Are out-of-wedlock births no big deal? Or are they? I am listening to MPR's Midmorning and Kerri just introduced the topic:
As the rate of babies born out of wedlock rises, some scholars argue that there is a negative social impact on children. Midmorning asks if the increasing numbers indicate a crisis after all.
Guest Kay Hymowitz: is fellow at the Manhattan Institute and author of "Marriage and Caste in America: Separate and Unequal Families in a Post-Marital Age."
Guest Lisalyn Jacobs: vice president for government relations for Legal Momentum (formerly known as the NOW legal defense fund).
Edit: The show is over but you can catch the archived audio here.
In any case, you can join this open discussion now, and share your perspective on children born outside marriage.
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Julia Schrenkler
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Minnesota Public Radio
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Comments: 51
I saw this in a very good neighborhood. The mother said do not play with Betty. "Why"? asks the child. Mother,'Because I told you not to."
So without the discussion on the ability to provide for the economic needs and parental needs, this discussion could go anywhere.
During the program they touched on the differences between teens and young adults trying to do this compared to women who are in their late 30s etc. There's often a huge difference in finances and general stability that [often] relates to a person's age.
Let's look at a couple of things.
The quest for gender equity in the workplace gave rise to the two-earner family. This raised the price of everything from housing to the cost of a movie ticket. Everything is now priced for the two-income family.
At the same time, we saw the rise in the single parent household. It does not take an economist to comprehend the effects of society moving in two-direction but let's spell it out. Single parent households generate poverty.
I am a little concerned about the attitude "it is no one's business but that family's". Why is it first nobody's business when someone elects to "go it alone" then suddenly it beomes everyone's business when single parents cannot afford food, housing and daycare?
But, you asked.......
Children need a Mommy and a Daddy. Every, single statistic shows a two-parent family to be optimal for child-rearing.
The studies on mental health issues, behavioral issues, ad nauseaum all point to the same cause - the breakdown of the nuclear family.
It's time women realized some things, and yes ladies I'm talking to you because YOU have all the power here.
First, sex doesn't not equal love. Period. I don't care what he says.
Second, be responsible. If you insist on having sex, with someone you are not married to, protect yourself from pregnancy and/or the possibility of an STD.
Third, do not shack-up with some guy to "see how it works out". It's never going to work out, certainly not like a marriage. Ever hear the old milk for free adage? Yeah, well the times they have not changed.
Women, you deserve to marry a good man. Look at your partner, and if he's not your husband, is he the kind you'd like to marry and make babies with? If he is, great, marry him! If not, move along.
To your second point I think culturally we do try to go-it-alone. How many people actually rely on their family for childcare or financial support?
Sadly some who do this are teens.
Who are we to judge the value of someone's relationship with their child?
Oh and to the one who said kids gets teased about being from a one parent home .. where are you living? MOST kids now are from one parent homes for one reason or another .. some kids just have no manners and weren't taught not to tease others. Even now some of the two parent homes are not the kids biological parents due to divorce and remarrying and such.... a family is made of bonds of love it is not written it has to be a mother father and child but it is made up of individuals held together by love ..
I used to work in a tower in Minneapolis City Hall. One day I fell in with a slow moving parade of people flowing toward the Hennipin Country Government Center. All these people were older than I and most had kids in tow. They were attending a support group for Granparents raising grandchildren.
There were hundreds of them.
Very sad.
Dena, I tried to clarify that point upthread. I was speaking of people who chose children without bothering to enter into a relationship.
I too was a single parent. I raised two kids back in an era when feminists in the legislature worked as hard as they possibly could to systematically excluded fathers from the family. It was an interesting variation on the "NO MAN IN THE HOUSE" rule. The result was, I had my kids full time, paid all their bills, took care of all their needs and still paid $1,000 a month in child support.
Do you know, in this state, in this era, we still give physical custody of children more often to grandparents than to fathers?
You wrote, "I would not intentionally choose to have kids out of wedlock but I know women who have and for their own specific reasons and they are wonderful mothers..." You've got me wondering if this discussion might be more illuminating if they were participating. Can you find out if they'd like to join this discussion and talk about their reasons?
Greg, thanks for clarifying that earlier statement. I had to see the half-full perspective of your story in that I'm glad those kids had their grandparents to depend on. Can you elaborate on the data / trends of MN giving custody to grandparents vs. fathers?
Before my divorce I thought I was a good parent. Some of my fondest memories are of my daughter shaking a worn-out copy of "Each Peach, Pear, Plum" as she yelled at me"Read, read". With my son, it was the same, he would crawl on my back and lean over my shoulder as I traced a finger along the lines of "Green Eggs and Ham". I recall countless hours of baseballs, footballs and frisbees in flight and bicycle journeys with the kids down the trails in Chaska.
