Posted on: Thursday, May 17, 2001
Editorial
The Census: Aloha to Ozzie and Harriet
If you want a lesson in how public policy often lags behind social reality, take a look at some of the latest numbers out of the U.S. Census.
For the first time, the Census says, there are more Americans living alone than as married couples with children. This has profound social implications for policy-makers, both locally and nationally.
There is no doubt that stable families make for stable societies. So there remains a value to public policies that support stable families. Such policies range from insurance and health benefits that tilt toward families to the mortgage interest deduction that stimulates home ownership.
But the disconnect is that many public policies rest on social assumptions that might have been valid a generation ago, but not today. From school hours to family leave policies, we still operate fundamentally as if the norm was an intact family, with one spouse at home and children at the neighborhood public school.
The latest Census numbers suggest this simply isn't so. Over the past decade, the number of single-parent families grew three times faster than married couples with children.Today, the "norm" is as likely to be a single-parent household, a person living alone or other new-form households.
The Census also found a surge in the number of couples co-habiting, but not married.
In many cases, the impact of the changing social scene falls most heavily on women. The surge in single-family households is heavily tilted to women, often those who have outlived their husbands and are living in precarious financial circumstances.
Among single-parent households, the majority are women.
All this simply suggests that policy-makers in Washington and in Honolulu must re-think basic social assumptions that underlie so many of their decisions. Social welfare policies, tax benefits and other government services must be targeted toward reality, not toward an Ozzie-and-Harriet world that no longer is the dominant norm.
