The money spent on relationship education is little more than a rounding error in TANF’s $17 billion budget, but why spend any of those precious resources on a program that appears to be failing miserably?
That’s what Benjamin Karney wonders. For the last couple of decades, Karney, a professor of social psychology at the University of California, Los Angeles, has studied marriages, how they either remain stable or deteriorate. He thinks the very idea of teaching relationship skills to low-income couples was probably misguided from the get-go, based on an unproved, and somewhat condescending, assumption.
“The reason divorce rates are high among poor people isn’t that they don’t know things that other people know,” Karney says. “In fact, there’s a lot of evidence from my lab and from other labs that the ability to communicate effectively with your spouse is significantly associated with the stress that you’re under in your life.”
Stress is toxic. We know, from multiple studies, including a much-discussed 2010 paper by the Nobel Prize-winning social scientist Daniel Kahneman, that higher levels of stress are associated with lower levels of emotional well-being.
Karney’s point, then, is that poor couples don’t get divorced because they’re less adept at communication than couples with healthy 401(k)s and three-car garages. Poor people get divorced because they’re poor, and being poor makes you stressed, and being stressed makes it harder for you to communicate, which makes it more likely that you’ll split.
Read the rest at: http://www.dallasnews.com/opinion/sunday-commentary/20140131-can-tax-dollars-buy-love.ece
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