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December 23, 2007
Unwed Mothers V. The Traditional Family
by Jack Lee
I got into a mild disagreement over parenting yesterday and it started when B- and her sister M- said they were going over to thier cousins (no relationship to me - I'm a foster Dad) and that her cousin was going to have a baby and how wonderful it was and how happy they were for her! My first question was how old is the mother-to-be? Answer 23. Ok, is she married? "No, but she has a boyfriend and he's a really nice guy and they've been together for ever." (Doink! Wrong answer.) My knee jerk reply was, "Marriage first - babies second." (Then I thought about it a second and mentally revised it to good job, marriage and then baby. And then I mentally revised it again to good education, good job, marriage and then baby)
I said, "So who is going to support this baby? A terse reply from B- followed, "He is, and he works!"
Then B- became visibly annoyed with my line of questions and her sister M- also chimed in to form one long lecture that went something like this, "...just because somebody isn't married doesn't mean they can't be happy and have a baby together. What's marriage anyway? People get married all the time and they have babies and then get divorced. Marriage is just a concept, a piece of paper and hardly anybody stays married and if they do they often wind up not even liking each other and they are miserable, so I don't see any reason to be married."
Ouch! I was thoroughly rebuffed for my old fashioned ideas of family!
I have to admit there’s some truth to what the girls were saying, but I also felt they were being short sighted and I wanted to discuss this a little further. Without having any ready facts at my disposal I fumbled along with, "Well, what about the child? That child born out of wedlock has to go to school some day and kids can be cruel because of the stigma attached to such births, thats our society."
B- and M- fired back with, "So who is society and what right do they have to say anything about what makes people happy, it's none of their business..." And this was concluded by the final cop-out of me being more or less just dismissed before their female tempers boiled over, "I don't want to talk about anymore (both girls now visibly mad at me)." However, I know where this was headed if it was allowed to go just a bit longer. It would probably have involved some version of the "Murphy Brown" example and how "everybody does it" and then back to "who cares about what other people think"... yadda, yadda.
Here are some interesting facts I found that I hope my girls will read too, The first is courtesy of a study called "Perspectives on Sexual and Reproductive Health, Nov-Dec, 2002 by Deborah Roempke Graefe, Daniel T. Lichter . The research says, "Nonmarital childbearing reduces the likelihood of marriage. Nonmarital childbearing raises the likelihood of divorce among unwed mothers who eventually marry, a finding that also varies by race and ethnicity."
Now the divorce rate issue: "By now almost everyone has heard that the national divorce rate is close to 50% of all marriages. This is true, but the rate must be interpreted with caution and several important caveats. For many people, the actual chances of divorce are far below 50/50." And " ...if you are a reasonably well-educated person with a decent income, come from an intact family and are religious, and marry after age twenty-five without having a baby first, your chances of divorce are very low " Cohabitation, Marriage, Divorce and Remarriage in the United States, National Center for Health Statistics.
A recent University of Chicago study said, "the number of unmarried households with no children increased 230%, the number of children in single-mother households increased 417%, and the number of children living with neither parent increased 1,440%. Only 51% of American children, or 36.4 million of them, lived with both parents, and 18.2%, or 13 million of them, lived with a single parent, in 1998. This left 31% of the nation's children, or 22 million of them, living with neither parent." And now this shocker, "as 13 million of these 25.7 million children now living with "two parents" are actually living with step-parents, most of them step-fathers, where they are seven times more likely than children living with families to be sexually abused."
And this testimony from Michael Tanner, Director of Health and Welfare Studies, the Cato Institute. "The relationship [between single-parent families and crime] is so strong that controlling for family configuration erases the relationship between race and crime and between low income and crime. This conclusion shows up time and again in the literature. The nation's mayors, as well as police officers, social workers, probation officers, and court officials, consistently point to family break up as the most important source of rising rates of crime.(6)
At the same time, the evidence of a link between the availability of welfare and out-of-wedlock births is overwhelming. There have been 13 major studies of the relationship between the availability of welfare benefits and out-of-wedlock birth. Of these, 11 found a statistically significant correlation. Among the best of these studies is the work done by June O'Neill for the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services.
“Eighty-five percent of all poor black children live in fatherless families” meaning that “the poverty rate for black children without fathers is nearly six times that for black children with two parents,” writes David Horowitz, an early Black Panther supporter, in his 1999 book, “Hating Whitey.” It should be noted the black population also has the highest per capita crime rate; also the connection to drugs, crime and poverty is overwhelming in any race with single parent families.
In his controversial 2002 speech during the NAACP commemoration of Brown vs. Board of Education, actor Bill Cosby decried the fact that: “No longer is a person embarrassed because they’re pregnant without a husband. No longer is a boy considered an embarrassment if he tries to run away from being the father.”
The book “Losing Ground,” by Charles Murray states that “illegitimacy is the single most important social problem of our time—more important than crime, drugs, poverty, illiteracy, welfare, or homelessness because it drives everything else.”
The risk of being an unwed mother is:
1. Having a baby first makes marriage that much more unlikely and having a baby first increases the chances of divorce should you get married.
