Is Lyndon Johnson partially to blame for the rise in single-parent homes?

[TheDeadFlagBlues]

While I have many criticisms of the AFDC, there's actually no substantive research or evidence showing that the AFDC's rather strict rules against cohabitation and eligibility restrictions against those who were married had a significant effect on marriage rates or single motherhood. It is supposedly 'intuitive' that it must have had such an effect but the reality is that the majority of unmarried mothers didn't sign-up for AFDC, even though they were entitled to receive it. Because the AFDC had such rules and restrictions, it's quite likely that those signing up for it generally felt less stigma about being a single mother, which of course will be correlated with remaining a single mother, with or without the AFDC.

It is very notable that there's no signs that welfare reform, which more or less terminated entitlements for cash-grants for single mothers and replaced it with tax credits that actually encourage marriage, had any effect on marriage rates or single motherhood. In practice, I think we can say that a number of forces ended "shotgun marriages" as an institution and that it is unlikely the AFDC or Great Society played an important role.

This is all to say that reactionaries and Catholic types who want to blame the welfare state for the erosion of the family are extremely misguided. Ultimately, once easily accessible birth control became widely available, the old social norms were always going to fall apart rapidly. And virtually no one alive today would trade away the powers of such tools for being forced into marriage at age 22 due to having pre-marital sex. I think various social conservatives are basically delusional about this and should be thinking about how we can support a modern concept of the family that accepts cohabitation instead of marriage and that supports single parents.