The first assignment is to draw a picture, on the theme of “Relationships today are like....” One woman draws a whirlwind, another a hangman with a noose. A third colors in a bright balloon drifting up toward a ceiling full of sharp spikes.
“If you’re not careful,” she tells the class, holding up her picture, “it could pop.”
The instructor, Marline Pearson, nods sagely. She displays another drawing, of a newborn baby and a graveyard. “Is this true or is this not true?” she asks. “Relationships can bring us our greatest joy and our greatest pain.”
Pearson is a social science instructor at MATC. She’s developed several curricula focused on the teaching of relationships, including a “Love U2” class for teenagers. This spring, she taught a new, two-session class called “Within My Reach” at the South Madison Health & Family Center. Its goal is to help adults form healthy romantic relationships.
“A whole lot of people have lived through their families falling apart,” explains Pearson. “That’s a common experience now.”
About half of the class’ 17 students are unmarried, though nearly all of them have children. All but two are women. The youngest is 27, with two young children by a boyfriend who also fathered children with two other women. Most of the students are Latino or black. And all have struggled with difficult issues: divorce, infidelity, drug abuse, domestic violence and economic hardship.
Pearson sees a direct link between failed relationships and wider societal problems, like poverty, teen pregnancy and juvenile delinquency.
“People in the justice system will tell you, it’s all about relationships,” she says. “Relationship troubles have a way of messing up every other part of your life.”
So Pearson, together with two researchers at the University of Denver’s Center for Marital and Family Studies, put together a curriculum to teach people how to have healthy relationships. Anyone can benefit from the class, but Pearson has geared it toward low-income communities.
“When their families fall apart, they have a lot more to lose,” she says with a shrug.
Most liberals will cringe at Pearson’s underlying message: that stable, committed relationships, almost always in the form of marriage, are the best thing for society. And some human services advocates warn that a relationship class directed at low-income individuals might be classist.
“I worry about it coming across as, ‘We’ve got to help low-income people be better people,’” says Nancy Wrenn Bauch, a counselor at the YWCA who works with single mothers. “There are a lot of other things going on for some families. It’s not just relationships, it’s a lack of affordable housing or child care that makes it difficult for them.”
But Pearson points to research showing that stable marriages can help reduce poverty. Isabel Sawhill, a fellow at the liberal Brookings Institution in Washington, D.C., recently testified before Congress about the correlation between poverty and relationships. Sawhill calculated that if the government doubled cash welfare benefits, that would reduce poverty by only 8%. If everyone in the country had a high school education, that would reduce poverty by 15%.
But if the nation’s marriage rate returned to the level it was in 1970, when 85% of children lived in two-parent households (compared to 2006, when only 67% did, according to the U.S. Census Bureau), poverty would drop by 27%.
Traditionally, social programs for poor people have focused on meeting basic needs, like housing. “Yes, we have to do all these things,” says Pearson. “But if we’re interested in supporting families, then we have to pay attention to strengthening parental unions.”
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