2. High risk of being dependant on welfare.
3. Child is more likely to be unproductive, underachieving and prone to crime.
4. Child is seven times more likely to be sexually abused.
5. Unwed mothers and their children are far more likely to be involved in drug abuse, crime, homelessness, poverty, illiteracy and welfare.
6. People who do it right, who get married after first getting a good education that leads to a good job, that have a mutual religious affiliation and plan ahead for their parenting have an extremely low rate of divorce, at least 10 times less likely than those who don't. Wow...double wow!
And who do you think my girls are going to vote for, you may wonder? Well, they have both indicated they like Hillary Clinton.
Posted by Post Scripts at December 23, 2007 09:43 AM
Comments
"...just because somebody isn't married doesn't mean they can't be happy and have a baby together. What's marriage anyway? People get married all the time and they have babies and then get divorced. Marriage is just a concept, a piece of paper and hardly anybody stays married and if they do they often wind up not even liking each other and they are miserable, so I don't see any reason to be married."
This is one of the sadest speeches I have ever read...and it could just as easily have been said by a baby boomer! It represents part of the ugly legacy of the boomer rebellion. It is also total garbage.
If you stay in school, get a college degree and a good job (and the maturity that comes by taking those steps) before you get married, you have a much higher chance at being HAPPY and SATISFIED in life...as do your children. DUH...it's a no brainer. Is it really worth the huge risk to play it any other way...that's STUPID, as Jack's statistics reveal. There are no valid arguments against marriage only dumb alternative choices.
Does that mean their friend is doomed to an unhappy life? No, but the odds are really against her and her child ...why, if other choices still exist, would you roll the dice?
Our kids never got the chance to live in an America where crime, drugs, the homeless, & lost kids from broken homes were NOT part of the everyday fabric of life. A sad legacy indeed and one of the reasons that conservatives are so adamant about reasserting basic family values. Individual success and happiness is a small part of our purpose; the very survival of our society society is the larger issue and that is dependent on strong intact families.
Posted by: Tina at December 23, 2007 02:22 PM
Tina, Tina, Tina...THANK YOU! You have delivered pearls of wisdom and said so perfectly. Now, if these wonderful words of wisdom will sink in!
The new "me" generation keeps lowering the bar until you could step over it, what things worthwhile come that easily?
Posted by: Jack Lee at December 23, 2007 05:53 PM
The new "me" generation keeps lowering the bar until you could step over it...
Great line...seems to me they'll be trippin'
...what things worthwhile come that easily?
Great question, which brings up the fundamental lies that fool the young...1. marriage brings happily ever after 2. good marriages just happen. 3. happiness is something that you get from outside yourself.
Posted by: Tina at December 23, 2007 06:50 PM
I don't believe there is anything wrong with not getting married. My life partner and I have been together for 8 years and we have no intensions of getting married. We have a 12 year-old (hers, now ours, from a previous relationship) and we have explained to him on numerous occasions why we do not get married. We have told him that marriage is fine for some, not for others. We happen to believe that you do not need a piece of paper to prove you love each other. If for some reason the time comes that we need to seperate, we believe it will be far less traumatic than a divorce. There will be no fighting, no custody issues, no property division, no court battles, and (perhaps the best part) no judge telling us that we are no longer together.
We believe that far too many people stay together "for the kids" or because "it's too expensive to get divorced" and that causes more harm than seperating. Seperation does not mean no contact and the children are forgotten. It just means that the adults cannot live together anymore. There are several reasons for this. People do grow apart. People do develop different looks on life. Marriage often means that people who no longer share common life goals are forced to stay together. We've seen this cause far more problems because they fight constantly and often they have no intentions of "working it out." An unmarried couple we know (two children) seperated and they continue to parent their children better than most married couples we have witnessed. They continue to be present at special events, present a united front during times of discipline, and they still like each other enough to be able to enjoy holidays in each other's company. Often married couples who are forced to stay together (and inevitably get divorced anyway) end up hating each other so much that the thought of the other makes them physically ill.
The point is that society is changing. Keep in mind that change is not always a bad thing. Yes, there are a lot of societal changes that fit squarely into the "bad" category but I do not believe the trend away from marriage is a bad thing. Tina, your first commenter, believes that "...that's STUPID, as Jack's statistics reveal. There are no valid arguments against marriage only dumb alternative choices." I actually feel sorry for Tina. With such a closed mind, how is she going to deal with any changes in her life or society?
As for Jack's statistics, we need to think about those. Often, "statistics" are simply that: statistics. Statistics do not take into account individuals. Only a collective result that only scratches the surface. None of those statistics took into account how many of those children of marriageless relationships would not get married because of the high rate of divorce? Every single couple in my extended family is divorced. Unfortunately, due to the close nature of my extended family, I was privy to many of the details of the divorces. I made the decision in my 20's that marriage was not for me and there may be a better way to live life with another. So far, I have been right. But, that's me. Others choose to cling to customs and traditions from the past like a person who cannot swim clings to a life ring in the water. If that works for them, I am happy for them. Biologically, we are all different in many ways. Who ever said that what was good for one was good for all? The "me generation" as you choose to call it, may be the first to question the marriage establishment but they will not be the last.
Posted by: Tom at December 24, 2007 07:44 AM