I think it’s one of the greatest underreported facts that a healthy marriage is as much of a predictor of economic success as an education is. (No cite, sorry, like I said, it’s underreported. I’ve heard it from two people involved in population studies, one liberal, and one conservative.)
I’m not sure that has to do with one’s upbringing, outside of the fact that a child is likely to copy their parents. I think the effort needed to sustain a marraige just demonstrates one’s motivation in life, something that applies to a lot of economic things as well.
You might want to ask yourself how the long-term presence of a stable, adult male who was committed to the success and support of you and your mother would have hurt things at all.
As Garfield226 mentions, what you describe is not exactly the norm for most single parent households.
Single parenthood correlates with practically every social pathology known to Western science, from crime to dropping out of high school thru lifetime income and emotional problems. Etc. . And before you start packing strawmen, this is not the same thing as saying that all children of single-parent families will end up messed up - just that it is disproportionately found in familes of this type.
This part is probably true. Unfortunately, in single, never-married households in particular, there is generally at least one less person to be loving and responsible. Sometimes two.
See, I’d agree to that… but only because you qualified your statement by saying a HEALTHY marriage. Most people just throw the word “marriage” out there like it’s a cure-all panacea for the poor, when it’s not, it’s the series of successful elements that make up a healthy marriage that help ward off the debilitating effects of poverty.
All of that is true, but largely irrelevant. Our society is constructed around the nuclear family. There is nothing to ensure that single moms are well integrated into an extended family for support, either emtional or financial. We’re not going to return to simple village life where your uncle, cousins, and siblings, etc. all live within shouting distance. And over time, we’re developing mult-generaltional families consisting of poor, single women whose etended family, even if they’re present, bring little to the table. I guess I don’t see what your point is. Are you saying that your situation is the norm in single mom households? Are you saying that all single mom households aren’t doomed to failure-- something no one here would argue with?
Geez, lucky you, I can’t hear enough about it. But then, the statistic is usually used as an invective, and you’re probably not its target. In fact, I can’t think of a situation where anyone would mention it that’s not one of unproductive, insulting finger-wagging.
I’m kinda shocked y’all didn’t. Where’ve you been?
Seriously. I don’t see illegitimate births as the problem, per se, so much as symptomatic of a wider, deeper problem: the pathology of an entire ethnic group mired in widespread generational poverty – all the while adopting middle class consumer spending habits, tastes and pampering and getting deeper into debt – while doing next to nothing in basic prepardedness as family units to sustain a working class lifestyle, let alone a middle class one. No people this undereducated and unskilled as a group, with this many families this unstable, with this many able-bodied men who are this damned trifling, this damned immature and this damned insecure, ought to be churning out ANOTHER generation just as silly-acting and unmotivated to work hard as them.
Damn. I got angrier and angrier just writing that sentence. No wonder I got the hell up out of teaching.
The situation isn’t quite as bleak as I wrote. People wise up as they get older. Most black women do not just continue having kids. Men quit fucking around and assume responsibilities, either voluntarily or by court order. Extended families do step in to help, and they do bring quite a bit more that John Mace sees, particularly if they are middle class. This is an American problem, not just one with poor blacks and hispanics – it’s just that, as with so many things, it’s really upsetting how niggas be trendsetting. Having a bunch of kids I can’t really afford by several women I don’t want to be with is not how I do things, but some people – clearly – can’t see anything problematic about that.
I can understand your reaction. But can’t we, at least in this thread, move past that and try to understand 1) if it’s a problem and 2) if so, what to do about it? Granted, there has been some fnger wagging in this thread, but I still think we should be able to address the topic as dispassionately as possible.
My sister’s first-born was born out of wedlock. My sister and her (at the time) boyfriend lived together, much to the chagrin of my mother, but they weren’t married. So I suppose technically, my niece was “illegitimate”.
A year after the baby was born, her parents got married. So I guess she was no longer “illegitimate”?
I guess my sister was a statistic. Too bad that statistic doesn’t reveal that my sister is now a successful financial advisor, homeowner, and mother of two beautiful, talented daughters. And devoted wife to the father of both of her children.
