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.

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.

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 under 30, according to Child Trends, which analyzed 2009 data from the National Center for Health Statistics.

Still, the issue received little attention until the publication last month of “Coming Apart,” a book by Charles Murray, a longtime critic of non-marital births.

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 post-secondary schooling and 43 percent of women with a high school diploma or less, according to Child Trends.


read more: http://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/18/us/for-women-under-30-most-births-occur-outside-marriage.html?_r=1&hp&gwh=1147156860904110CF96A86B68E08969

 

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The consistent grammar suggests a cut/paste . . .

Rho

 

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It is a serious problem, both in the welfare (not the government type, but the actual well being) of the parents and of the children. There have been studies (neutral ones even, not partisan crap) showing that even poor folks do better with two parents.

Personally? I think its the same problem the communists started having. Its not difficult to live on the dole in this nation (its not what one would call FUN mind you, but its not impossible) so it becomes less of a draw to work hard for those who are not inclined to do so. Add to that the popular image of the 'i want only sex and beer and no thinking' male figure- and more and more males are just letting it all slide. They ARE like additional children, leaving single mothers to carry the burden.

The answer is not abortion either, because our child-to-elderly ratio is one of the things that is in america's favor coming into the next few decades. (even china's replacement rate isnt sustainable, they will have too many old people to support on too few children, think a Japan type recession...in CHINA) children are important...but we have no big concentrated push to get people to buckle down and raise their little cock-spawn.

 

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Yeah, this is happening for the financial benefit. Many are with the guy that knocked them up. But by claiming to be single they get more help. People are great at learning to work any system that exists.

 

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The irony is that they'd have more money if they didn't have any kids at all, too. Kids are expensive, even with government assistance.

 

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But DE, that would require some forethought.

 

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it would also require that you spend the money you get actually ON the kids.

 

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You're never getting your precious 1950s back.

What bothers me is not that we have lost the 50s (and really, they weren't that great) its that these things go in cycles...sooner or later the libertine system will get TOO free, and the backlash will be downright Victorian.

its happened many many times, one system gets too staid, so the backlash is completely irresponsible and loose, and the backlash of that goes back the other direction.

 

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Then we're at opposing beliefs system since I advocate for absolute liberty, and I guarantee there's no such thing as too much freedom. Social movements are hardly cyclical.