“RAISING KEVION”: Intermittently sweet, harsh, true-to-life piece from the NYT Magazine‘s welfare beat reporter. Must-read; if I’ve heard this story once I’ve heard it a hundred times. Via Family Scholars.

Excerpts: “Nearly a decade has passed since the country ‘ended welfare’ with a landmark bill imposing time limits and work requirements, and low-skilled women like Jewell have entered the work force in record numbers. But low-skilled men have not. And low-skilled black men, the sea in which Jewell has spent her life swimming, have continued to leave the job market at disconcerting rates, even during the late-90’s boom. In cutting the rolls and increasing work, the 1996 welfare law, and a related expansion of services, has been celebrated as a rare, even unique, triumph, and on one level it is. But with about 90 percent of welfare families headed by single mothers, it is also a lesson in the limits of a policy that is focused on one sex. Whatever it has done to put women to work, it won’t really change the arc of inner-city life until it — or something — reaches the men. …

“A parallel story resides on Angie’s branch of the family tree. She did know her father — knew him as a drunk. ‘Wanna marry my mama?’ she once asked a city bus driver as a little girl. ‘I want a daddy!’ Still, her feelings toward her father ran so deep that she credits them for her decision, after leaving welfare, to become a nursing aide. She saw her father for the last time just before she moved to Milwaukee, and she was stunned at how sick he had become; she had to help him use the bathroom. A month later, he was dead. Taking on a caregiver’s job, she said, was her way of making amends. ‘I felt so guilty — I did not do anything for him,’ she said. ‘I was mad at him, yeah, but . . . he was still my daddy.’ …

“His idealization of the wedding extends to the marriage. The sociologist Kathryn Edin argues that poor, unmarried couples often conceive marriage as an especially exalted state — relationship perfection — rather than as the acceptably imperfect structure in which daily living occurs. That’s certainly how Ken described it. ‘Once you get married, that means she’s everything in a woman you’re looking for and you’re everything in a man she’s looking for,’ he said. Jewell said much the same: ‘It’s just you and that person, become one.’ A marriage, therefore, carries intimidating risks, none greater than the risk of your partner cheating. ‘Oh, yes, yes, yes,’ Ken said. ‘If you’re married, and she goes out there and cheats on you, that’s like the worst thing in the world! ‘Cause you said those wedding vows. When you get married, you say you got an inseparable bond. So if she goes out there and cheats on you, she’s breaking laws and policies!”’

whole thing