Nancy Folbre is an economics professor at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst.

The percentage of men who contribute time and money to raising children has declined over time in the United States, the other side of the more publicized trend of the rise of single motherhood.

Today's Economist Perspectives from expert contributors.

As Jason DeParle points out in a recent article in The New York Times, changes in household structure have contributed to increased poverty and inequality.

But the changes in fathers’ willingness to support children associated with these residential shifts may be as much consequence as cause of increased poverty and inequality. Public policies have done little to address this problem beyond small-scale efforts to promote marriage through counseling and education.

Most discussions of single mothers focus on their choices, faulting them for deciding to raise a child without a secure commitment from a father.

Yet the majority have been to the altar (or a justice of the peace) at least once. In 2010, about 62 percent of custodial mothers living with children whose biological father was absent were either divorced or married.



Further, the detailed and comprehensive “Fragile Families and Child Well-Being” study, focusing on low-income parents, shows that most mothers were romantically involved with the fathers of their children during pregnancy and childbirth, hoping for a long-run parenting partnership.

Both nonmarital births and divorce, shaped by a class gradient, are lower among the more educated. One could argue that women who don’t get a college degree are stupid, and stupid women are not very smart at picking parenting partners, so we should discourage them from bearing children.

This seems to be the implicit argument behind widespread hostility to public assistance for single mothers. We need to save them from the spider web of dependency on government.

This argument, combined with the widespread misperception that most single mothers are black, helps explain why policies in the United States are so much less supportive of single parents than those in other countries. It also helps explain why poverty rates among children in the United States are exceptionally high. (For detailed statistics, see this compendium provided by the advocacy group Legal Momentum).

Many single mothers are also handicapped by low wages and poor benefits in paid employment.

Still, if they would just marry men like Mitt Romney, they would have it made. Instead, they have sex with men who don’t help pay their bills.

In 2009, the latest year for which data are available, only about 41 percent of custodial parents (predominantly women) received the child support they were owed. Some biological dads were deadbeats.

Many others simply couldn’t pay up. Men with low levels of education have also been hammered in the job market, and William J. Wilson, among others, has pointed to the decline in “marriageable men” as part of the explanation of changes in family structure. A study of Britain between 1971 and 2001 suggests that deindustrialization and job loss contributed significantly to the growth of lone parenthood.

A recent Government Accountability Office report shows that economic recession also bites. The year 2009 was the first in the history of the current child enforcement program to show a decline in total receipts, even though the amount “intercepted” from unemployment payments nearly tripled.

The report also points out that many states currently dictate that child support payments for families receiving public assistance be used to repay the state, rather than to benefit children.

Declining real wages, high unemployment and cutbacks in social programs affect a wide swath of the economically vulnerable. Research in the field of social epidemiology shows that poverty and economic inequality are stressful, with negative effects on both the physical and mental health of those who feel they have little control over their lives.

In “Promises I Can Keep,” the sociologists Kathryn Edin and Maria Kefalas show how the endless struggle to make ends meet can exacerbate mistrust in couples. In continuing research, Professor Edin and Timothy Nelson are studying why many men find it difficult to remain involved with their children.

The social psychologist Shelley Taylor asserts persuasively that men and women have evolved different responses to stress. Men, when threatened, often experience a “fight or flight” response. Women are more likely to resort to a “tend and befriend” strategy.

This gender difference could help explain why low-income women are more likely than their affluent counterparts to become mothers, while low-income men are less likely to live with the mothers of their children.

We know that high unemployment rates in the United States contribute to a discouraged-worker effect, in which people give up actively searching for employment and drop out of the labor force.

Economic conditions at the bottom of the income distribution are also contributing to a discouraged father effect.