Posted on 02/18/2012 12:59:45 PM PST by DogByte6RER
Most Births Among Those Under 30 Are To Unwed Moms
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 U.S. women younger than 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 past 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 U.S. children are born to mothers younger than 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 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 American children born outside marriage face elevated risks of falling into poverty, failing in school or suffering from 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.
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 U.S. 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 younger than 30, according to Child Trends.
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 postsecondary schooling and 43 percent of women with a high school diploma or less.
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.
As any good humanist would say: “Who is to judge?”
I agree with all your comments. This is a total disaster - I can’t work out why people are not much concerned.
The same trends are evident in Australia, except that illegitimacy among ethnic communities is lower, not higher, than the mainstream. But everywhere it is spreading like a plague.
These trends are accompanied by a shocking rise in violence towards children - numerous children die at the hands of their “care givers”.
In the US, as you say, family breakdown has nigh on destroyed the black community, and the Hispanic community is now badly affected. I remember that a rare conservative reviewer of the US/Spanish film Quinceañera asked if a celbratory story about an unwed pregnant 15 year old was really what is needed at the moment - considering exploding illegitimacy rates in that community.
Placemark
Bullseye as usual.
I blame unREALITY TV, women’s magazines and the sick idea that everyone should have weddings that cost as much as down payments for mansions.
We know another little kid where the mom was on drugs. The mom has been in jail and her kids were being looked after by the grandma for a time. She has a kid with just about every boyfriend--3 official kids by all different dads, but we suspect that her "brother" is actually her son too. Her oldest son lives with his dad, but the middle child never knew her dad. She definitely has a sadness about her because of it. At one time she asked my husband if he could be her dad. The littlest boy was supposedly fathered by an illegal that got kicked out of the country. After the illegal, she was living with an alcoholic boyfriend. That ended in December after a physical/verbal fight and within just a few days she was onto another live-in boyfriend. So the "family" no longer lives in our immediate neighborhood, and we no longer see the little girl as much which is sad for her and us. There's absolutely no stability in the little girl's life.
Where do you get the idea that whites are 85% of the population. Whites are under 2/3 of the population and will be a minority in under 40 years.
A very melancholy story. You at least showed friendship and support for that young girl, who is in such hard circumstances.
“And where Lawlessness increase, the love of many shall grow cold.”
The Word does not go out in vain.
Lawlessness. From the “top” down, brings cold love.
It’s over 80% if you include Hispanics in the “white” total. Some demographers do, most don’t.
It is sad all the way around. We hadn’t seen her since before Christmas. Her mom contacted me in January and we took her out to eat and then back to our house on MLK Day. On the way taking her home, she said, “’My name’, I brought all the stuff you gave me to my new house”. Then it got quiet for a bit and she said, “Thank you, ‘My Name’”. When she got out of the car, my daughter soon fell asleep on the way home, and I just started crying and couldn’t quit for quite some time. She said it in such a sincere, touching way. It was very sweet.
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