This article is a shoddy mess of overused stereotypes and snippets from letters to Dear Prudence with little to no actual supporting data. It starts out with an overly generalized statement that “we still think of the archetypal unwed mother as a Jamie Lynn Spears—a dopey teenager who dropped her panties and got in over her head.” Since I have no idea who Jamie Lynn Spears is, though I might hazard a guess that she must be in the movie Juno that is referred to in the article’s subtitle, I guess I am not part of the “we.”
Setting that aside as a perhaps lame rhetorical opening, I continue reading in the hope for some actual facts. I soon find: “In 1960 about 5 percent of births were to unwed mothers; that figure is now a record high of nearly 40 percent.”
Assuming most of the 35 percentile increase is due to an actual increase in out of wedlock births rather than an increase in reporting rates due to the decreased stigma that Ms. Yoffe claims in the rest of the article, it seems we have a fact. Out of wedlock births have increased since 1960. Not earthshaking, but at least supported.
Ms. Yoffe then uses responses from her advice column to support her argument that the stigma of unmarried mothers has decreased. Not that I necessarily disagree with her conclusion, but a handful of letters from people self selected to have problems hardly provides strong supporting data for a societal change.
She then concludes that this change “also means that modern culture is out of touch with the needs of children. Some researchers identify out-of-wedlock births as the chief cause for the increasing stratification and inequality of American life, the first step that casts children into an ever more rigid caste system. Studies have found that children born to single mothers are vastly more likely to be poor, have behavioral and psychological problems, drop out of high school, and themselves go on to have out-of-wedlock children.”
Some researchers is an interesting and explicitly limited phrase. Note that she does not say, most researchers, a preponderance of experts, or anything that indicates that the consensus of expert opinion supports her strong conclusion that out-of-wedlock births are the chief cause for stratification and inequality. And her conclusion implies that this stratification and inequality is not chiefly caused by initial poverty, infant malnutrition, poor or absent preschool or elementary education, lack of higher education, single parent families, no national health care ensuring limited access to health care and health insurance, focus on short term gains rather than long term success, an entitlement or victim mentality, belief in luck (whether through state run lotteries or through the fortune of a successful damages lawsuit) rather than hard work as a key to success, massive wealth transfer from young workers to older retirees, or any of a host of other possible causes. Nope, none of these things, the main cause is out-of-wedlock children. Where is the wealth of data and expert opinion to support this crucial and sweeping conclusion?
According to the Fragile Families and Child Wellbeing Study, “most of these parents, both women and men, said they wanted to get married—and to each other.” But somehow (magically?) because they have an out-of-wedlock child a shocking 60% of these couples split after five years. The overall divorce rate is something like 50%, not sure what the statistic is over a five year time frame. But on the surface 60% breakup rate doesn’t sound incredibly high for a group of people who had not chosen to get married to each other in the first or second place.
This article could have been a lot shorter, e.g. I think people who are going to have children should usually get married first and have children second because I think that is better for the children. Some researchers somewhere agree with me.
