For Women Under 30, Most Births Occur Outside Marriage

Inner Beauty · Feb 19, 2012

nicole89marsh said: ↑

This.

Single parents (if they work) aren't always around for the children. If a mother or father is working to provide the sole income for a household, it means that the household income level is lower (than most married couples) as well, which impacts a whole bunch of things for children like nutrition, education, even certain sports they play.

Working single parents don't often have the time to spend with their children, so after they figure the child's old enough to be left home alone safely, the child is 'on their own'. Sometimes leading to involvement with gangs and other criminal activity (Why should they make a modest living doing some crappy job, when they could sell drugs and be "da man" on the street?). Juvenile crime rates increase in the summer because kids are out of school with nothing to do... so no school and mom or dad off working, often mischief could happen.

To see numbers going how they're going is kind of 'scary' when thinking in terms of the future, who knows what'll happen then...

I'm in favor of long term relationships, and have seen many happy marriages that lasted. There's a lot of "fairy tale" romances in my family, helps keep that flame alive, so to speak. But, if numbers are going the way they are now, something may need to change. What exactly would work in the place of marriage, I don't know... but an institution like marriage cannot just be 'eliminated' from society, it needs to be exchanged with something else.
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Great post as well....

I wish I could rep everyone in here....

Ches · Feb 19, 2012

The Dark Knight said: ↑

I think a lot of those statistics are off. For one what if both parents worked and worked the same hours? So you'd have a kid at home alone anyway. So the problem isn't necassirly two married people in the household together as much as it is contact time. And I think the idea of a support system has been abandoned as well. What happened to it takes a village. I had aunts uncels and my grandmother who were constantly watching me and my brother when I was younger and my parents worked.

And I don't think we can do away with marriage but reformulating it in some respects is necessary.
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Yeah, what HAS happened to it? Everybody worries about themselves. They don't feel they have any responsibility to anyone else. And that, imo, is largely the problem with society today.

Sheesh, for a post where you wondered "whoooo caaaaares?" , it's certainly generating alot of discussion. :razz:

The Dark King · Feb 19, 2012

chesbaygrl7 said: ↑

Maybe in YOUR world. This just isn't true across the board!

It's a sad day indeed, imo, when someone calls a romantic relationship a burden. :cry: I still say you have never truly been in love, my dear.
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I think most people haven't but that's besides the point I say that most relationships don't work because of the numbers. If half of marriages end in divorce then from the other half you people who can't afford a divorce or stay together for the kids that means most of them don't work. Not to say none of them don't but its pretty clear to me.

For me any that's as flimsy as what romantic love appears to be is a burden. Not every time but from what I see most times.

The Dark King · Feb 19, 2012

chesbaygrl7 said: ↑

Yeah, what HAS happened to it? Everybody worries about themselves. They don't feel they have any responsibility to anyone else. And that, imo, is largely the problem with society today.

Sheesh, for a post where you wondered "whoooo caaaaares?" , it's certainly generating alot of discussion. :razz:
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I like contraversy sometimes. I stand my original point though who cares in the grand scheme of things. Wrap it up and advise your kids to do the same and this won't even be a conversation topic.

Ches · Feb 19, 2012

Stizzy said: ↑

Stizzy!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! Lol
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:smt043:smt043:smt043

Oh, I have tears in my eyes from laughing so hard! Love ya bunches, sexy Stizzy! (I esp love Geeky Stizzy! Woohoo!)

Ches · Feb 19, 2012

The Dark Knight said: ↑

I like contraversy sometimes. I stand my original point though who cares in the grand scheme of things. Wrap it up and advise your kids to do the same and this won't even be a conversation topic.
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:smt104

The fact that you don't care and think no one else does speaks volumes. But whatever. Don't presume to speak for me, please. I do care.

Thanks, North, for posting. :smt023

Stizzy · Feb 19, 2012

chesbaygrl7 said: ↑

:smt043:smt043:smt043

Oh, I have tears in my eyes from laughing so hard! Love ya bunches, sexy Stizzy! (I esp love Geeky Stizzy! Woohoo!)
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Thanks babe!! Stizzy loves Ches back! :smt057

Nikkers · Feb 19, 2012

The Dark Knight said: ↑

I think a lot of those statistics are off. For one what if both parents worked and worked the same hours? So you'd have a kid at home alone anyway. So the problem isn't necassirly two married people in the household together as much as it is contact time. And I think the idea of a support system has been abandoned as well. What happened to it takes a village. I had aunts uncels and my grandmother who were constantly watching me and my brother when I was younger and my parents worked.

