The Gray Lady jumps on Charles Murray’s bandwagon:
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…
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.
“Marriage has become a luxury good,” said Frank Furstenberg, a sociologist at the University of Pennsylvania.
I can’t help thinking that this trend will be very bad for the country. Women with children and without college educations have a whole lot on their plate and not a lot of time or money to deal with it. Children who grow up in poorer, single-parent households tend to have significantly higher problems in school and elsewhere. Many will end up as wards of the state, in one sense or another.
The things we want to suppress, we tax. The things we want to encourage, we subsidize. We are taxing the hell out of success, and subsidizing dependency, even as we attack the old institutions which formed the basis for what we used to call morality.
This is what you get.
Two observations. First, notice the careful deliberate manipulation of the statistic at the foundation of the alleged income inequality. The stat used is household income, and the fact that higher education levels produce two income, stable homes at a greater rate than lower education levels is responsible for almost all of the rise over the last twenty years. There is not nearly the disparity in individual incomes than there is in household incomes – a fact the MSM, Occupy Whatever, the Democrats, etc., won’t ever share with you. Doesn’t fit the narrative.
Second, sociologists have shown that graduating HS, working full time, waiting until 21 to marry, and not having babies outside of marriage has almost a 100% success rate in preventing poverty. The mistake the left makes is in ignoring these behaviors, and thinking it is all about access to resources – give mothers income, and they will act middle class. Give people health care, college education, you name it, they will act middle class. Proven wrong, yet we continue to throw money after solutions that have proven to fail. When the solution. As Murray points out, is in behaviors – and the unwillingness of the elites to appear “judgemental” precludes any meaningful changes in the trends of the last forty years.
I’m just hoping it gets noticed by the youngers.
Used to be, the word love was defined at least in part by action on the part of the male to solidify the family unit. You know, job, self-advancement, a certain amount of self-denial for the good of the fam, and teaching the little ‘uns the same. A smart girl would see this as part and parcel of “love”.
Now the word seems, to more and more people, to simply connote a feeling that is really largely lust. The new “love” produces children. The guy decides this isn’t so much fun anymore, and either leaves or plays the role of an additional child, leaving the lady the full burden of feeding and raising the kids.
In the absence of a responsible male, the girl decides she’s better off without the additional adult child, casts him off, and decides for this reason that singleness is preferable to marriage.
I realize that this does not represent all young men and women; I personally know many counterexamples. All the ones I can think of worship God and study their Bible. However, I see this over and over again in the friends of my kids.
I do hope that stable marriage is viewed as preferable again, and causes people to try to figure out how to get it for themselves.
Oddly enough, those college graduates who wait to marry are much more likely to be welfare state supporting libs than conservatives. Why that is, I have no idea. Perhaps quicker minds than mine will have a theory.
“The things we want to suppress, we tax. The things we want to encourage, we subsidize. We are taxing the hell out of success, and subsidizing dependency, even as we attack the old institutions which formed the basis for what we used to call morality.”
Behold, the results are in!
Our country is gong down the tubes with simultaneous destruction of the family unit, religion based moral standards, respect for law, the work ethic, educational achievement, savings and investment, and personal responsibility. Our education system is nothing more than socialist indoctrination camps.
Thank you liberals!
If not turned around in November, it will be every man or woman for themselves to survive.
I no longer want to contribute to a government that is destroying our country and rewarding evil and punishing success.
Exactly what is the definition of “all enemies foreign AND DOMESTIC?”
I’ve been thinking about this quite a bit lately. It’s not helped by the over-glamorization of celebrities who have baby daddies (or no daddies) rather than be in a stable relationship. Since the celebrity worship culture has gone way far over the edge the influence these people have can’t be dismissed.
And when there are reality shows called “Teen Mom” you know that someone somewhere has jumped the shark.
Channeling your inner Dan Quayle, Kris? I wonder whence gets his apology from the elites? Since he has been proved right and all.
But, but we have legions of Lefty LIB Moonbat Teachers to provide lots of ” self-esteem” to the youngsters…..that will make sure that they feel good about being poor, uneducated and neglected…..we need more of the under achievers if we’re going to keep KFC, McDonalds and all the Starbucks staffed with drones to provide fast food and coffee….
Walmart will also provide them with plenty of work filling shelves with goods made in China.
C’mon, you think these LIBs don’t have a plan for this outcome???
