Those teenage moms
I read somewhere recently that births to teenage mothers had set a new historic low–which made me wonder for a moment what that might be about. Within a moment it occurred to me that “teen births” is a pretty meaningless statistic, because it lumps together married and unmarried teens.
I know, being as old as I am, that there were a great many teen births when I was young, but a lot of those teens were married (shotgun weddings or not). And sure enough, here are the figures:
The peak for teen births was 96.3 per 1,000 in 1957, in the midst of the Baby Boom, after having risen dramatically following the end of World War II. But the composition of teen mothers has changed drastically since then. Back in 1960, most teen mothers were married ”“ an estimated 15% of births to mothers ages 15-19 were to unmarried teens. Today [written in April of 2016], it has flipped: 89% of births are to unmarried mothers in that age group.
The teen birth rate has been on a steep decline since the early 1990s, and that trend accelerated during the recession of 2007-09 and the years following, reversing a brief uptick that began in 2006. What’s behind the recent trends? One possible factor is the economy: A Pew Research Center analysis tied the declining birth rate to the flailing economy. And birth rates for teens fell faster than they did for all females ages 15-44 from 2007 to 2014 (42% and 9% declines, respectively).
There are repercussions to this change:
Children born to unmarried mothers are more likely to grow up in a single-parent household, experience instable living arrangements, live in poverty, and have socio-emotional problems. As these children reach adolescence, they are more likely to have low educational attainment, engage in sex at a younger age, and have a birth outside of marriage. As young adults, children born outside of marriage are more likely to be idle (neither in school nor employed), have lower occupational status and income, and have more troubled marriages and more divorces than those born to married parents.
Women who give birth outside of marriage tend to be more disadvantaged than their married counterparts, both before and after the birth. Unmarried mothers generally have lower incomes, lower education levels, and are more likely to be dependent on welfare assistance compared with married mothers. Women who have a nonmarital birth also tend to fare worse than childless single women; for example, they have reduced marriage prospects compared with single women without children.
But being “unmarried” doesn’t always mean no father is around, at least for a while:
A majority of unmarried births now occur to cohabiting parents. Between 2006 and 2010, 58 percent of unmarried births were to cohabiting parents: in 2002, the proportion was 40 percent. Children born to cohabiting parents are more likely to see their parents eventually marry than are those born to non-co-residential parents. Nevertheless, children born to cohabiting parents experience higher levels of socioeconomic disadvantage, and fare worse across a range of behavioral and emotional outcomes than those born to married parents.
And this seems to be an important statistic, too:
The proportion of births to unmarried women has increased greatly in recent decades, rising from five percent in 1960 to 32 percent in 1995. After some stability in the mid-1990s, there was a gradual rise from 1997 through 2008, from 32 to 41 percent. The rate appears to have stabilized again, and was at 40 percent in 2014.
To reverse any of this would take a series of large societal changes that I don’t see on the horizon.
This is such a complex issue.
In my family for example my mother had my oldest brother when she was 18 and if you do the math conception took place before she graduated high school and she married his father, her first husband, shortly after graduating. Two more children followed and much physical abuse before divorce a few years later. Eventually she married my father and was married to him for 40 plus years until his death.
Conversely in the current generation of my family there are three couples that have never married but have been together for 10 plus years and have multiple children together.
So, what is better my mother in an abusive marriage or my nieces and nephew unmarried but in long term relationships?
Griffin:
It is indeed a complex issue, and anecdotal stories—such as that of your family—don’t tell us much about the larger picture.
But I would say the following—to the question of “which is better”—the real question is “for who”? And why not go for what is best, as a goal?
If the younger generation are really in good long-term relationships, I happen to think that the commitment of marriage would be better for the kids, as a precedent and a message. But obviously, a good relationship that is stable is a good thing; it just would be better IMHO if it were in the context of a marriage. One wonders what the objection is to marriage, and my guess is that it has to do with the adults, because the kids would probably be happy to see it happen. As for your mother, obviously it was best to have the second marriage. But the question about the first is would it have been better for her to have been a single mother back in those days, than in the abusive marriage that she got out of? I don’t know the answer, but I think either alternative was pretty difficult. I’m glad she made the break and found a good husband.