I don’t think single parenthood is ideal. But I think the “illigitimacy” statistic is meaningless. A marriage certificate doesn’t make a family. And even if 50% of black children are living in a single parent household, that figure doesn’t tell us anything about their home life. With the astronomical divorce rates across the US, many children are being raised by one custodial parent. Some of these households are dysfunctional, but I wager most of them are alright.
Of course, being poor and being a single parent do not work well together. From an economic stand-point, single parenthood (which I define as raising a child all by yourself… as opposed to raising a child without having a husband) is simply a bad choice. But not a moral one, IMHO. I see no reason to be outraged by single parenthood if the parent can afford it.
Some people just are. My grandmother, who recently had her first great-grandchild born and come visit her over Christmas, welcomed my cousin Shana, the mother, back home with open arms but flat-out refused to even meet the father or allow him inside her house simply because they are living together but aren’t married. Me, I’m ecstatic the dude loves 'em both and is working two jobs. But some people can’t see beyond the formalities.
My family is exceptional, sure, but it shows that there is a way to raise a child well in America outside of the nuclear family. This doesn’t have to be a statistic about failure. Our society exists to serve us. When women started entering the workforce, society changed to accommodate that (day cares sprung up, workplaces started offering flex-time and family leave. companies frequented by women stayed open extended hours). Why shouldn’t society accommodate African-American women?
Frankly, right now there is a crisis in African-American manhood. 10% of African-American men aged 25-29 are in prison as we speak. Between 1980 and 200, three times as many black men went to prison as went to college. 17.7% of African-American men in general have spent time in prison- which severely limits their employment options and their suitability as a mate. While a good amount of this reflects genuine criminality, a lot of the prison rate is caused by selectively applied drug laws and the minimum sentences that come with them.
Add to that a high AIDS rate and the fact that a African-American males are far more likely to marry a white female than an African-American female is to marry a white male. In 73% of black-white marriages, the male is black.
The men simply aren’t there. This is the crisis, not women who are focusing on raising their families just like every other generation of women on this earth. I don’t know the answer to this crisis- although I suspect shoving the poor/black people in to the crappiest schools in the country, confining them to neighborhoods with high crime rates and few job opportunities and restricting public transport to job-rich affluent areas, and the endless countless little tolls of three centuries of institutionalized racism takes it’s toll.
[gargield226]What I think you’re failing to grasp is that, in my (admittedly limited) experience, single-parent families are NOT AT ALL like what you’re describing. Good on you and your mother and your extended family for being able to provide that environment for. You’re not damaged by it, and neither would most children of single parents if they were raised as you were.
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Irrelevant. Nobody is saying that all single-parent families are sunshine and roses. All nuclear families are not sunshine and roses either. The point is that adherence to the nuclear family model is not a good predictor of an effective child-rearing environment.
Agree, to the extent that our society has been based on that, and assumes it in a lot of cases.
However, it clearly doesn’t hold true right now, if so many people live successfully in non-nuclear families.
Our choices, then, are to
(a) change society, or
(b) change the family type that our society is constructed around.
I prefer the first option. Society is here to serve our needs, rather than the other way around. If single motherhood serves our needs (and, for many of us, it does), then why not have a society that reflects it?
Sort of. To the extent that having a child out of wedlock is “no big deal” in society, it will increase in all segments of society. That may be “no big deal” for people with the means to swing it, but it’s a tough way to start out your adult life when you can’t.
You do make a good point in that the raw statistic hides inportant details like the case of your sister. But if the rate is double or triple what it was 40 years ago, that’s almost certainly not a good sign.
All it means is that the model of society which is based on a nuclear family model is no longer effective. I disagree that it’s not a good sign.
What it is is another piece of evidence, along with the growing support for same-sex marriage, that Mom and Dad and 1.5 kids no longer represents the “average” family. We can either change families, or we can change our expectations of “average.”