“73 percent of black children are born outside marriage, compared with 53 percent of Latinos and 29 percent of whites.” What’s sad is the black community doesn’t realize that the welfare state is such a detriment to them (or that 73% at least – got to be politically correct here) and is ensnaring more and more U.S. citizens by the day. It has made that 73% completely DEPENDENT on government. Same goes for the no-diploma mothers and everyone else having kids outside of marriage and BEFORE a college degree. I’d like to see updated statistics. Instead of “Children Born outside of Marriage” I’d like to see “Children Conceived outside of Marriage-Both Born and Aborted” This is why birth control is such a double edged sword. Before BC, you simply did. not. have. sex. until you were ready to have a kid with the person you were having sex with. Abstinence is 100% effective and FREE!!! In today’s world, saving sex for marriage is something that seems impossible to most and “easier said than done” yet THIS IS WHAT our ancestors pre-BC DID because they were forced to be smart, not bailed out by welfare when being dumb.
I have nothing fascinating to add, but wanted to remark that the comments here and also in the posting “Cultural Isolation” make me feel at home. It is refreshing to find a group of folks with similar ideas on morality and culture. Most of the time, since leaving the USMC, I feel like my family and I are in a bubble of “old America” surrounded by the siren songs of decadence and sloth. Okay, that is a little dramatic, but its nice to see I’m not alone. That you, Lex, for hosting a site that brings such people together.
I found my WWII veteran father’s advice on love and marriage helped me.
“Get a girl pregnant and I’ll kill you. Not you’ll be in trouble, but I will literally kill you. I brought you into this world, I can definitely take you out of it.”
I avoided partaking in premarital relations as a result.
I didn’t tell my own children the same, but I made sure they understood that teenage pregnancy not only victimizes your future, but your child’s as well. I’m glad to say that my daughter and my oldest son married after college and both are doing well, with happy grandchildren who are the delight of my life, stable middle-class incomes (for now) and solid marriages. I told them that if they’re going to engage in such behavior, first of all, it’s going to violate the tenets of our faith and second of all, would you want to raise a child with this person? I thought it worked better than my father’s sage advice, which scared me badly as a young teenager with more guts than sense.
My other two teenagers are hopefully headed on the same path.
But I’m glad my Dad scared me. It helped me become who I am today, meet the woman who became my wife and have the family I have today. He meant well, as he always have.
I just can’t believe our popular culture would glorify something 90 degrees on the opposite side of that. Sometimes I wonder if this nihilst bent in our culture stems from our leftist friends’ desires to burn the whole western civilization to the ground. The destruction of the traditional family is a good place to start.
As my old man would say, “the proof’s in the pudding.”
I think all of this stems from a rejection – by all manner of people, regardless of skin color or political affiliation – of the basic moral tenets as put forth in the Bible. God knew what He was doing when he created us, and when He created the means by which we were to reproduce. Sure, He made it fun & enjoyable, but He also intended it as a means by which a husband and wife bond with each other – “the two shall become one flesh.”
Tragically, we have abandoned these principles because we cannot codify them into law; to do so would be to trample on individual rights and such. Oh, the military still has quaint laws against adultery and so forth, but have you ever heard of a civilian being tried for such? Fornication (as it used to be known) is now practically de rigeur for young folks, and the bastards they produce (for that is still the appropriate term) are now “the new normal,” as Lex puts it.
Laws won’t help, IMHO. You cannot force someone into a moral lifestyle by simply passing laws and leave it at that. That approach didn’t work for the Israelites way back when, and it won’t work for us now. Blaming the liberals/Democrats/welfare state/whoever won’t work either. Sure it feels nice to rant & rage against people, but in the end what have you accomplished?
For me, the answer lies in changing peoples hearts. Once they’ve had a change of heart, their minds tend to follow. Once they’ve changed their minds, their behavior changes as well. I do that by starting at home, with my own kids – much as grizzledcoastie here did. I expand that circle by talking to my friends about moral issues, and by encouraging them to follow godly standards of conduct. I enlarge that circle even more by choosing a career path in which I am free all day, every day, to talk to soldiers of all ranks about the choices they are making and will make in their lives, and encouraging them to embrace something other than the “Me first!” cry of this generation.
That’s how you change things.
Want to be part of the solution? Start with an at-risk kid in your church/school/neighborhood. Be a Big Brother or Big Sister. Work with the Boy/Girl Scouts. Mentor someone. Stop whining & start doing.
Thus endeth today’s sermon.
“Goin’ to the chapel, and we’re gonna get mar-ar-ar-aried, goin’ to the chapel…”
I’m waiting for Beyonce to re-record this.
