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pandabear
Fleeting Body
Joined: Aug 17, 2007
Age: 54
Posts: 9629
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 Posted: Sun Feb 19, 2012 8:30 am Post subject: Increasing Bastardization of America |
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http://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/18/us/for-women-under-30-most-births-occur-outside-marriage.html?_r=1&nl=todaysheadlines&emc=tha2
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For Women Under 30, Most Births Occur Outside Marriage
It used to be called illegitimacy. Now it is the new normal. After steadily rising for five decades, the share of children born to unmarried women has crossed a threshold: more than half of births to American women under 30 occur outside marriage.
Once largely limited to poor women and minorities, motherhood without marriage has settled deeply into middle America. The fastest growth in the last two decades has occurred among white women in their 20s who have some college education but no four-year degree, according to Child Trends, a Washington research group that analyzed government data.
Among mothers of all ages, a majority — 59 percent in 2009 — are married when they have children. But the surge of births outside marriage among younger women — nearly two-thirds of children in the United States are born to mothers under 30 — is both a symbol of the transforming family and a hint of coming generational change.
One group still largely resists the trend: college graduates, who overwhelmingly marry before having children. That is turning family structure into a new class divide, with the economic and social rewards of marriage increasingly reserved for people with the most education.
“Marriage has become a luxury good,” said Frank Furstenberg, a sociologist at the University of Pennsylvania.
The shift is affecting children’s lives. Researchers have consistently found that children born outside marriage face elevated risks of falling into poverty, failing in school or suffering emotional and behavioral problems.
The forces rearranging the family are as diverse as globalization and the pill. Liberal analysts argue that shrinking paychecks have thinned the ranks of marriageable men, while conservatives often say that the sexual revolution reduced the incentive to wed and that safety net programs discourage marriage.
Here in Lorain, a blue-collar town west of Cleveland where the decline of the married two-parent family has been especially steep, dozens of interviews with young parents suggest that both sides have a point.
Over the past generation, Lorain lost most of two steel mills, a shipyard and a Ford factory, diminishing the supply of jobs that let blue-collar workers raise middle-class families. More women went to work, making marriage less of a financial necessity for them. Living together became routine, and single motherhood lost the stigma that once sent couples rushing to the altar. Women here often describe marriage as a sign of having arrived rather than a way to get there.
Meanwhile, children happen.
Amber Strader, 27, was in an on-and-off relationship with a clerk at Sears a few years ago when she found herself pregnant. A former nursing student who now tends bar, Ms. Strader said her boyfriend was so dependent that she had to buy his cigarettes. Marrying him never entered her mind. “It was like living with another kid,” she said.
When a second child, with a new boyfriend, followed three years later — her birth control failed, she said — her boyfriend, a part-time house painter, was reluctant to wed.
Ms. Strader likes the idea of marriage; she keeps her parents’ wedding photo on her kitchen wall and says her boyfriend is a good father. But for now marriage is beyond her reach.
“I’d like to do it, but I just don’t see it happening right now,” she said. “Most of my friends say it’s just a piece of paper, and it doesn’t work out anyway.”
The recent rise in single motherhood has set off few alarms, unlike in past eras. When Daniel Patrick Moynihan, then a top Labor Department official and later a United States senator from New York, reported in 1965 that a quarter of black children were born outside marriage — and warned of a “tangle of pathology” — he set off a bitter debate.
By the mid-1990s, such figures looked quaint: a third of Americans were born outside marriage. Congress, largely blaming welfare, imposed tough restrictions. Now the figure is 41 percent — and 53 percent for children born to women under 30, according to Child Trends, which analyzed 2009 data from the National Center for Health Statistics.
Still, the issue received little attention until the publication last month of “Coming Apart,” a book by Charles Murray, a longtime critic of non-marital births.
Large racial differences remain: 73 percent of black children are born outside marriage, compared with 53 percent of Latinos and 29 percent of whites. And educational differences are growing. About 92 percent of college-educated women are married when they give birth, compared with 62 percent of women with some post-secondary schooling and 43 percent of women with a high school diploma or less, according to Child Trends.
Almost all of the rise in nonmarital births has occurred among couples living together. While in some countries such relationships endure at rates that resemble marriages, in the United States they are more than twice as likely to dissolve than marriages. In a summary of research, Pamela Smock and Fiona Rose Greenland, both of the University of Michigan, reported that two-thirds of couples living together split up by the time their child turned 10.
In Lorain as elsewhere, explanations for marital decline start with home economics: men are worth less than they used to be. Among men with some college but no degrees, earnings have fallen 8 percent in the past 30 years, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, while the earnings of their female counterparts have risen by 8 percent.