But I was only a good dad then.
I didn't become a real parent until after my wife was taken by bi-polar disease. After that my kids came first in everything. After that my wants, my desires, my agenda utterly and completely vanished and I discovered what it really was to be a father.
It is from that experience I can say that I could never imagine a person putting any "good reason" of their own before their child by chosing to have a kid without a partner.
Kids come first - always.
This document is a little dated but it is only one that I can quickly come across on Google. Consequences of Minnesota Child Support Guildlines for Children Of Divorce Parents
This study was done to gather data on child support, not gender equity, so there are no statistics on custody award to members of the family other than the parents.
But you can read between the lines.
In 1986, 81% of mothers received sole physical custody compared to 10% of fathers. 10% is lower than the ratio of grandparents to parent awards.
By 1999, there was some improvement with more joint physical custody arrangements but the ratio of awards to mothers versus fathers dropped to 64% in mother's favor with only 8% of kids awarded solely to Dad. Again, grandparents and other family members top that number.
Once the kids enter the picture, I'd tell a man to be the kind of father he'd be proud of...regardless of the kind of father he had.
The cycle must be broken, and there's only one way to do it. Personal responsibility.
However, there is in reality, no reason to get married anymore when two folks want to start a family.
That little diatribe rendered him speechless, but he did it. Not for me, but because after thinking about it he realized it's not "just a piece of paper". It's a commitment, he to her and her to he, that from today on we are one person and our family will be strong.
Four years, and one baby, later he told me not long ago that the commitment they made that day was far more than a piece of paper. It was a bond, a promise, and the word of a good man and a good woman to each other.
That's how important it is, and your flippant attitude is, sadly, all too prevalent.
As for family planing, the data would strongly suggest that the availablity of low-cost contraception is what INCREASED the rate of out-of-wedlock births.
Anyone who believe this is counter-intuitive should consult the charts at the back of Francis Fukuyama's The Great Disruption and study the spike in out-of-wedlock births in the wake of contraception availability in countries world-wide, even Socialist countries with full-ride medical plans.
Such an incentive.
Greg, if the woman gets state aid, and the man has no health care, and the family would need to pay $600 or so additional each month for health care if they got married just because the woman would loose her state aid, then there is indeed a financial reason to not get married.
Second, please read what I wrote again. That's not why he got married. I just made the argument about the piece of paper a moot point.
Why is this man not getting state aid?
Are you suggesting that people should engineer their lives around state benefits?
I don't know why she gets state aid but I know that she does.
And yes there is a bit of engineering in their lives as they don't want to get married because she will lose her state aid, and he can't afford the health care. But I do know that the state knows what he earns and includes that in the calculation for her health care. I also know that if he were to do much better, then she would also lose her health care from the state.
I also know that if they were to get married she would be dropped from the state health care program.
And that 'Commitment' is just a piece of paper, as the divorce papers, are also just a few more pieces of paper.
Such a commitment.
If "her" income is low enough to qualify for state aid and "he" is only partially employed, I would bet that even their combined income would still qualify them for MinnCare.
Anyway, if they have a kid, the county is going to come after the father to recoup their medical outlays anyway.
They're on their second kid and the first one now has no health care as he lost it when he was two, and the second one will also lose coverage when she is two.
I have a question for some of you: my sister became pregnant by a man who then dumped her. What would you have her do? Get an abortion, or raise her son as best she can? From the sound of it, she should've chosen the abortion. After all, that would mean one less single parent, right?
And what's this bullsh*t about "shack-up honeys"? Nothing like boxing up people in tidy, insulting categories.
I was married for nine years, and have been divorced for four. No children (though I wanted one). When I saw all of the legal paperwork my attorney and I had to go through, I realized that a marriage is simply that: a legal union that gives straight people privileges. Period. The committment and love don't come from the paperwork that protects the couple. It comes from their hearts.
The institution of marriage as we know it today is actually of recent origin. The traditional model of marriage as a political and economic bond contracted by families was replaced just a couple hundred years ago, with the "love bond" form of marriage - the overly-romanticized hearts 'n flowers Victorian model we Westerners believe is the only way marriage is and ever has been. If you've gone through household items and the myriad of financial issues that divorce calls for, you realize that despite the romantic aspect of marriage, it is still (at its basic level) about legal rights.
We do close to a million abortions a year, most of them involve single women. We also produce almost a million kids to unmarried parents. That is a lot of "oops" and a major impact on the economy and a sustainable society.
That is an old "Women's Studies" Myth that has absolutely no basis in fact. First of all, it is Euro-Centered and marriage is almost completely universal. Secondly, it is classist in the extreme and aligns with the view that only the history of the nobility is what happens in the world.
