Coffin Corner

October 20, 2011

Yesterday, The Heritage Foundation and Georgia Family Council co-hosted an event in Atlanta, Georgia, illustrating the profoundly negative consequences of social breakdown in the state and offering some promising solutions to restore human flourishing. At the symposium Breakthrough Georgia: Fighting Poverty and Restoring Society, Heritage Senior Research Fellow Robert Rector presented Georgia-specific research on child poverty and the role marriage can play in reducing poverty rates.

Today, over 45 percent of births in Georgia are to unmarried mothers. The lack of social and financial stability that accompanies those single-parent households greatly increases their chances of experiencing poverty.

One in four single-parent households are poor in Georgia, while only 7 percent of married families experience poverty. A child living in a single-parent home is five times more likely to experience poverty than a child in a married-parent household; marriage can drop the probability of child poverty by 84 percent. 

Very little information is available to at-risk communities on the benefits of matrimony. Rector suggested that community leaders and policymakers correct this “information deficit” by promoting the social and economic benefits of marriage in schools, reducing marriage penalties in welfare programs, and promoting life-planning and healthy relationship programs to those in communities where healthy marriage has almost disappeared.

Effectively addressing decades of social breakdown can’t happen overnight—and it won’t happen without the important work of families, churches, and civic organizations. That’s why Georgia Family Council introduced a new initiative yesterday that will combine both effective public policy and community-based solutions to relieve suffering and promote human thriving.  “We want more Georgians doing well,” Randy Hicks, President of Georgia Family Council, explained, “and we believe there’s a way to get there.”

He outlined the multi-year Breakthrough Georgia initiative that will identify and develop specific policy proposals and grassroots solutions to overcoming the barriers to human flourishing in the state. Specifically, Breakthrough Georgia will produce policy and community recommendations that will “reflect the dignity and personal responsibility of the individual, promote family formation and self-sufficiency, and respect and protect the role of community and faith-based groups in meeting the needs of people.”

The challenges created by social breakdown and the collapse of marriage are great; but the promise of effective policies and community-based solutions to alleviate suffering, promote wellbeing, and foster self-sufficiency is even greater.

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