“Women used to rely on men, but we don’t need to anymore,” said Teresa Fragoso, 25, a single mother in Lorain. “We support ourselves. We support our kids.”
Fifty years ago, researchers have found, as many as a third of American marriages were precipitated by a pregnancy, with couples marrying to maintain respectability. Ms. Strader’s mother was among them.
Today, neither of Ms. Strader’s pregnancies left her thinking she should marry to avoid stigma. Like other women interviewed here, she described her children as largely unplanned, a byproduct of uncommitted relationships.
Some unwed mothers cite the failures of their parents’ marriages as reasons to wait. Brittany Kidd was 13 when her father ran off with one of her mother’s friends, plunging her mother into depression and leaving the family financially unstable.
“Our family life was pretty perfect: a nice house, two cars, a dog and a cat,” she said. “That stability just got knocked out like a window; it shattered.”
Ms. Kidd, 21, said she could not imagine marrying her son’s father, even though she loves him. “I don’t want to wind up like my mom,” she said.
Others noted that if they married, their official household income would rise, which could cost them government benefits like food stamps and child care. W. Bradford Wilcox, a sociologist at the University of Virginia, said other government policies, like no-fault divorce, signaled that “marriage is not as fundamental to society” as it once was.
Even as many Americans withdraw from marriage, researchers say, they expect more from it: emotional fulfillment as opposed merely to practical support. “Family life is no longer about playing the social role of father or husband or wife, it’s more about individual satisfaction and self-development,” said Andrew Cherlin, a sociologist at Johns Hopkins University.
Money helps explain why well-educated Americans still marry at high rates: they can offer each other more financial support, and hire others to do chores that prompt conflict. But some researchers argue that educated men have also been quicker than their blue-collar peers to give women equal authority. “They are more willing to play the partner role,” said Sara McLanahan, a Princeton sociologist.
Reviewing the academic literature, Susan L. Brown of Bowling Green State University recently found that children born to married couples, on average, “experience better education, social, cognitive and behavioral outcomes.”
Lisa Mercado, an unmarried mother in Lorain, would not be surprised by that. Between nursing classes and an all-night job at a gas station, she rarely sees her 6-year-old daughter, who is left with a rotating cast of relatives. The girl’s father has other children and rarely lends a hand.
“I want to do things with her, but I end up falling asleep,” Ms. Mercado said.
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ruveyn
Phoenix
Joined: Sep 22, 2008
Age: 76
Posts: 29275
Location: New Jersey
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| Posted: Sun Feb 19, 2012 8:45 am Post subject: |
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So?
ruveyn |
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naturalplastic
Phoenix
Joined: Aug 27, 2010
Posts: 4580
Location: mid atlantic coast usa
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| Posted: Sun Feb 19, 2012 10:03 am Post subject: |
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Interesting.
Not sure what the development portends but it is significant trend. |
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giall
Hummingbird
Joined: Mar 17, 2011
Posts: 22
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| Posted: Sun Feb 19, 2012 10:09 am Post subject: |
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| It's always interesting to a see a major shift in society. I wonder if we'll get to the point where marriage isn't considered the default setting the way it seems to be today. |
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Fnord
Enigmatic Threadkilling Metasyntactic Variable
Joined: May 07, 2008
Posts: 17804
Location: Stendec
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| Posted: Sun Feb 19, 2012 11:30 am Post subject: |
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| There are going to be a lot of lonely single moms looking for a step-daddy for their kids. The difficulty is that I know of no man who is willing to raise some other man's brats for just a place to sleep, eat, and watch TV. I tried, and it didn't work out. |
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Billybones
Snowy Owl
Joined: Jan 28, 2012
Posts: 133
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| Posted: Sun Feb 19, 2012 3:57 pm Post subject: |
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"Bastardization" is quite a loaded word. Interesting article though.
I'm sure it has many causes - economic, cultural, etc. But this is a trend that has continued unabated for decades now, in spite of all the efforts on the part of reactionary politicians & church hierarchies to undo the revolution in manners & morals that has occurred over the last 4 decades or so. By now we should know that civilization isn't collapsing. The overall trend is that we're all becoming more tolerant of one another.
People are deciding on their own what is right for their own lives, with less regard for tradition, authority & social convention. That is worth celebrating. |
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Vexcalibur
Proud to be smug as heck
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Joined: Jan 18, 2008
Posts: 5378
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| Posted: Sun Feb 19, 2012 6:20 pm Post subject: |
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| Fnord wrote: | | There are going to be a lot of lonely single moms looking for a step-daddy for their kids. The difficulty is that I know of no man who is willing to raise some other man's brats for just a place to sleep, eat, and watch TV. I tried, and it didn't work out. |
Well, I've met many that succeeded.