Marriage, for love, among common people is the history of human kind, it is where most of our poetry and much of our music comes from. People wooed each other on the steppes of Mongolia and with flutes in the woodlands of Minnesota long before the first Women Studies program was launched and even before the first European put pen to parchment.
Life: We thank or curse our mothers for creating us. Survival of our species doesn´t care about the details of why or how long we maintain a pairbond.
Liberty: The freedom we have to conduct our lives within the boundaries of law still leaves us a lot of room to purpetrate mischief against our neighbors. Freedom without morality will be rather ugly for the many. Bear in mind, a legal act is not always moral.
Pursuit of Happiness: This begins in childhood and seems to develop best under the guidance of one or more loving parents. As adults in society we are vulnerable every day to those who would rob, swindle, or abuse us. Staying happy is not easy. Our families should be a safe haven which helps to nurture our happiness. When families break up, moms and dads have to decide what is more important, serving themselves or serving the needs of their children. Even when people chose to do the right thing at first, later the ugly side of human nature inspires all kinds of discord.
So now, in this community discussion, we opine over a woman´s choice to rear children without a father present. Since it already happens quite often, there is no question that a woman has the power to do it. What about consequences? Is single parenting no more than a rational choice made by the few who find benefit in it, or is it a portent of a widening gender conflict where more and more women believe that men are the problem. If men are the problem, then the solution is easy. Women need only abort all xy fetal tissue. For now, its legal.
There's a distinct anti-woman feel to this thread and to these arguments. Just because she ends up carrying the child and (usually) care for it, doesn't mean the woman is a slut, a whore, a floozy, a loose woman. The man is equally culpable.
BTW, my nephew... the one raised by a single mom... makes straight As, is always on the honor roll (10th grader), and recently won a short story contest. He's one of the most mature, kindest, coolest young men I know.
Quite the contrary, I find the discussion distinctly anti-male.
Going it alone and children without marriage, most often implies, children without fathers in their lives.
What could be more anti-male than that?
For two long, our society has view men as "a penis with a pocket-book". We institutionalized "The Tender Years Doctrine" over 150 years ago giving women absolute right over the lives of children In recent years, we began paying women for going it alone by rewarding them with more than generious child support.
There was an excellent study by Margaret Brinig and Douglas Allen titled These Boots Are Made For Walking: Why Most Divorce Filers Are Women The study concludes that women file for divorce in 80% of the cases because they expect to have custody of the marriages most important asset, the children, more than 80% of the time.
While there has been some movement toward gender equity, there is still a strong resistence to it -- not oddly the most resistance to gender equity comes from feminists.
Well, I could have said "unpaid you-know-whats", and that would have also been true, but I was trying to be somewhat sensitive.
Don't like it? Tough. I calls it like I sees it. No apologies.
This topic seems to be based on some pretty archaic ideas. One, that children are the chattel of the mother.
Let's take the situation where two people meet in a bar, have a few drinks, and a roll in the hay. He wanders off, she finds herself pregnant.
Now, according to the law, it's her body and she gets to make all the decisions about whether to carry the child to term and he has absolutely no say in the matter. However, technically, once the umbilical cord is cut. He has an equal shot at becoming the sole physical guardian of that child.
Again technically, her odds of walking out of the hospital with the kid in tow are legally less than 50% (since in a fraction of cases neither biological parent gets custody).
Should he not have an equal right to be a parent as she? But this entire topic is based on the premise that he does not and should not.
We know that regardless of what the law says, we live in a Jim Crow world where the law says one thing and the way its implemented says something else.
We count on that, don't we?
People say our laws on employment are kinda like that too. That men have the advantage, but let's pretend the world was just as equitable in the realm of Family Law as it is in the case of Employment Law.
Now put yourself in the place of the mother who after giving birth watches a guy she didn't really know, bow and say "Thanks for the kid....and oh yeah, your check is going to be $500 lighter on Friday and $1,000 lighter a month for the next 18 years".
Gee.......that kinda changes the discussion don't it?
Gosh, does anyone think this might change some national trends regarding the family and parenthood?
I'd like to get everyone's take on this aspect of the discussion: Considering this trend isn't exactly new, what are the realities and potential future implications from children born out of wedlock?
Too bad sarcasm doesn't translate very well here.
It's perhaps a simplified version of the big picture, but it doesn't bode well for a decline in kids with one (or no) parent around.
It's really sad........
Lovely picture, eh?
In the middle of one of my daughter's soft-ball games, the short-stop did a face-plant while diving for a ball. She came up crying and bleeding. Everyone rushed to her aid and her mother led her off the field.
Her dad met her on the sidelines and after taking a good look at her injuries spun her around and told her to get back on the field....which she did.
