Amy Benfer

Yet when the idea of family is addressed in a political context (and Americans, despite our reputation as rugged individualists, still insist that our private lives are political), a dichotomy arises, usually along partisan lines, between abstract notions of an ideal American family and the real families that the majority of Americans actually live in.

At no time has this enormous gap between thought and deed been as visible as when U.S. Census figures came out recently that documented the extent to which Americans are not practicing what some among us still preach. The nuclear family, according to the numbers, is fast becoming a demographic oddity; the number of single-parent families is skyrocketing and many Americans couples are choosing to not get married but to have families anyway.

What then happens to the purveyors of “family values,” to the conservative organizations that view Americans who live as single parents, unmarried partners or blended, gay and lesbian families as problematic, or even immoral?

It looks as though many of the proponents of family values as defined by a seemingly mythological standard are responding to the census figures in two ways. First, they seem to have made a distinct rhetorical shift. Rather than preaching the absolute authority of God, many of these groups now invoke the (relative) authority of social science to argue for the preservation of the nuclear family. At the same time, however, they cling to the idea that what is “right” is worth fighting for, regardless of the statistics, and in this crusade, conservatives are finding support in certain quarters, including the White House.

Those who wish to hark back to the nuclear family — which reached a peak of 45 percent of the American population in 1960 — face formidable odds of success. The most recent census figures show that, for the first time, the percentage of Americans living in nuclear families has declined to below 25 percent of the population. (As this figure represents married couples living with children, it also includes blended families, so the percentage of married couples living with their biological children is presumably lower.)

We also know that young adults are delaying marriage and children (the average age of women at first marriage is now 25, up from 20 in 1960; for men it is now 27, up from 22 in 1960), if they marry at all. Twenty-six percent of Americans live alone, outnumbering those who live in nuclear families. Americans are much more likely to live together outside of marriage — unmarried couples now constitute 9 percent of all unions. Single parents are the fastest-growing group of people with children; during the 1990s, the number of single-parent families grew five times faster than the number of married couples with children. The number of families headed by single fathers, while still low, doubled from 1 percent of all households in 1990 to 2 percent in 2001.

In other words, Americans have redefined the American family. And any political organization that wants to get enough votes to keep candidates who support their platforms in office must grapple with the reality that the majority of Americans — and American voters — do not live in traditional families.

Nancy Folbre, an economist at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst and the author of “The Invisible Heart: The Economics of Family Values,” says that if conservative groups want to reach out to Americans, they must finally revise their definition of family.

“The positive thing that conservative groups have done is to emphasize the importance of committed relationships and the involvement of both parents in raising a child,” says Folbre. “But the fact is that people can do that without being legally married. If what they decide to do is emphasize these values, not the demographics of the families in question, they will survive. But if they insist on this notion that only people who are married with children meet this criteria, they will find themselves obsolete.”

The initial response to the census figures tended toward the obsolete model, with a spokesperson for the conservative Family Research Council insisting that “this data shows we need to regain the importance of marriage as a social institution. People are disregarding the importance of marriage and the importance of having a mother and father who are married.”

A later response from the Heritage Foundation feels equally stubborn, even desperate, in its fuzzy analysis of the numbers and “life cycles.” Explained Kirk Johnson, a senior policy analyst at the conservative think tank: “The nuclear family is not necessarily a minority. You have to take into consideration people’s life cycles. People between the ages of, say, 40 and 60 may not be living with their children in the house, but they may have lived in a nuclear family at some point during their lifetimes.”

But other conservatives seem to have a more circumspect view of the statistics, one that indicates a beleaguered acceptance of the numbers but renewed conviction about the “problems” those numbers suggest.

“I have no reason to question the accuracy of the statistics,” says Ed Vitagliano, news editor of the journal for the conservative American Family Association, “but I do think that the culture as a whole understands that the family is important. It’s easier to get a divorce now than it was 35 years ago, but I don’t think people are comfortable with that. I think we have an awareness that something is wrong if families are disintegrating. Even for people who get a divorce, I think there is an underlying fear about the disintegration of the family, and a desire to live in a stable family.”

Interviews with others at the Heritage Foundation and the Family Research Council, as well as the American Family Association, a Christian organization based in Mississippi, reflect further softening of rhetoric in recent weeks. None of these conservative groups condemn those who live in nontraditional families (perhaps because 75 percent of the voting public falls outside of the category of the nuclear family in one way or another). Instead, their responses make reference to respect for personal choice, to the best interests of children, to the acceptance of the reality of people’s lives — while still promoting an ideal version of family life.