Neo,
Yep you are correct about anecdotal evidence but it can be illustrative. And believe me it is much groused about by the older generations about why won’t they just get married but they have all kinds of reasons. There is no doubt that on the whole it is better for the children (and the adults) to be married but marriage is not the be all and end all answer either.
Of course my mother ended up in the worst of all worlds as she was in an abusive marriage and then was a single mother for several years with a deadbeat ex husband.
So the answer to me is marriage is best but stable and committed relationships are the key factor whether that includes marriage or not.
I grew up in a rural area of Iowa. Three girls in my class of 32 students (that went all the way from1st through 12th grade) became pregnant in our teens. The first one was 13 at the time and married the 16 year old father. They married and had 2 moree kids after she came back to finish HS. Another girl became pregnant at 16. She refused to name the father and was sent to livee with relatives in another state. The last one was 18 and became pregnant during our senior year. She and her boyfriend married and remain married to this day.
This a complicated issue and it is something that has been with us since the dawn of human history.
Marriage implies a willingness to publicly commit, for better or for worse to another. Society’s interest in marriage lies in the possibility of children. Otherwise, marriage is simply another form of a business contract. Children have an obvious psychological need for stability. Nothing offers a greater sense of security to a child than knowing their parents have publicly consecrated their union before the eyes of God.
Clearly, this is why prior generations took for granted that, the most sacred of ceremonies was properly conducted in a Church. In the Lord’s house…
What a poor substitute is the hollow secularized version.
With our (human) limited skill and perception, the prevailing wisdom suggests we should follow best practices, not to determine, but to engender preferred outcomes. So, we strive, survive, love, and live.
That said, with evolution (i.e. chaos) in mind, what is your fitness function?
Stability in a cohabitation arrangement is more difficult to come by for the working class and the poor:
I think another factor is that home making skills are no longer valued by society. It used to be that most women realized they had to make a home for their husband AND their children, to know that if your husband was going to have a hard day, it might be good to give him his favorite meal when he got home. And children need that kind of stability too.
If the mom is changing boyfriend regularly, kids have no foundation, nothing to hold onto as they go out into a sometimes difficult world. They never learn what to look for in a partner and they don’t really learn self control. It’s me, me, me all the way.
Good comments, all of you.
While a committed relationship, married or not, is important for children, our social welfare system encourages single motherhood, with all of its attendant problems.
Yawrate Says:
October 17th, 2017 at 8:19 pm
Good comments, all of you.
While a committed relationship, married or not, is important for children, our social welfare system encourages single motherhood, with all of its attendant problems.
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For the Left, this is a feature, not a bug.
Cf. Obama’s campaign ad about “Julia” – the bride of the all-mighty government.
And people wonder why there is so much drug abuse and suicide…
Everyone here is talking past the fact that young males and females simply don’t join together in procreative sexual activity as much as they once did.
Since the 1970s females have been told by feminists that attention to the clitoris is what leads to orgasms and that the vaginal orgasm per se is in fact a myth. It doesn’t seem to matter then that stone butch lesbians seemingly contradict all this by their cult of the strap-on dildo (which never gets soft, and can be longer and thicker than any hetero male penis), which then leads to the most advanced approach of all, fistfucking combined with the use of a vibrator directly upon the clit. The Hitachi vibrator allegedly cannot be resisted and will induce orgasm in less than one minute.
Meanwhile hetero males have shifted their primary focus of desire to the ass, to anal intercourse.
Norman Mailer used to tout the possibility of creating a child as adding a metaphysical dimension to sexual intercourse which rendered the act profound.
He actually attended would-be debates about all this with Germaine Greer and other hot feminists of the 1970s — debates in which he was laughed at and generally thought to have ended up looking like a retrograde fool.
I became good friends, ten years ago or so, with a 23 year old “alt dyke” who was not even really seeking connection with other females, but with “cute emo boys” whom she fucked with her strap-on. I thought this was an interesting trend. (There’s a story about this, “Stabs At Happiness,” published at Annalemma online.)
Becoming a parent often means becoming an adult, and most young males and females seek to remain childlike, or childish, or out-and-out children, as long as possible — or forever….
Haven’t you noticed how many people in their 50s, both male and female, whether effectively neutered or still hanging on to some identity ostensibly straight or gay, instead of human offspring, children, now cling desperately to sentimental relationships with dogs or cats?