One might say the mom was over-protective. One might say the dad was harsh. But then one might say that kids need both protection and a kick in the rear when times get tough.
Kids need both messages - about a lot of things.
The hardest thing for a parent to go through is when their children outgrow the things that they do best. A lot of parents are great with little kids, some are better with teens. The saddest thing of all is watching a parent who is good with one try to raise the other.
Yup, and sometimes a man is forced into single parenting too.
The thing that I find saddest is when great dads who are more than willing to parent their kids are locked out of the lives of their children by a selfish mother and a bigoted Family Law Court.
For every dead-beat dad there are a hundred dead-bolted dads.
You and I and the rest of the dads who have ended up abused by the family legal system understand perfectly well all of your comments about all the bad things which happen to good dads. I find it a wasted effort when you repeat them here. We men know what you mean while the women don´t know, don´t believe, or don´t care. The fact is, a man and wife live under the same roof but in two different worlds. As for the women´s comments here, their messages seem clear, but I usually cannot sympethize with them. Their world doesn´t make much sense to me. I have been trying for years to understand their world, but I still don´t. I have never met a woman who understands men, though I have read some material from a few who seem to. In the end I feel quite powerless to help my sons avoid the relationship pitfalls. All I can do is offer help if such trouble comes.
To be blunt, the highest hurdle to post-divorce cooperation is - MONEY Child support is a huge incentive for one parent, almost always the mother, to lock the other out of a post-divorce relationship with the kids.
Let's look at the disincentive of child support.
Assume mom and dad are both working parents with an equal salary. Give them each a very average after tax income of $40K a year. Also note that according to law most of large out-of-pocket expenses such as medical insurance and child care are divided equally by the courts. When these expenses are not divided equally they are usually paid for by the non-custodial parent - dad.
This leaves the matter of support payments. In Minnesota, child support for the first child is 25% of net income with an additional 5% for each subsequent child.
Now, let's look at a couple of scenarios:
1) Mom and dad have joint physical custody. The way the law works in these cases is both parents pay child support - effectively canceling out each others obligation. Both mom and dad are left with an income of $40K
2) Mom has sole physical custody and the kids "visit" dad. Mom's net income after taxes is $50K and dad's is $30K.
3) Mom remarries and her new guy makes $40K and does not pay child support. Now mom's family income is $90K, $10K more than it was prior to her divorce.
I think we can all see where the monetary incentives are.
I already know what you are talking about. The very nature of law is to favor one person over another. We all call it justice when we have a law against theft. What does the thief think? In divorce one can only have what the law allows. My ex took it to the max. She felt good about it. She sang the old song before my eyes, She Got The Goldmine, You Got The Shaft. She had an irresistable incentive to split, just like you said. If you understand what a good man is, then you know that in such matters we ourselves must take responsibilty for what happens to us. We do not deserve some of that which happens to us, but it is always our own choices which let it happen. Ignorance is no defence. I think you know how clever I thought I was when I was twenty. My cleverness gave me nine years of marriage, a divorce, then fifteen years of support payments which bankrupted me. It felt like the law had punished me. It felt like getting a life prison sentence for J-walking. It was my own fault.
You are right about taking responsibility. A lot of guys get bitter, but you have to deal with the cards you are dealt and always put the kids first.
I do have to give credit to a lot of couples though. Custody sharing is growing fast and the laws, though not fair, have been changed to accomidate those who do share.
Credit for this goes to ex-rep Tom Neivelle from Northfield. He was lucky to have a Republican majority in the House. The DFL fought reform tooth and nail.
I just hope that they don't turn back the clock.
I was given both physical AND legal custody of my girls by the court... something that doesn't happen to many fathers. I agree that it's best for children to grow up with loving adults (parents, grandparents, adopting couples), and when there's more than one person, the work of raising a child becomes easier, naturally. But for many, that's not a reality. Many kids today grow up with two parents but one of them is abusive or neglectful. What then?
THIS is a reason, at least partly, for many divorces like mine, for many single-parent homes like mine, and guess what? Often the kids turn out better in that situation, with only one parent, than when the parents stay together. Many kids involved in the juvenile system come from dual-parent homes, and many kids who succeed in life come from single-parent homes -- that's a reality. It is a reality in our family -- my two older step-sons, who lived in a dual-parent home as teens, got into all kinds of trouble back then. The ones who spent their teens with me in a single-dad home, stabilized within a year of moving in with me and have successful lives.
So let's not be formulaic -- the QUALITY of the loving adults in the kid's life is more important than the QUANTITY of adults.
Bottom line for me: Loving, mature and dedicated people -- that's what children need. Two is better than one. Three better than two. There are cultures where a maternal uncle is the main man responsible... others where grandparents are part of the kid's daily life.
It does take a village.