“I think it’s very important that as an organization, we don’t make single parents believe that God doesn’t love them or that we don’t care about them,” says Vitagliano. “I think the church needs to be careful about its message, that in teaching and preaching the ideal, we do not isolate or reject single parents.”

Vitagliano says he believes that in a time when people rarely know their neighbors, the church is the ideal institution for aiding single parents, who he says deserve “not only Christian love, but practical love” — like help with day care, looking in on latchkey children and providing general emotional and practical support.

“I think that even the people involved in a single-parent situation would agree that it is a less than ideal situation,” says Vitagliano, “with the exception of the rare Hollywood personalities who wear their single parenthood as a badge of pride. Most people find themselves in that situation because of a divorce, an unwanted pregnancy or because a partner dies. I don’t think that people gleefully and joyfully head into single parenthood.”

In other words, it may be acceptable to be a single parent, but it is not a good idea to want to be a single parent. In this scenario, we all still believe in the ideal, even if some of us have been barred through life’s disappointments from achieving it.

The underlying assumption is that no one consciously chooses to live in what would be considered to be an “alternative family.” Instead, we remain uncoupled, or unsuccessfully coupled, or childless or unmarried despite our best intentions. Crucial in this view are the various indications, supported by research, say conservatives, that outcomes for parents and children in alternative families are dire — or least not what they could be if these people were ensconced in nuclear families.

On May 15, the day that the new census figures were released, the Family Research Council responded with a press release titled, “Marriage Is a Must — Cohabitants Who Marry Are More Likely to Divorce,” which cited (unspecified) studies that show that married couples are less likely to divorce, that marriages last longer than cohabiting unions and that married couples are happier, and their kids fare better, than those who live in cohabiting homes.

Adds Johnson of the Heritage Foundation, “The research shows that having children out of wedlock puts a child at risk for a host of other social problems, and the choices of the parents can stack up against the child. I think that every individual makes choices, but most people would agree that it’s bad to be poor, it’s bad to have children who are more at risk for criminal behavior, it’s bad to have children who are at risk for educational failure. And I think that people recognize that their families will be better off to the extent they can avoid those risks.”

But social science is, unfortunately, not absolute in its authority or pronouncements on family structure. As is so often the case when “research” is cited as gospel, one finds that the data and its collector must be scrutinized and evaluated for signs of limitations or manipulation. It’s true that some respected studies have shown that the children of divorced or never-married parents are statistically more likely to have problems (usually measured in terms of educational achievement, behavior and discipline).

But at the same time, early studies also suggest that certain nontraditional families — especially those of single fathers and gay parents — score as well as or better than intact families in child outcome. In part, this seems to be because of the “exceptional parent” syndrome: It is so difficult to become a gay parent or, to a lesser extent, a single father that the ones who do so are unusually committed to becoming a parent.

“Social science hasn’t proven anything,” says Barbara Nordhaus, assistant clinical professor of social work at the Yale Child Development Center. “It can’t prove anything about family structures, because the one thing we know is that conflict in families is detrimental to children.

“But we don’t have any information about family structure,” she adds. “We have information about deprivation, poverty, malnutrition, disease, unemployment, drug addiction of parents — those kinds of things aren’t good for kids. But it’s not about the structure of the family. That’s a prejudice, a bias. And it’s more and more of a fairy tale. No one even remembers what the nuclear family was. People think it’s a cartoon from the ’50s.”

Nordhaus also criticizes studies that reportedly reflect what is in the best interest of children — particularly when it comes to family structure.

“The ‘best-interest notion’ is totally bogus in this discussion,” says Nordhaus. “It’s extracted from the legal arena, and even in the legal arena it has caused more confusion than clarity. It has to be translated for each individual child. There is no agreement about a child’s best interest — except in the terms of a child to be protected and loved and wanted and to be part of a family that is not intruded upon by the state. But it doesn’t really advance the discussion at all; it’s just a smoke screen, really, for these people to fill in what they want to fill in and claim that they are only acting in a child’s best interest.”