My husband and I did it a bit differently. We got married, spent two years working two jobs each to save for college and then went to school. 21 days after graduation we had our first son.
So, you can flip it around some but what must remain constant is your commitment to education, your spouse and your morals. Believe me, there were plenty of opportunities to stray off the path during the first 6 years of our marraige.
Sounds like the formula for a lot of frustrated and angry young-and-gettting-older-and-madder women in the future of the young male populace. Good luck, Lads…you’re going to really need it. And, yes, I know it takes two (most of the time right now) to make a baby, so the young men have themselves to blame when this bolt of personal and financial lightning hits them. But they do need to be warned sternly in advance by people who know them. Same sort of warning for the young women. Not that I don’t think that such warnings are plentiful, but I believe many don’t listen well.
This is one of the reasons I am turning into a reactionary. Being old and grumpy may have something to do with that, but not so much as my horror at what our society has turned into.
Delete “reactionary”, insert “wise elder and sometime seer”.
Better, more accurate characterization. No charge.
Nah, I’m OK with “reactionary.” Hell, one of my favorite blogs is “Chariot of Reaction.” Besides, reaction is how rockets work, and rockets are cool.
The BF and I were talking about this very subject today. It’s deeply disturbing for us, as we’ve both had front-row seats (in personal and professional settings) to what can happen without a stable mom and dad for kids. The future is scarier and scarier and although I firmly believe a given individual can change, I’m not convinced there’s hope for society at large…
No good can come of this, even my great grandfather knew it. He was born in 1885. When my father’s older sister got accepted to college in the 50s, he said that was the only college education he’s pay for… a woman’s. He said a man can work with his hands and do physical labor, but an uneducated woman was stuck with a low paying job. So he not only paid for my Aunt’s college education, in the summer he paid her NOT to work, so she’d not be enticed to get a job, or worse yet find a man who wanted to marry her and didn’t give a dang if she was finished school.
That’s a lot of forsight for a man born in 1885… and a lot of life experience. He’d seen the trials and tribulations of women trying to raise a family by herself. That’s a tough row… one I’d personally not want to hoe.
This is a way of life, a career path for many women now. I talk to women who live in some of thee neighborhoods. The women we’re talking about put out kids like pieces of toast to get increases in their WIC benefits, then send send the kids out into the neighborhood for food and many of the other things they need.
Let’s just stop paying them and deal with the kids who are out there. Though closing the orphanages, and relying totally on the foster parent program menas many of these kids will end up in pedophile homes.
Local radio host a couple years ago asked for about a week, for foster home kids to call in and testify to a good experience. NONE did. Many called in with good orphanage experiences, like saying they had these big families now to keep in touch with and meet.
The only person who called in was a parent who took in a girl when she was 13, now 17, as a foster. The girl was set through 15 pedophile homes. She’d complain and they’d just move her to the next one. As far as she knew nothing was ever done to the pedophile.
America… this is the best we can do in 2000 ? It really is disgusting and supported (or ignored) by the liberals. The net effect is they are breeding a voter base. And I personally believe that’s all that matter to them.
You get what you pay for.
And, as we shall see, you pay for what you get.
We get what we pay for. I am personally blessed, I earn enough to be the sole provider in our home. My wife is likewise blessed to be a stay-at-home Mom for our two kids, ages 4 and 2. Once they’re in school she might re-activate that college degree of hers, get a job in a near-by town, even if part time. It would do wonders for her sense of self, I suspect, and give her a little spending money. It has to be difficult to feel dependent, even upon your own husband, and in spite of the joy that kids bring to our lives parenting is a burden I’m not sharing for roughly 12 hours out of the day. And I don’t bring in enough that we can hire nannies or cleaning staff or that sort of thing, I make enough that we can pay the bills and save a little and a car payment requires a discussion about where we are going to cut spending.
It’s a lifestyle choice. In most countries, I’d be rich beyond the dreams of avarice.
I worry about my kids. If this trend continues they won’t be *able* to choose to be sole providers due to the taxes that will be needed to subsidize the dependent class of sole providers. Will my kids have a nuclear family in evidence among their peers? Will our family be seen as a quaint artifact of an antique age, or perhaps a relic of a morality that is no longer relevant? Just a few years ago some book called “Sara Has two Mommies” was all the talk among the conservative media, but what has been slipping by is that “Sarah has eight siblings, one Mommy, a case-worker from the city and three unrelated guys she refers to as her Uncle but has never met” is probably the book title that would best describe family life on benefits today.
And we who have behaved responsibly will continue to send money to those who have not lest we be considered callous.