There are lots of ways to approach it. I’ve done it by accepting families of all shapes and sizes. Other ways of doing it are dispensing with the assumption that women only work for “pin money,” so don’t merit salaries as high as men. (This started a while ago, and we’re still working on it.) You may notice all the places that the word “parent” has been replaced with “parent or guardian.” My beautiful country has done it by dropping the requirement that married couples must be of the opposite gender. Universally accessible daycare would help a lot, because while “normal” two-parent families have ready access to daycare (ie the woman, who stays home and looks after the kids), this doesn’t work for many, many people. Live-in domestic workers have an immigration category all their own in Canada, in response to the needs of non-traditional families (whose wives are radical enough to go out and work). Whenever you see a change table in a MENS room, you’re seeing a change in the model of society.
It’s happening. Not quickly, by any means, or at all easily, but in this case the glacier of the status quo is slowly moving.
Grandparents as guardians of their grandchildren is a very unfortunate social trend. There can be nothing positive in it. This is such a burden on grandparents, who have to consider the awful plight of their children while doing the best they can to rescue their grandchildren from a failing life which I’m sure they can’t help feeling some responsibility. These grandparents should be free like the rest of us aging humanity to reconnect with their spouse and achieve retirement goals.
I agree that guardian grandparents should be supported, but that is only a band aid solution.
The Solution to the Problem of The Increasing High Rate of Unplanned Black Births.
I’m posting as a 55 year old Canadian whose experience with the black population is limited 45 years of news reports, TV , books and movies. My limited experience and relationships with Canadian black people who live in small communities like I do doesn’t even remotely connect with the American black population in jeopardy.
Someone posted that the problem originated in slavery. I have a hard time believing that. My impression from my early years is of a majority American black population of high moral standards. There was a black subculture particularly in the music industry prior to Elvis, that pioneered drugs and subtle sexualized music largely confined until the birth of white rock and roll. The older people were shocked and concerned because the constraints on rampant sexuality had been unleashed. The youth culture overall bore little resemblance to the culture of their parents.
Then came acceptable pornography like Playboy, followed by explicit crotch shots in Penthouse, and then Hustler even more explicit than Penthouse. Marijuana, LSD, and mushrooms lubricated the trend of overt sexuality until the pill came along and Pandora’s box was now wide open. The pill was not a good enough answer, so the Roe vs Wade decision was neccessary for the population at large.
Well the solutions for unwanted births seems to have worked for the white population at large. there were some difficulties but education and availability of abortions and contraceptives seem to have solved that problem. For the whites anyway. So why doesn’t it work for the black population? I can’t believe that they are getting less education on the need for contraception and less availability for abortion.
Well I’ve noticed that we in Canada have stayed with the Americans on the value of freedom of sex, but my generation, has been having some second thoughts, particularly as a result of the onset of Aids. We understand the powerful nature of peer pressure and hormones, but as parents we remind our children that abstinence is an option until some meaningful relationship comes along and even then, to make sure all precautions are taken. My generation having unleashed this culture of sexuality is quietly taking responsibility on an individual basis, guiding our children through a period when they are not equiped to make rational decisions for themselves.
Yes, poverty and the socio-economic situation for a lot of blacks plays a large role, but the die has been cast. Parental energy and influence are compromised in single parent households where the parent has to work like a dog to keep things together and has little hop for herself. With the lack of effective parental influence, the cycle of uncontrolled sexual behaviorial consequences are passed on. No amount of government financial intervention will solve this problem.
Well, when you live in poverty, the joys of sex become even more urgent. Couple that with the pride that the younger black population have in having their own culture, and we end up with rap. My kids listen to it, yes, but I’m convinced that although they enjoy it, it has no relevance to their lives. They are listening to a foreign culture. There are no hos and bitches in their lives. Listen in on some of these black sitcoms, watch some of these black music videos, and it is sex sex sex and more sex. It seems to be all about sex. What ever happened to love?
So what is the solution? I say it is time that American society and institutions consider controlling public displays of sexuality. We need to dial it back and begin promoting love and the importance, value and joy of commitment to one’s sexual partner. That is definitely not being taught in the schools.