The argument for marriage and against divorce was bolstered last year by books by Linda Waite and Maggie Gallagher — “The Case for Marriage: Why Married People Are Happier, Healthier, and Better Off Financially” — and Judith Wallerstein — “The Unexpected Legacy of Divorce,” an exhaustive 30-year study of the effects of divorce on children. Both books seemed to lend credence to the argument that social experimentation has weakened American families in qualitative ways. But both authors have been criticized for their sample size, their methodology and, in Wallerstein’s case, the fact that she was working with a self-selected group from her own practice.

Indeed, the factor that makes Wallerstein’s work so compelling — the longevity of the study — may also be the factor that renders the work obsolete for this generation of parents. In the three decades covered by Wallerstein, divorce went from being something that good families rarely or never did to being something that 50 percent of all married couples did. Under the circumstances, it is hardly surprising that the first generation of parents and children who lived through divorce and single parenting had problems. But what are the outcomes for a generation that has models of healthy divorce to follow?

Jane Mattes, a social worker who founded Single Mothers by Choice in 1981, adds that much of the research showing the disadvantages of being a single mother is flawed because it fails to differentiate between children of never-married mothers and those who have the additional baggage of having gone through a divorce or the death of a parent.

She also points out that certain studies have indicated positive outcomes for children of single parents, including better scores on standardized tests. This may be affected by the education and income of the single parents, but professional, middle-class single mothers are one of the fastest-growing segments of single mothers: Between 1990 and 1998, the proportion of never-married managerial and professional women who became mothers grew by 51.7 percent.

Regardless of the research — its paucity and its controversial methodology — conservative groups have not given up the battle to promote a narrow vision of the ideal family, and they are finding institutional support in their quest.

The conservative solutions are familiar. In fact, many have been tried — without success: Eliminate the marriage penalty, educate people on the values of marriage and continue to reform welfare in such a way that it rewards people for getting married and creates more difficulties for single parents.

The Bush administration and members of Congress — including members of the House Ways and Means Committee, which has jurisdiction over renewing welfare funds — are looking at mandatory marriage incentive programs, especially those that privilege two-parent families over single-parent families, a key goal explicitly stated in the 1996 welfare reform bill.

The programs under consideration by the Bush administration range from those that promote marriage as an ideal — such as “marriage promotion” programs (like the ones tried, to negligible effect, to combat epidemic divorce rates in the Bible Belt) to mandatory marriage education programs in high schools (which have already been tried in Florida). Robert Rector, a senior researcher at the Heritage Foundation, has reportedly called for direct cash payments of up to $5,000 to be paid to women at risk of out-of-wedlock pregnancy, to be dispersed at the rate of $1,000 a year for each year that they remain married.

There is little evidence that these kinds of programs, many of which have been tried on the state level, actually produce satisfactory results. If anything, the new census figures provide the best argument against them. Whether Americans are choosing to explode the nuclear family or are simply finding themselves in nontraditional binds, the numbers tell a new story: We are not what we once were. We may never be “ideal” again.

The novel begins at the end: 16-year-old Min — “call me La Desperada” — is making a pilgrimage in a borrowed truck to dump off a cardboard box containing the “prizes and the debris of this relationship, like the glitter in the gutter when the parade has passed.” The intended recipient is her ex-boyfriend, Ed, the co-captain of the basketball team, whom she met when he waltzed into her friend’s Bitter Sixteen party — featuring dandelion green pesto and an inedible 89 percent cacao cake in the shape of a black heart — looking exactly opposite its theme, “strong and showered” and “enormous as a shout.”

Ed is “like some movie everyone sees growing up”: “the jocky hero, handsome in the student newspaper and star of a million strands of gossip,” who always “has a girl on him in the hall, like they came free with a backpack.” She likes jazz, he likes mainstream rock “as bold and dull as a giant potato”; she wants to be a film director, he wants to be “winner of state finals.”

At first, she can’t believe a boy like him would be interested in a girl like her and struggles to put together “the print and the negative, the boyfriend and the celebrity shadow.” But he is utterly smitten; to him, she is “different,” like a “spicy food” from “Whatever-stan.” Though we know from the beginning — heck, from the title — to expect a bad end, Handler unfolds the odd-couple love story in a way that resists, rather than reinforces, clichés — of boys and girls; jocks and freaks — while evoking the universal adolescent experience of falling in, then right back out of, love.

Gaby Rodriguez, the author of the memoir “The Pregnancy Project,” soon to be a Lifetime movie of the same name, lives in Toppenish, Wash., population 9,000, 75 percent Latino, with a casino and a discount movie theater where second-run movies cost $3; where 98 percent of the students at her high school qualify for free lunch and teens compete with their parents for jobs at Dairy Queen and Taco Bell, and in migrant labor.