And I don't think we can do away with marriage but reformulating it in some respects is necessary.
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There's more income available then for childcare, etc... while if it was a single parent they may not be able to afford it in the same way. That's my opinion on it anyways.

Agree with support systems being abandoned, relatives would watch my sister and I when we were younger as well. People are becoming 'too individual' in a sense, not relying on family/connections like in the past. Maybe it depends on the size of the family as well... *ponders*
Guess that's why the economy 'messing up' is a good thing. More people are apparently moving back with their parents, or with other family members to save money and make ends meet. Short term perhaps... but maybe it'll help with unifying support systems again.

The Dark King · Feb 19, 2012

chesbaygrl7 said: ↑

:smt104

The fact that you don't care and think no one else does speaks volumes. But whatever. Don't presume to speak for me, please. I do care.

Thanks, North, for posting. :smt023
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I never presumed anything. It was in question form. Ya dig?

The Dark King · Feb 19, 2012

nicole89marsh said: ↑

There's more income available then for childcare, etc... while if it was a single parent they may not be able to afford it in the same way. That's my opinion on it anyways.

Agree with support systems being abandoned, relatives would watch my sister and I when we were younger as well. People are becoming 'too individual' in a sense, not relying on family/connections like in the past. Maybe it depends on the size of the family as well... *ponders*
Guess that's why the economy 'messing up' is a good thing. More people are apparently moving back with their parents, or with other family members to save money and make ends meet. Short term perhaps... but maybe it'll help with unifying support systems again.
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Yeah I've always had a big close knit family. Probably one of the reasons I really never seek love else where. My family and friends have always been consistent.

Nikkers · Feb 19, 2012

The Dark Knight said: ↑

Yeah I've always had a big close knit family. Probably one of the reasons I really never seek love else where. My family and friends have always been consistent.
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Yeah, the kind of family that would have a family forest, not a family tree. I love my big close knit family too, but still ended up finding love elsewhere (granted, it didn't really last, but then again... plenty of time lol).

It's good knowing family would have your back, but really have to feel for those that do not have the same. Not everyone has the same social capital to help them through things.

The Dark King · Feb 19, 2012

nicole89marsh said: ↑

Yeah, the kind of family that would have a family forest, not a family tree. I love my big close knit family too, but still ended up finding love elsewhere (granted, it didn't really last, but then again... plenty of time lol).

It's good knowing family would have your back, but really have to feel for those that do not have the same. Not everyone has the same social capital to help them through things.
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Very true. It's easy to take for grantite sometimes.

Tamstrong · Feb 19, 2012

andreboba said: ↑

IMO it's a dangerous social trend when half of all births to women under 30 happen outside of marriage.
Mainly it's an economic argument related to the decline in household incomes.
It benefits two non-affluent working parents to pool their assets through marriage than going it alone.

I also think there's a gap that occurs in one's social development when they are raised by a single parent. What unspoken lesson is a young girl being taught when she doesn't see her father in the home, or feels that it's normal for a father not to be a primary parent for his children??
What does a young boy learn when he doesn't regularly see his father in the household??

Almost every sociological study on child development and achievement favors children raised in a two parent household compared to only by the mother or father.

I think the number of felons currently incarcerated in U.S. prisons are 90%+ the products of single parent households.
That's not an accident.
There are benefits to marriage that go beyond what the two principles are getting out of it personally.

Babies happen and they don't always show up when we plan them to, but when it's almost preferred for young people to have children without being married then it becomes a symptom of a greater erosion in the core values of the nation.

One of the first signs in the decline of the state of Black people in America was the number of Black children born out of wedlock since integration and the 1960s. Lower academic achievement, less earned income and higher rates of incarceration followed.

It's fine for someone to be against marriage, but IMO it's wrong for those same people to desire to bring children into the world they aren't committed to raising together with the other parent.

