More than half of the children being born to women under 30 these days are born out of wedlock.
Jason Departe and Sabrina Tavernise, reporters for the New York Times, made this discovery reading “Child Trends,” a Washington research group that analyzed government data.
The pair looked deeper. They found that having children out of wedlock has become a class thing. Ninety-two percent of women who are college graduates are married when they give birth. These women are also most likely to have comfortable incomes and to stay married. The youngsters born to such couples are far less likely to have emotional problems, drop out of school or, it goes without saying, fall into poverty.
Nonmarital births also are connected to race: 73 percent of black children are born outside marriage, compared to 53 percent of Latinos and 29 percent of whites.
While most of the nonmarital births occur to women who are living with a man, the data also showed that such relationships are more than twice as likely to dissolve as are marriages. When they do break up they most often leave a single mother with the responsibility of raising the child. Single mothers make up the poorest slice of the poverty-stricken in the U.S.
When social conservatives such as Rick Santorum look at these facts, they declare the collapse of the American family is at the root of our problems and call for a return to bygone values.
What they do not provide is a roadmap.
Today’s culture has been created deliberately through millions of individual decisions made over decades. Perhaps the most formative feature of the rich world today is the freedom women have to shape their own lives, to earn their own way and be as creative in as many ways as their talents, their energies and their determination levels allow them to be. The liberation of women has had a profound effect on the American family.
The more recent economic blow dealt to working class men by the lower wages and benefits caused by globalization that has made them less valuable as mates also has made marriage less essential to the formation of a household.
The combination of liberated women and weakened men may explain why there are fewer traditional families — and why the trend is likely to persist.
— Emerson Lynn, jr.
