What is the most basic reason for why children find themselves in poverty to begin with? Do you know or just refuse to care enough about the kids to say it publicly? (Hint: it ain’t the lack of pre-k education; there was hardly such a thing before that 40 year period you refer to). It’s the breakdown of the traditional family, like it or not. Now what will you do with that fact? Will you publicly promote the traditional family for the sake of children, or will your concern for them be effectively capped by an ideological pre-commitment?

Gail Collins has written a column chiding any opposition to mandatory pre-k programs for children, something being proposed by our president. I’m not going to address that issue directly in this post. I simply want to point out that for all the public tears shed over children living in poverty, it appears that liberals like Gail Collins are only willing to go so far to address it. They don’t mind talking about solutions that will only modestly make a difference (if any). But they dare not challenge liberal orthodoxy by addressing the most fundamental causes of childhood poverty, family breakdown, because that would mean promoting a particular sexual/family arrangement and discouraging others (an unforgivable sin in the Church of the Left) . You can read the entire column.

She has much to say about children in poverty and our social obligations to deal with it. But any, I mean any, discussion about the causes and solutions to poverty that don’t address the breakdown of the traditional family can only be described as irresolute (to put it as charitably as possible). That true and most basic cause of poverty (and most other major social problems of concern to the left and right), which is perhaps the easiest relationship to demonstrate in all of social science (liberals are lovers of science, no?), doesn’t even get a tiny mention in her column. Rather, she goes with this:

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President Obama is trying, against great odds, to do something for 4-year-olds.

People, think about this for a minute. We have no bigger crisis as a nation than the class barrier. We’re near the bottom of the industrialized world when it comes to upward mobility. A child born to poor parents has a pathetic chance of growing up to be anything but poor. This isn’t the way things were supposed to be in the United States. But here we are.

Would it be different if all the children born over the last 40 years had been given access to top-quality early education — programs that not only kept them safe while their parents worked, but gave them the language and reasoning skills that wealthy families pass on as a matter of course?

We’ll never know.

She is really concerned about growing poverty and a permanent under class. Applause. As a Christian, I am too. But what, Ms. Collins, what is the most basic reason for why children find themselves in poverty to begin with? Do you know or just refuse to care enough about the kids to say it publicly? (Hint: it ain’t the lack of pre-k education; there was hardly such a thing before that 40 year period you refer to). It’s the breakdown of the traditional family, like it or not. Now what will you do with that fact? Will you publicly promote the traditional family for the sake of children, or will your concern for them be effectively capped by an ideological pre-commitment?

Perhaps supporting a government program, however effective, will be enough to appease your guilt. But if you didn’t know before, I’m telling you now, the breakdown of the traditional family is the main cause by far of poverty, a well-established fact in the social science literature. What’s family breakdown? You know, the nice liberal gift we have been unwrapping for that same 40 year period you are so concerned about, in which the whole notion that certain family and sexual arrangements are to be morally preferred, supported, and politically promoted over others has been identified as totally unnecessary and even hate speech. And while celebrating the disappearance of any taboos and producing a culture uncritically accepting of any conceivable family arrangement, the unmistakable linkage of poverty (and crime, drop-outs, depression, drug-use, health, etc.) with family breakdown among our kids is simply ignored.

So we’ll just go with statist solutions, again, even though they’ve been far less effective in combating cyclical poverty as they have been in rewarding absentee fatherhood (again, the real cause of poverty). Better that than be accused of bigotry by Hollywood or university professors, I guess. What about social mobility? Again, glaring omission on your part. There was indeed more social mobility in the past. Poor kids didn’t usually stay poor. Was it because we have moved away from welfare programs for them? Is it because public education has gotten so much better? Is it because there was a nationwide system of pre-k education? No, no, and heck no. It was because the family was basically in tact, cultivating skills, disciplines, habits, etc. (whether those parents were wealthy or not was irrelevant, Ms. Collins) which served their future well-being. Where is the well-confirmed fact in your column Ms. Collins?

Apparently, what Ms. Collins would have us believe is that the absence of state-ran pre-k programs or expanded welfare programs is the real cause of the recent increase in poverty and upward mobility (note: how lack of a treatment can be identified as a cause of a disease, I’ll leave for others to explain). And that solving poverty among children will only come with the right array of more government programs, swapping out parents with the state. Let’ see. Forty years or so, right? So it couldn’t be, well, this I suppose:

You see Ms. Collins, statistically and historically, you don’t get trapped in poverty because you didn’t have a pre-k program. You get trapped in poverty because you didn’t have a father. If you really, I mean really, cared about the kids stuck in poverty, then this would at least get a mention or two.

Troy Gibson is a Political Science Professor at the University of Southern Mississippi, specializing in Religion and Politics in America. He attends Woodland Presbyterian Church (PCA) with his wife, Natalie, and three children, Caleb, Noah, and Sarah Ann. This article first appeared on his blog, The Reformed Mind, and is used with permission.

[Editor’s note: One or more original URLs (links) referenced in this article are no longer valid; those links have been removed.]