In 1965 then Sociologist Daniel Patrick Moynihan wrote a report titled “The Negro Family: The Case For National Action”. In it he laid out the thesis that the American black family was at risk. Cited as one of the main causes of this was black single mother households and the resultant poverty caused by high out of wedlock birth rates. An annotated version of the report is herewith the statistics.
What is the current out of wedlock birth rate for American working class/ middle class white females?
Out of wedlock births have gone up for everyone. They went up much more for blacks.
They appear to be a bit lower for white working class people than they were for blacks when Moynihan published his report (cite- pdf), if that’s what you mean.
Could you clarify which page of the PDF has rates of non-marital birth for the white working class? I didn’t see it.
I do find from your cite that for all white women, 29.3% of births in 2013 were to the unmarried, which is higher than the 22% rate for black women in the early 1960s that so alarmed Moynihan.
“Out of wedlock” births is no longer really relevant. There has been a staggering revolution in the proportion of couples who are living “out of wedlock” and having children voluntarily as a couple, but still statistically classified as out of wedlock. Furthermore, the divorce rate is so high, the number of children born in wedlock and being raised by a single mom by the time they start school, may exceed the number of out-or-wedlock births in 1965.
The criteria for impact does not lie in the number born out of wedlock, but the number being raised by one parent. Marriage is no longer a useful metric for that.
I’m not sure “out of wedlock” births are still a good metric for whether or not families are in trouble. Some couples stay together their whole lives without getting married, and many families are married at the time of the birth of their children, but not much longer. Some out of wedlock children are raised in perfectly fine households, and some, of course, are not. I think if you want to argue that White Working Class people are having problems, you need to find another way to assess that.
“Out of wedlock” also isn’t a permanent situation. My niece was born a year before her parents were married (although they had been living together). They are still together 23 years later. But according to the statistics, she was born “out of wedlock”. Doesn’t matter that her parents were living together the whole time.
Things have evolved. The main data point now is single-parent household. It doesn’t matter if the parents are/were married. It’s how many are around.
So consider the deprived Tiffany Trump.
She was born out of wedlock. That’s bad.
But her parents got married shortly afterwards. That’s good.
They split up less than 4 years later. That’s bad.
Her father remarried. That’s good.
She spent most of her time with her single mother. That’s bad.
The toppings contain potassium benzoate.
