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The government policy that promotes marriage among single mothers as a key part of the effort to fight poverty has missed the mark, according to one leading researcher. The reason, said Kristi Williams, Ph.D., an associate professor of sociology at The Ohio State University, is that marriage fails to provide the same benefits to poor, single mothers as it does for others. “If the goal of marriage promotion efforts was truly to lower poverty rates and improve the wellbeing of unmarried parents and their children, then it is time to take a different approach,” Williams said. That could include preventing unwanted births and giving more child care support for single mothers, she said. Williams wrote a briefing paper on the issue for The Council on Contemporary Families. Her report was one of two released to assess the state of the War on Poverty on its 50th anniversary. It’s easy to see why marriage promotion is appealing, Williams said: About 46 percent of children in single-mother households were living in poverty in 2013, compared to 11 percent of children living with two married parents. Marriage promotion became an official U.S. policy in 1996 when Congress passed welfare reform legislation that allowed states to spend welfare funds on a range of efforts to get single mothers to marry. It has continued, with some modifications, to this day. | 
