On my way into Town last night, I turned on my favorite NPR affiliate WBUR to hear what was going on in the world. I caught the tail end of After Welfare, a radio documentary by the American RadioWorks on the 1996 federal welfare reform legislation which ceded funding to the states and some of its subsequent effects. The piece closed with a very interesting focus on marriage. Evidently, the bill Clinton signed into law has in it some very specific wording that promotes low-income marriages. The idea runs something like this: two low incomes can provide for a child better than one. In Oklahoma, just over two million dollars pay for one of the more radical programs to result from the shift to the states. It is called the Oklahoma Marriage Initiative.

Aimed at low-income expectant parents, couples volunteer to complete a 12-hour course during which they learn, review, and discuss what it takes to stay in a long-term relationship. I believe much of their time is devoted to ever important communication techniques. It’s hard to know what if any effect OMI and others programs like it will have. And we won’t know for years, but it’s worth trying, I suppose. Studies show that as a group single mothers hold some of the most conservative family values. They believe that being a mother is one of, if not the single most important thing a woman can do. They want a traditional, nuclear family, and the majority [in the study I can’t remember below] oppose abortion.

While you may not be suprised to learn that even poorer people don’t want to sabotage their own lives, many critics of the 1996 law were afraid that low income women would have more and more kids in order to up their monthly check from the state at the expense of tax-payers and their hypothetical children. Some ground-breaking research, which I can’t name off the top of my head, in which about 160 single, low-income mothers were interviewed, shows that these women didn’t get married not because they somehow lack morals and values—as others might suggest—but because they revere the institution of marriage as holy. They’re holding out for someone who can provide a stable, healthy environment for them and their kids. The only difference, it seems, between them and their middle- and upper-class counterparts is resources.

Professor Skip Gates of Harvard’s Afro-American studies department recently produced a several part PBS documentary on blacks in America. He found that many boys in impoverished areas grew up to do what their role models did: sell drugs and go to jail. But why? Because they didn’t know what else to do. Why go to school and learn things that might be useful years from now and make no money in the interim when you could sell some drugs and make a few thousand dollars in a few days? The problem of immediate gratification is ruining large portions of society. The sort of education we need here is of the utmost personal kind. It is important that children, as President Bush says, be exposed to as many possibilities as, uh, possible. If a parent tells a child that he can be whatever he wants to be when he grows up, the statement has very little empowering effect if the child can’t think of things to be.

So when I say that these women’s middle-class counterparts have more resources, I intend more than material means; I’m also talking about psychology and education.

If these women believe that motherhood is the highest form of success they can acheive, it’s no wonder that most low-income babies, while perhaps not planned, are purposefully not prevented. Among other things, we need to get more and different kinds role models and mentors to work especially within low-income populations.

Even when presented with alternatives, it’s easy to believe that you’re born into your part in society, that lots are cast. In America, parents reinforce this misconception all the time. When interviewed, American mothers will list innate ability as the single most important factor in determining a person’s long-term success. Chinese and Japanese mothers, on the other hand, choose effort and persistance. As a result, American children can easily believe that those things which come easy to them are the things that are meant for them, and the stuff that’s hard isn’t. Again, pretty unsuprisingly sociologists suspect that one reason kids join gangs is a thirst for immediate gratification. Gangs will get you where you want to be fast.

And that’s why good math education is so crucial. (I could see you waiting for it, so I won’t disappoint.) Math is the sort of subject that requires lots of forethought and whose reward is delayed gratification. Of course good mathematical training won’t cure all of society’s ills, but [because this post is already long I’ll keep this brief and end abruptly claiming wildly that] the psychology of mathematics couldn’t hurt.