When Eleanor announces she is pregnant at 16, it is taken for granted that “her future” can’t include a child until well after college and a suitable marriage. When Gaby, the youngest daughter of a woman who has seven children between the ages of 14 and 35, and 31 grandchildren by the time Gaby is in her early teens, does the same, it is greeted as the expected outcome for a girl like her.

Abortion isn’t an option considered by either girl: “[M]y parents would more likely kill me if I had an abortion than if I were just pregnant, because that’s very against their religion,” says Eleanor (emphasis mine). Gaby, who describes herself as “very pro-life” says she “really had no idea what Planned Parenthood did” until she walks into their office at 16; after reading their literature, she decides it is “designed to make girls feel okay about getting abortions.” But while Eleanor’s pregnancy is real, Gaby’s is not: As part of her senior project, she decided to fake a pregnancy, with the help of her boyfriend, Jorge, her mother, the school superintendent, and a belly sculpted from clay and padded with fabric.

Each girl faces both stereotypes and discrimination: some quite similar, others inflected by each girl’s very different class and cultural expectations. Although Eleanor’s parents work with African AIDS orphans as their life’s work, they see their daughter’s pregnancy as shameful. Eleanor and Lam marry, are given summer jobs at the camp his parents run to force obese children to lose weight, and are paid with lodging in a “one-room cabin heated with wood, with the kitchen up the hill in the main house, and the bathroom a hornet-infested latrine six cabins away” — not exactly comfortable for a pregnant woman who visits the latrine several times a night. As part of the deal, Eleanor has to “pretend I’m twenty (yeah, lying — what a great example), and we have to be married and pretend the marriage came before the baby, so it doesn’t look like I got knocked up by accident or anything.” Another counselor, Jen, mocks her for her perceived stupidity about birth control and alleged sluttiness — though she’s got where she is with one partner and a broken condom — and informs her, “If I had a baby, my dreams would just go down the toilet.”

Although Eleanor herself is seen as damaged goods, her baby — assumed to be that much-sought-after commodity, a white, healthy infant  — is much in demand. Lam’s parents, who lost a child in infancy, want to raise the child as their own; her parents would like her to give the baby to “perfectly prim, older sister, Sarah — just hand it over like a sack of potatoes.” After all, says Sarah, “We’re young and we live in a beautiful home.”

Nolan ends her novel with a surprising but very satisfying and believable twist that profoundly underscores the idea that demanding “perfection” in parents or children can be its own fatal flaw, and that sometimes passion, determination and a woman’s connection to her own child can mean more than a perfectly groomed nursery.

While many of Gaby Rodriguez’s friends and family decide her teenage pregnancy is unremarkable — “they’re used to teen moms,” says one classmate to her best friend — it is likewise assumed that she has “ruined her life.” Gaby points out, “Pregnant or not, I was still in school and getting great grades. I was in the top 5 percent of my class, with a 3.8 grade point average. With everything they knew about me, why would they be so quick to write me off as another statistic?… Didn’t they believe in me enough to know that, even if I were pregnant, I’d still find a way to go to college and achieve my dreams for me and my baby?”

Although young mothers are statistically less likely to finish high school and go to college, it may be comparable, she says, to the four-minute mile, which was once thought to be an impossible goal for a runner. But within three years after the first runner came in at four minutes, 16 others did the same. Why not see the academic plans of women like, say, President Obama’s mother — who earned a doctorate and raised two children, one of whom became president — as “the four-minute mile of teen pregnancy”?

Gaby removes her fake stomach at an assembly in front of all her classmates and a single local reporter. By the next morning, her story has spread across the wires, and she’s fielding competing offers from “Good Morning America” and the “Today” show, culminating in a contract for said Lifetime movie and this very memoir, helped along by credited ghostwriter Jenna Glatzer. At the assembly, she writes, there were “about seven girls” who were actually pregnant. “I hoped they would know I wasn’t trying to embarrass them or betray their trust,” she writes, “but that I was honestly trying to give them a voice.”

Gaby Rodriguez is sharp and compassionate; no one could credibly accuse her of naiveté or the desire to exploit teen parents, with whom she is intimately familiar through her family and community. But one can’t help but wonder why outsiders saw her — a teen who could have been pregnant but ultimately was not — as such an extraordinary mouthpiece for understanding teen mothers. Might it have more than a little to do with exactly the kind of prejudice she described in her book? No one was clamoring to interview her when she was one of eight presumed teen mothers at the school. Why did it take revealing she was not a teen mother for her to gain the authority to “give a voice” to those who were?