Becoming a single parent IMO should be an unfortunate outcome, it shouldn't be the goal.
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Great post! :smt023

chesbaygrl7 said: ↑

I agree, IB. Romantic love gets you through the honeymoon phase. It's not always something you instinctively "feel." Love is a choice. Imo, anyone who says that love just "happens" and it's something you can't control, doesn't really understand love. Marriage is teamwork. Two people HAVE to learn to work together. Two animals, yoked together, must go in the same direction to make forward progress. That's what the "work" is in the sense that it takes work to make a marriage successful. You have two people with different views, thought processes, needs and desires, and they must learn to work with each other to continue being happy and move the relationship forward. It's when one or both chooses to go off on their own that the yoke is strained and eventually breaks.

In this day and age, where everything is about "me" and selflessness is viewed as an archaic attitude (much like chivalry), it's no wonder marriages fail.

Other relationships - friendships, family relationships, work relationships - don't depend so much on the teamwork concept, so it's easier to maintain those relationships than it is to maintain marital harmony. If your best friend wants to go blow all his/her money on fun but frivolous purchases, what do you care? You might shake your head and wonder what he/she's smokin, but you likely wouldn't care too much because it doesn't affect your bottom line. However, if your wife/husband did that, you would care.
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I'd rep you for this, Ches, but I gotta spread it around.

nicole89marsh said: ↑

This.

Single parents (if they work) aren't always around for the children. If a mother or father is working to provide the sole income for a household, it means that the household income level is lower (than most married couples) as well, which impacts a whole bunch of things for children like nutrition, education, even certain sports they play.

Working single parents don't often have the time to spend with their children, so after they figure the child's old enough to be left home alone safely, the child is 'on their own'. Sometimes leading to involvement with gangs and other criminal activity (Why should they make a modest living doing some crappy job, when they could sell drugs and be "da man" on the street?). Juvenile crime rates increase in the summer because kids are out of school with nothing to do... so no school and mom or dad off working, often mischief could happen.

To see numbers going how they're going is kind of 'scary' when thinking in terms of the future, who knows what'll happen then...

I'm in favor of long term relationships, and have seen many happy marriages that lasted. There's a lot of "fairy tale" romances in my family, helps keep that flame alive, so to speak. But, if numbers are going the way they are now, something may need to change. What exactly would work in the place of marriage, I don't know... but an institution like marriage cannot just be 'eliminated' from society, it needs to be exchanged with something else.
Click to expand...

Well said, Nic! :smt038

andreboba said: ↑

'Relationships rarely work out.' -TDK.

ONE successful relationship outweighs the pain and heartache of a dozen failed ones IMO.
Just because it's hard to find one, or make one sustain, doesn't justify the position that 'relationships rarely work out'.

What you call being reality based, I see as someone who's become wholly jaded and pessimistic on the idea of being emotionally involved with someone else.
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Another great post, Andre!

chesbaygrl7 said: ↑

I have read that, indeed, there are (in the article I read) young women who DO look at government assistance as a "career" of sorts. It's all they know. Their grandmothers were single, living on welfare, their mothers were, single living on welfare and so they, in turn, were looking to do the same thing. Not exactly how we want to see kids following in their parent's footsteps or "taking over the family business!"
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Yeah, it's an unfortunate, scary cycle.

Howiedoit · Feb 20, 2012

The Dark Knight said: ↑

Whoooooooooooooo carreeeeeeesssssssss!!!!
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I would assume the FATHERS of these kids, because they will be HUNTED down by Child Services to pay for child support.

goodlove · Feb 20, 2012

4north1side2 said: ↑

For Women Under 30, Most Births Occur Outside Marriage
By JASON DePARLE and SABRINA TAVERNISE
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/18/us/for-women-under-30-most-births-occur-outside-marriage.html

LORAIN, Ohio — 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.

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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well well well. I wonder how the conservative talk show are going to explain this

4north1side2 · Feb 21, 2012

The Dark Knight said: ↑

Whoooooooooooooo carreeeeeeesssssssss!!!!
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You will once you find your ass getting punked by some bastard children for fun yelling "Wooooooooooooorld Staaaaaaaaaaaaaaaar"

The Dark King · Feb 21, 2012

4north1side2 said: ↑

You will once you find your ass getting punked by some bastard children for fun yelling "Wooooooooooooorld Staaaaaaaaaaaaaaaar"
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Lol good one

blackbull1970 · Feb 23, 2012

Interesting article.

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