Rob Henderson’s Troubled: A Memoir of Foster Care, Family, and Social Class is a difficult read. For the first four chapters of the book, you want to reach through the pages, back in time, hug a small abandoned boy, and tell him everything is going to be OK.
Then, for the next two chapters, you just want to slap him as he recklessly endangers himself and others.
But the memoir does get easier from there, as Rob joins the military, graduates from Yale, and moves on to Cambridge University.
If you don’t recognize Henderson’s name, you may recognize the term he coined, “luxury beliefs,” which he defines in the book as “ideas and opinions that confer status on the upper class at very little cost, while often inflicting costs on the lower classes.”
Drug legalization is one “luxury belief” Henderson identifies in the book. “A well-heeled student at an elite university can experiment with cocaine and will, in all likelihood, be fine. A kid from a dysfunctional home with absentee parents will often take the first hit to self-destruction.”
Henderson argues this asymmetry in consequences is why less than half of people without a college degree support drug legalization, but 60% of people with a bachelor’s degree or higher do.
But for Henderson, who entered the Los Angeles County foster system at the age of 3, one luxury belief hits home more than others.
“Most personal to me is the luxury belief that family is unimportant or that children are equally to thrive in all family structures,” Henderson writes. “Affluent people, particularly in the 1960s, championed sexual freedom. Loose sexual norms caught on for the rest of society. The upper class, though, still had intact families. Generally speaking, they experimented in college and then settled down later. The families of the lower class fell apart.”
“Among college graduates, only 25 percent think couples should be married before having kids,” Henderson continues. “Their actions, though, contradict their luxury beliefs: The vast majority of American college graduates who have children are married. Despite their behavior suggesting otherwise, affluent people are the most likely to say marriage is unimportant. Gradually, their message has spread.”
One sees this all the time in the public policy arena. People’s Policy Project founder Matt Bruenig is just one example. A graduate of the University of Oklahoma for undergrad and Boston College for law school, Bruenig married his high school sweetheart and has two children with her.
But when asked about his general opinion on marriage, Bruenig said, “We live in a pluralistic society. Let a thousand flowers bloom on different approaches to life.”
If only all those flowers were blooming equally.
As Henderson documents in the book, unmarried families are much more unstable than married ones, and this lack of stability harms children. He cites one 2012 paper that found, holding family stability constant, children raised in low-income families were no more likely to engage in harmful or destructive behaviors later in life than children raised in wealthy families. However, regardless of income, children raised in unstable homes, both wealthy and low-income families, were more likely to engage in harmful behaviors as adults.
Bruenig and other married progressive elites like him deny any benefits from the institution of marriage whatsoever. Here is how Bruenig frames the matter: “Parent cohabitation is sometimes good and sometimes bad, depending on the characteristics of each parent and how those parents get along. Based on this view, the relevant inquiry is how many of the 22 percent of kids who live in single-parent households would actually be better off if their specific parents lived together.”
But this is the wrong question entirely. Bruenig is simply assuming away any benefits of marriage. He is assuming marriage and “parent cohabitation” are equal. But they are not.
Cohabitation is a far more volatile institution than marriage is. Half of children born to cohabiting parents see their parents’ relationship end by their third birthday, compared to just 10% of married parents. Fast forward to age 12, and two-thirds of cohabiting parents have separated compared to just 25% of married parents.
Elites such as Bruenig seem to think that mothers become abstinent when they have children. Nothing could be further from the truth. Women still have physical and emotional needs that they seek to meet through men, even if they are single mothers. Unfortunately, there is no bigger danger to a young child than an unrelated man in the house.
Henderson demonstrates this danger in his book by recounting the story of Christian, a friend whose house he would sometimes stay overnight at. After Henderson told Christian how his adoptive father cut off their relationship because his adoptive mother divorced him, Christian started crying hours later.
“I asked him if he was OK,” Henderson writes. “He told me about a time a few years earlier when he was taking a nap on the couch. When he woke up his mom’s boyfriend at the time had his hands in Christian’s pants. Christian said he was scared and had never told anyone before.”
That is what a “thousand flowers blooming” actually looks like.
The question to ask is not if each child would be better off if his or her specific parents still lived together. The relevant question is: What is the best way we, as a society, can channel male and female sexual desire into stable projects of cooperative care? For millennia, it was understood in the West that monogamous marriage was the best way to bind men and women.
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Are all marriages perfect? No. Does domestic violence happen? Yes. But do you know where domestic violence is more likely to happen? In unmarried relationships.
Henderson’s Troubled should remind us that if the goal of public policy is to protect young children, then all of our policies — tax, welfare, trade, immigration, drug, everything — should be geared toward helping young men and women get and stay married. That is the proven best way to deliver stable households for children to grow up in.