Why you can still find the American dream in rural America
Conn Carroll
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Feminist icon Gloria Steinem did not come up with the rallying cry, “A woman needs a man like a fish needs a bicycle,” but she did popularize it. Unfortunately for families over the last 50 years, Steinem has been proven spectacularly wrong.
Women absolutely do need men, especially if they hope to raise them.
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Another study has been published showing that children raised in communities with more married fathers in the home have better outcomes than children raised in communities without married fathers and that boys are hurt most by the lack of fathers in a community.
Researchers Dylan Connor, Lori Hunter, Jiwon Jang, and Johannes Uhl set out to explain why children born into poverty in rural communities have a better chance of escaping poverty as adults than their urban counterparts, even though rural communities normally have much less economic opportunity than urban communities.
In other words, if all the economic dynamism is in big cities, then why is it so much easier for small-town poor children to make it rich as adults?
The answer, it turns out, is that rural communities have more married fathers in the home than urban communities do.
“The local share of a community’s children who were raised in two-parent households can account for almost all of the variation between urban and rural places in terms of household income mobility,” the researchers conclude. “Rural children from poorer backgrounds are more likely than their urban counterparts to grow up with both parents present in the household. Where this is the case, these childhood circumstances are predictive of higher average levels of adult household income attainment.”
Importantly, the researchers identified significant gender differences in the results. “High levels of income attainment among children from poorer rural backgrounds is driven exclusively by the outcomes of males growing up in rural communities with high shares of two-parent households,” the researchers write. “Males from rural places are also more likely to be married and less likely to be incarcerated as adults.”
What is interesting about this study and others that have examined children’s outcomes on a community level is that it shows the benefits of marriage extend beyond the household where married fathers live and to the entire community.
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Married fathers living with their children not only help their children but those fathers provide a stabilizing force for order in the neighborhood and are role models for other boys as they turn into men.
So, unless we want a vastly unequal and stratified society, perhaps we should admit that men and women need each other.