“The Pregnancy Project,” in this light, brings to mind “Black Like Me,” the 1961 book by John Griffin, a white man who impersonated a black man in order to describe the prejudice he encountered in the South. In part, the revelation comes from seeing how the exact same person can be treated so differently, depending on the circumstances. But at the time, Griffin surely benefited in part from white readers who conferred more authority on a white author. One can’t help but wonder if Rodriguez similarly gained moral authority to talk about a group of women who experience prejudice once it was established she was not a member of the group. In her book, she quotes a teen mother on a message board who writes: “When you get pregnant as a teenager, a lot of people give up on you and treat you like garbage, no matter how smart or nice or hard-working you were before. Nobody wants to ‘encourage teen pregnancy’ so they feel it’s their duty to make you suffer.” That writer remains anonymous.

Charlie, however, is the only person she knows who, from birth, has been able to understand both the universal language common to all classes, and the three distinct, class-based languages. This gives her often unwelcome insights (her neighbor’s racist rants about immigrants; the exact nature of the snubs she and her friends get from the Counsel girls at the prep school with the slippery marble steps). And like her 6-year-old sister’s ability to heal wounds, it is a talent, according to her parents, which will be fatal to their entire family if discovered.

With her voluptuous best friend, Brooklynn, Charlie frequents secret clubs, like one at which the hand stamp is embedded with hallucinogens and the comely youth of all classes mix freely. It is there that she meets “predatory,” silver-eyed Xander, “dangerously boyish and beautiful Max” — and hears and comprehends a language she has never heard before. Futuristic punk, medieval dynasties, social commentary, swashbuckling revolutionaries and a dash of magical powers combine to make this a swift, sequel-friendly read.

But what is “Teen Mom” really teaching us? And what does its popularity tell us about our current moment? 

The sober reality show has been a surprise hit for MTV, a channel that seemed one Jell-o shot away from a life-long coma, and heroines Catelynn, Maci, Farrah and Amber have graced the covers of tabloids all season long. (Maci’s back with her baby daddy! The details behind Farrah’s boyfriend’s tragic demise! Exclusive photos from Catelynn and Tyler’s tearful reunion with baby Carly!) Cynically speaking, the cast members of “Teen Mom” are nearly perfect lab specimens for a tabloid: They have youth, beauty and baby bumps. They also have exes, family drama, incarcerated parents, adorable toddlers — and, frankly, they need money. The show has caught on not only with MTV’s core teenage audience, but also with 20- and 30-something women. In an age when the American middle class is once again obsessed with perfectionism in parenting, some may be sucked in by the novelty of young mothers raising children with so few resources. Others are simply sucked in by the nonstop drama and soapiness.

These girls’ high visibility upends history. Teen mothers were always shoved to the back of the frame, often literally sent away, and certainly rarely given the spotlight. And those stories that are told are incomplete: Too often, tales of teen parents start and stop when one is 16 and pregnant, and neglect to tell the story of what it’s like to be 19 with a 3-year-old or 26 with a 10-year-old. “Teen Mom” goes further than most any show ever on television in documenting ordinary struggles of young parenthood.

This season alone, it showed us the ambivalence and embarrassment of Maci, a Tennessee girl from a middle-class family, as she asked her son’s father, Ryan, for child support, and took us into a riveting meeting with their mediator, in which they bargained for time with their son while Maci wept. Catelynn and Tyler — high school sweethearts from hard-drinking, hard-living parents who gave their daughter Carly up for adoption in hopes of creating a better life for her — might represent one of the most sympathetic portrayals of birth parents ever committed to film. They’re a graphic reminder that for the parents left behind, the grief doesn’t end when the baby leaves the frame, even when it feels like the right decision. One of the season’s most poignant moments was Tyler — a tough teenage boy who had cried over pictures of his daughter alone in his bedroom, who had a father in jail, who kept promising his girlfriend they would be better parents to their own children someday — sitting in a diner across from Brandon, the man who was what he most wanted to be: Carly’s father. And rather than detail his own pain, Tyler, in a lovely moment of empathy, asked Brandon what he had sacrificed to be a parent.