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auntblabby
Chief Assistant to the Assistant Chief
Joined: Feb 13, 2010
Posts: 18075
Location: the island of loveable toy humans
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| Posted: Sun Feb 19, 2012 6:58 pm Post subject: |
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^^^
the problem with that, is that for every good-hearted noble man, there are a legion of less noble men who don't have it in their hearts to put themselves out for somebody else's spawn. supply and demand don't match up here. |
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Oodain
big chief wulla bamboom alakaway
Joined: Jan 31, 2011
Age: 23
Posts: 5022
Location: in my own little tamarillo jungle,
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| Posted: Sun Feb 19, 2012 7:08 pm Post subject: |
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over here it seems to function pretty well,
i know of quite a lot of couples where one or both brought children into the mix.
_________________
//through chaos comes complexity//
the scent of the tamarillo is pungent and powerfull,
woe be to the nose who nears it.
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marshall
Under the whirlwind
Joined: Apr 15, 2007
Posts: 9156
Location: Western Michigan
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| Posted: Sun Feb 19, 2012 7:58 pm Post subject: |
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| Billybones wrote: | "Bastardization" is quite a loaded word. Interesting article though.
I'm sure it has many causes - economic, cultural, etc. But this is a trend that has continued unabated for decades now, in spite of all the efforts on the part of reactionary politicians & church hierarchies to undo the revolution in manners & morals that has occurred over the last 4 decades or so. By now we should know that civilization isn't collapsing. The overall trend is that we're all becoming more tolerant of one another.
People are deciding on their own what is right for their own lives, with less regard for tradition, authority & social convention. That is worth celebrating. |
I see somewhat of a danger in this though, especially during economic hard times. I don't think the notion of marriage as a strong commitment should ever be abandoned. Not that I support the anti-gay crowd or religious conservatism. I support gay marriage, birth control, and most other "liberal" causes. I just support practical family values from the standpoint that we should be compassionate human beings. I think single parent families are hell. A single person just isn't built to be able to work 8-10 hours a day, take care of a household, and raise 2-3 kids all at the same time. |
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Master_Pedant
Rocky Anderson for President!
Joined: Mar 15, 2009
Posts: 4707
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| Posted: Sun Feb 19, 2012 8:08 pm Post subject: |
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| Fnord wrote: | | There are going to be a lot of lonely single moms looking for a step-daddy for their kids. The difficulty is that I know of no man who is willing to raise some other man's brats for just a place to sleep, eat, and watch TV. I tried, and it didn't work out. |
Whatever severely misandristic notions you may hold, not all men are self-centred pricks.
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marshall
Under the whirlwind
Joined: Apr 15, 2007
Posts: 9156
Location: Western Michigan
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| Posted: Sun Feb 19, 2012 8:22 pm Post subject: |
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| Master_Pedant wrote: | | Fnord wrote: | | There are going to be a lot of lonely single moms looking for a step-daddy for their kids. The difficulty is that I know of no man who is willing to raise some other man's brats for just a place to sleep, eat, and watch TV. I tried, and it didn't work out. |
Whatever severely misandristic notions you may hold, not all men are self-centred pricks. |
That's pretty harsh. |
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LKL
Phoenix
Joined: Jul 22, 2007
Age: 37
Posts: 5684
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| Posted: Sun Feb 19, 2012 9:13 pm Post subject: |
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| Fnord wrote: | | There are going to be a lot of lonely single moms looking for a step-daddy for their kids. The difficulty is that I know of no man who is willing to raise some other man's brats for just a place to sleep, eat, and watch TV. I tried, and it didn't work out. |
Tell that to my dad (and adoptive father). He did ok with my brother and me. Family isn't just about a place to crash. |
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LKL
Phoenix
Joined: Jul 22, 2007
Age: 37
Posts: 5684
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| Posted: Sun Feb 19, 2012 9:15 pm Post subject: |
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| marshall wrote: | | Master_Pedant wrote: | | Fnord wrote: | | There are going to be a lot of lonely single moms looking for a step-daddy for their kids. The difficulty is that I know of no man who is willing to raise some other man's brats for just a place to sleep, eat, and watch TV. I tried, and it didn't work out. |
Whatever severely misandristic notions you may hold, not all men are self-centred pricks. |
That's pretty harsh. |
but accurate. |
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cw10
Phoenix
Joined: May 24, 2011
Age: 40
Posts: 973
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| Posted: Sun Feb 19, 2012 10:07 pm Post subject: |
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Why can't fathers just stay with their children?
Too much to ask?
Of course it is in a do whatever the hell you want society.
You reap what you sow. |
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