problem with our welfare-entitlement state is that eventually people run out of compassion for others. For millennia societies developed rules, not codified into law, to help guide behavior. It was a social contract. We jettisoned that contract about the time Love Child first hit the airwaves and have been suffering for it ever since.
In reporting on the “success sequence” for the New York Times, columnist David Leonhardt wrote, “Among parents between the ages of 28 and 34 who themselves had grown up in low-income households and then followed the success sequence, only 14 percent were living in poverty…By comparison, the poverty rate was 46 percent for those parents who had grown up in low-income households and then had a child without ever marrying.”
What’s best for children and society: Returning to a time when social pressure helped to keep a lid on the number of children born into untenable situations, or removing that pressure, subsidizing bad behaviors, and “normalizing” the untenable?
At some point something is going to give. If stigma and shame could prevent us from running out of compassion, then three cheers for stigma and shame.