Is Rising Illegitimacy Necessarily a Problem?

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there might be a higher prevalence in the us, i think its years since we had the last case in denmark.

also as for parents taking an active interest, you are right when saying its a double edged sword, i just see it in reverse, the far greater danger lies in children with little context or sense of responsiblity of choice.
i have known plenty of people that barely had a choice even after moving out, they had become so codependant that they in effect isolated themselves as effectively as any ASD ever could.

proper sex ed and a relaxed atmosphere surrounding the subject sex will do more for combating teenage pregnancies and STD's than any amount of control ever could, often control only pours fuel on the fire of rebellion, resulting in a net loss for society.

i also think that anyone that calls the cops for any kind of family related non violence matter (ie girlfriend/boyfriend, religion, tantrum,(with the possible exception of theft)) is a spineless moron,
the only thing that will cause is grief, in the worst case it will cost someone their life, kids have been tased in the us for tantrums, now what will that do?

@puddingmouse, excactly, the only thing that shows is just how irrelevant it actually is, illegitimacy that is, there is a higher personal freedom in many of the countries above the us, higher financial freedom and higher personal happiness, it makes no sense why anyone would then afterwards see illegitimacy as the actual issue, fathers not helping financially at the very least is one of those problems, incest another.

Over here, there are tax benefits to marriage. Also, the possibility to enroll one's spouse in one's health insurance plan. If people are going to raise children together, there are generally more benefits to being married than not.

Scandinavia is, of course, much more socially advanced than the USA.

i am telling you there are not. it's quite a claim you are making. perhaps you could provide some statistics that would back it up. particularly in relation to the child sex claim. i strongly suspect you will be unable to.

to suggest a strong link between child sex abuse and children born to unmarried couples is spurious.

it is also spurious to claim that an individual born to unmarried parents who was not a victim of child abuse and whose parents were not benefit fraudsters is "an exception" is also spurious.

Any trend that is more represented in the lower classes will see many of the negative things associated with lower socioeconomic conditions. That doesnt establish causation in any way.

i think it isn't a problem, as long as there are social systems in place to help support the children. i think the children are the responsibility of the whole community, and if single parenting or illegitimacy is leading to social problems then we are all responsible.

About 50 years ago, the most widely-accepted social model was the Nuclear Family. Two heterosexual parents took responsibility for raising their offspring, who left home at 18. If the parents were rich, then the offspring could look forward to an additional four years of childhood in college. The grandparents were sent to die in nursing homes (our version of concentration camps).

This social model was heavily subsidized by the government. Social Security relieved people of the guilt of not supporting their aging parents. Lots of tax breaks and subsidies earmarked for the nuclear family.

Previously, divorce and bastardy were rare. Now, they are a lot more common, and social structures don't seem to have evolved to accomodate the reality. People in the USA generally don't want to take care of illegitimate offspring, because we're much too selfish. Trying to make them the responsibility of the whole community probably just isn't going to succeed.

It's not about statistics...though personally I am curious about the data that is available.

But, yes, there ARE strong links. I'll give you four. Unprotected sex can potentially lead to pregnancy, right? And it quite often does whether it's an intended consequence or not. So there's ONE link. Are children usually allowed to get married? No. So that inherently means they are having babies out of wedlock. So there's another link. By law, children CANNOT consent to sex, so sexual activity is either criminal behavior (and not abusive) or it is abusive behavior (AND thus criminal). Link #3. Moreover it is often ENCOURAGED for the sake of getting welfare benefits they wouldn't otherwise be eligible for. And because it is a repeating pattern across at least three generations in many cases, children grow up expecting to continue the pattern. Link #4 (fraud). From a legal perspective, it's technically NOT fraud, but it is unethical manipulation of the system that encourages abusive and/or criminal behavior elsewhere. And it is an unnecessary way of life given the opportunities that they have, and that makes it an unnecessary burden on those paying money into the system when that money could be used to fill genuine needs. I don't mean punish the out-of-wedlock children for circumstances they have no control over, but I do mean require educational programs to inform them of the opportunities that they do have and equip social services to intervene when they encounter an abusive situation. I dunno if that's really a good solution (I harbor a deep hatred for DHS/CPS), but some kind of intervention to break the cycle at that level would go a long way towards eliminating that particular problem.

I'm less concerned about single-parenting in situations in which a mother has her first child, say, between the ages of 25-35. It is generally assumed that people have fewer kids when they wait until later in life to start their families, but people past that age are also generally more mature and capable of handling work responsibilities along with child-rearing (as single parents) than a 16-year-old, not to mention you can reasonably assume that they've completed most or all of their academic ambitions by that point. They don't have to worry about anyone "carrying" them and pose less of a burden on the state. By contrast, some women who start having babies early on seem to make a career of it. The effects of it are more pronounced when you see three generations living in the same house with a dozen or so individuals under the age of 18--and it's NOT a foster family.

Is that fairly common in Mississippi? I've never come across something like that.

But, it must be helpful to have a lot of family members together.

If you look at the way that slaves were bred in the South (and, by 1860, most Mississippians were slaves): a slave girl would start breeding at puberty, and have a baby every year or two. The slave girl had absolutely no say in who was going to impregnate her, where her children were going to be sold, and where she was going to be sold. Her owner might be her own father, in addition to fathering several of her children.

The "three generations living in the same house with a dozen or so individuals under the age of 18--and it's NOT a foster family" certainly wouldn't represent a degradation in living standards for Mississippi.

Even in the 20th century, racist pigs like Strom Thurmond exercised their assumed privileges over under-aged Black girls.

After Slavery was abolished in the US, the African American Community had an extremely strong family unit and were more likely to get married than white people were. That is until "welfare" came into being and destroyed those families.

The Fox News version of history.

Didn't get the information from Fox News, though yeah Fox News has reported on this.

The culprit of the family breakdown was due to "welfare" programs, maybe it was an unintended consequence but that's what caused the breakdown.

Nothing more than misinformation being spread as an excuse for eliminating welfare.

It's true that the proportion of black children that are born out of wedlock has increased over the last few decades, but most people don't know what the hell that statistic really means. It simply refers to how many black children are born out of wedlock compared to how many black children are born to married couples. A major reason the former share has increased is because married black couples are having fewer children than before, which means that more of those black children who are born will be born out of wedlock. If you really wanted to demonstrate a degeneration in black sexual morality or a breakdown of the black family, you would have to compare fertility statistics, and I recall that black fertility rates in general are lower than they were decades ago.

At any rate, even if this "breakdown of the black family" had never occurred, at least 80% of the income and poverty rate differences between blacks and whites would remain according to a 1990s study by the President's Council of Economic Advisers, so it's not as if having kids out of wedlock is what's holding black people back as conservatives like to believe. Furthermore, violent crime rates among blacks have decreased over time despite this "illegitimacy increase", so I doubt illegitimacy is the sole cause of social problems in the black community.

The "Conservative" view is that welfare causes illegitimacy and family breakdown, and that if welfare were to be eliminated, then everything would be magically okay.

Not likely, considering the cases of African Americans pulling themselves up out of poverty appear at least on the surface to be more common when there is a strong family unit with a mother and a father. Herman Cain is one example, and there are others.

Unless you're trying to say skin color determines one's intelligence, which is a bunch of garbage.