Then there is the on-again, off-again couple Amber and Gary, who have become the id of the series, confirming the worst stereotypes about teen parents. This season we saw portly, passive-aggressive Gary toy with the idea of leaving volatile Amber for another teen mom he met in the diaper aisle at Walmart; we saw screaming fights, one of which concluded with Gary taking the sheets off the bed, another that included a car chase with the baby on board; we watched Amber moving in with her new boyfriend, fresh from work release in jail; and finally, we saw Amber, who has been taking martial arts classes, beat Gary and kick him down the stairs. But the most haunting moment came when we saw their little girl, Leah, witnessing yet another fight between her parents, and telling her mom to be quiet — in just the same tone we’ve heard Amber use toward her all season long.

But if ever a documentary has been accused of distorting its subject matter, “Teen Mom” is it. The idea of tracking the experience of being a regular teen mom pretty much evaporates the second that mom is on the cover of OK! magazine. And the tabloid money does matter, in no small part, because one of the biggest arguments against teen parenting is that it creates poor families, and thus any realistic portrayal of teen parenthood must scrupulously follow the money: How much is it, and where is it coming from?

Three seasons in, it’s easy to become distracted by niggling details that may or may not reflect how much impact the show has had on each family’s personal finances and relationships: Why does Farrah spend so much time in the beauty shop? Why does she have a new Mac laptop? What make and model car are the girls driving? What part of town are they living in? I absolutely do not mean to imply that these girls, some of whom come from middle-class families, and all of whom support themselves to varying degrees through jobs and financial aid, are not entitled to support their families, or buy themselves hair cuts or computers. (Interestingly enough, the only mention we’ve seen of government assistance is when Farrah files for Social Security from her daughter’s dead father, and when she receives aid for day care, due not to her income, but to her mother’s domestic violence conviction). But if these families are meant to make a larger point about teen parents as a group, it profoundly matters to know not just if they are managing to survive, and eventually maybe thrive, but how. Yes, there are many different ways to succeed or fail as a teen parent, and very few have tried to ask the right questions. The answers can include school, family, jobs and good parenting. But once the options include “sell your family’s story to a tabloid,” you’ve pretty much polluted your sample.

Aside from the issue of who is paying for what, canny viewers may wonder just how much these families’ characters and images have been shaped by producers at a painstakingly edited show. This season, Maci and Farrah have seemed the most realistic and complicated characters, while Amber and Gary have started to look downright villainous. And it may be worth asking why Catelynn and Tyler, the only couple to release their child, seem consistently the most sympathetic characters in the show. Also, one wonders if the very act of exposing their lives before a national audience might have made all concerned more likely to solve their problems in the offices of counselors, mediators and therapists, and participate in therapeutic retreats — or to take it even further, to wonder whether many of those sessions would have happened at all without outside intervention.

Creator Morgan J. Freeman says he wants to capture these same girls and their families each year, not unlike Michael Apted’s “Up” series, a landmark of documentary filmmaking, in which British schoolchildren from different social classes, born in 1964, have been filmed every seven years since the age of 7. It is a laudable goal, and 21 years after giving birth to my daughter at age 16, I would dearly love to see a series that depicts all of the different ways these stories can turn out. But putting aside the ethical dilemmas, it becomes valid to ask: What are you documenting? Has the series already passed the tipping point after which they are no longer capturing the lives of teen moms, and instead are looking at the lives of young celebrities who happen to have young children?

We saw this with “Jon and Kate Plus 8,” which morphed gruesomely from a show about their family in which cameras happened to be present into a show about their family breaking up, thanks to the pressures of the cameras. The reality TV fame cycle is so well-established that one might speak of a series as having a half-life of sorts — the amount of time it takes for the show to go from publicly documenting people’s ordinary lives to documenting the private lives of public figures. In the case of “Jersey Shore,” it seemed like a matter of weeks.

Each season, with “Teen Mom,” it becomes more difficult to tease out the impact the show itself has had on the lives it depicts. After the episode in which Amber beat Gary aired, the producers were criticized for standing to the side during an incident of domestic violence (one also wonders if they would have done so had Gary been the one hitting Amber). But the most chilling moment was hearing Leah speak. Not merely because we could hear echoes of her mother’s words in her own, but because by hearing her speak, it forced us to scroll back and replay all the earlier scenes we had witnessed thus far from her childhood, and realize that she was no longer an infant. She is a real girl, who is old enough to understand the trouble her family is in, and we are watching it. It makes me wonder if reality TV, in a way, might be creating a whole mini-soccer-team of Mary Kate and Ashleys (minus the extravagant amount of cash), children who literally begin their lives on TV and stay there throughout infancy, childhood and maybe young adulthood. The further this series goes on, the more difficult it will be to separate what it is telling us about the lives of teen mothers from what it is telling us about the lives of parents and children who live under public scrutiny.