If you want to stop something, you tax it. If you want to promote it, you subsidize it. If you want to subsidize it for eternity, you attach a face or a name to it and claim the opposition wants to harm people by not allowing their money to be taken by the IRS and given to poor Tiny Tim.
Which pretty much describes the election campaigns today.
Bah. Humbug.
– Max
It is a combination of being blessed,realizing it and making that personal choice. That personal choice just isn’t being made anymore. From the minute my husband and I got engaged, we started planning, figuring out what was important to us and setting about to make it happen. We purchased a home we could afford on one income. It was small, but worked. We drove cars that were affordable and made sure we didn’t have a car payment. I was fortunate to be able to go part time when my two older kids were born and we shifted our schedules so we had someone come in during two mornings a week. When my third one was born, it was too much. I happily became a stay at home Mom until he went to kindergarten, where I then went back to work part time. My kids are teenagers now, I still work part time, I pick them up from school, haul them around, and glean from them every day what happened during their day. Every day… it’s what I do, and I do it with a happy heart.
We are a very very close family. And I worry like you, that MY kids will not have that same choice when they’re parents because they’ll be too busy subsidizing others who feel entitled.
re: “Will my kids have a nuclear family in evidence among their peers?”
We recently changed schools and districts, and have already found this to be true. The students at the new school are simply pathetic – no skills, no incentive, and finally we found out no family either. Our kids (14 and 12) were just shocked by how poor their classmates were performing, and I asked them to find out what their family life was like.
One after another, they heard the same story – living with mom, dad in jail or simply non-existent. No two-parent households among them, and every one of these kids struggling to learn what our kids had learned a year or more ago in a different district. Its been an eye-opening experience for our kids.
I’ve met the teachers at the new school, and simply can’t complain about them. They are struggling to teach kids that have no family and no structured, stable home life. The kids have no role models, especially the boys, except the trash in popular culture. The district just finished a drug and alcohol survey of the student body, and its horribly depressing. By their own admission, some of these kids, junior high-schoolers, routinely smoke marijuana with their mom after school. How can teachers succeed against that? And how can society expect to perform when this is what future citizens and leaders are coming from?
Not only that, but the kids these days are a bunch of wussies, even compared to me. I remember when the next-door neighbors got together with fireworks to celebrate the change of the millenium (a year early, but I wasn’t about to be pedantic if there were explosions) and all of us gray-haired grownups enthusiastically lit the (mostly illegal) fireworks.
The kids all stood aside fearfully and showed not the slightest interest in active participation. What the hell is wrong with kids these days? Why, I remember a trip to the emergency room resulting from un-approved modifications to model rocket motors when I was a kid.
Anybody recall the true definition of the word “BASTARD”?
I think if we went back to the good-ole days, when illegitimacy was shunned and children of those unions were called bastards, we’d cut down on all of this rutting by the unmarried.
I’m tired of my tax dollars incentivizing fornication and indolence.
Welcome to Venezuela.
I place some of the blame for this on our educational system. My neice graduated high school 4 years ago. When she was in school she had to take a course on how to take care of children. She was in this class with four of her friends. When they completed it, all five of them decided that they wanted a baby as soon as possible. Four of them, including my neice had a child within a year of graduating. This class also taught them how to apply for welfare and WIC benefits.
I heard somewhere, probably from some curmudgeonly right winger like me, is that the largest demographic in US prisons is “children of single mothers”. Draw your own conclusions.
I have a hard time when people start swinging at WIC benefits. As I stated above, I was married when I entered college and had our first child 27 days after graduation. I was considered indigent while pregnant, which I was, and was on the WIC program. I think WIC is probably the greatest public assistance program we have in the US today.
Take a look at the WIC regulations; you are given a voucher for very specific foods (you cannot buy twinkies or co-co puffs on WIC. You can’t even buy flavored cheese on WIC.) It is extremely strict.
In addition, you have to show up EVERY MONTH to get the voucher, be weighed and measured and sit through a lecture on nutrition.
Compare that to our current food stamp program where you can buy any type of junk food without any education as to what might be the best and most economical thing to feed your family. Hell, you can spend your food stamp dollars at KFC!!!
WIC is a program that saves taxpayers untold amounts of further assistance while food stamps are just a free ride.
BTW, even though we had no money while I was pregnant with our first child he was born totally healthy. He is now a LT in the Navy. I attribute that partly to the care and subsidy we got from the WIC program.
Please stop knocking WIC. ALL our food programs should be modeled after WIC…