Apparently, the couple told Us Weekly before their own family, and Sarah Palin’s official response — “Bristol believes in redemption and forgiveness to a degree most of us struggle to put in practice in our daily lives” — might give a cynical reader reason to believe that Mama Grizzly is still caught up in that “struggle” bit. The Washington Post’s Reliable Source sees a ray of light in the announcement, however, and basically says: Who the hell else could they be with? “The two have shared a completely unique experience: Small town teens catapulted to worldwide fame through the convergence of an unplanned pregnancy and her mother’s overnight political ascendance.” But if being a co-conspirator in a media maelstrom were all it took to build a strong marriage, the Gosselins would be our most steady couple.

Bristol and Levi are just one of dozens of tabloid-ready couples whose lives we “know” far too much about. But the Gosselins and the Jolie-Pitts don’t have a family member who regularly flirts with running for the highest political office in our country. And thus we betcha whatever path their private lives take will eventually be served back to us as a political narrative demonstrating good Republican family values.

Before the unfortunate demise of their relationship, Bristol and Levi were more or less toeing the Republican Party line on unplanned pregnancy: Condemn the premarital sex, but offer redemption to those who go on to have the baby, get hitched and make a proper family (hence the shotgun engagement on the eve of the Republican Convention). During the Bush years, as you may remember, this philosophy formed the backbone of the Healthy Marriage Initiative, which started from the premise that two-parent families tended, statistically speaking, to make more money and provide more stable homes for children, and thus decreed that the best way to make poor, unstable single parents into stable, affluent families was to marry them off to one another.

But as it turns out, things didn’t quite work out the way they planned. Just last week, conveniently enough, Women’s eNews ran a feature by Julie Marsh that concluded that marriage isn’t exactly the magic pixie dust young parents are looking for. Yes, two-parent families may be, statistically speaking, more affluent than single-parent families, but married women also tend to be more educated in the first place. Encouraging poor parents with little education and few job prospects to better themselves by marrying each other just gives you a family headed by two poor, uneducated parents. Marriage might not hurt, but it is basically irrelevant: What that family needs is at least one person with a decent education and a good job. Plus, having money doesn’t guarantee a good relationship. As one young mother told Marsh, “You can have a man that got a lot of money and do you dirty and that’s not cool.”

There’s no rule that says young parents can’t have both: a good marriage to the parent of their child, in which they mutually support each other’s goals to finish school and/or come up with enough resources, economic and otherwise, to keep everyone reasonably happy and cared for. But in practice, all too often, when two people slap together an idealized family as the solution to an unplanned pregnancy, it just means that one or both partners (most often the mother) delay getting the education and work experience they need to support their family solo, a shaky proposition given that women who marry in their teens are much more likely to divorce.

How does this all apply to Bristol and Levi? People’s lives don’t willingly conform to statistical norms, so perhaps this particular marriage will turn out just fine. All those months of public vitriol might make an interesting addition to baby Tripp’s scrapbook (file under: Parents’ “youthful indiscretions”). Then again, it’s possible that in not choosing to marry when Bristol’s mother’s political ambitions were the virtual loaded gun over their heads, they came to a better-planned, more thoughtful decision to be together. One might also point out that the “problem” many government programs, rightly or wrongly, seek to fix isn’t necessarily young parents, but poor parents. And right now — thanks to speaking fees, tabloid interviews and skin mags — neither Bristol nor Levi is poor (though one presumes that the job security of “professional tabloid star” may turn out to be even more rickety than “child actor,” and one positively cackles wondering what rules govern the allowable behavior between an “abstinence educator” and the father of her child in the weeks leading up to her wedding). If nothing else, consider it an experiment in the impact a decent speaker’s fee can have on teen parenting.

Bristol and Levi’s lives, of course, are their own, and as private citizens, I wish them well. Still, there is no getting around the truth that their private choices will eventually be served back to us as political parable. While I’m no fan of one-size-fits-all prescriptions, I’m still of the mind that a college diploma and decent job skills are a much better guarantee of young family’s healthy future than a marriage license.