“Why Is It O.K. To Have a Child with Someone You Know Won’t Stick Around?”
This question comes from a blogger whom I greatly admire and respect. However, her audience is black women so I will not post her entire article here, since I am not trying to ask this question of any one race.
For anyone interested, the article can be read here:
But why do you care what anyone else does? Don't you have your own life to worry about? I am a single Mom and I intend on keeping it that way. In no way, does my life affect YOU:)
Quoting lga1965:
Quoting eviesmom453:
Maybe they don't think being a single parent is a death sentence?
You are obsessed!
well, hell, if she is obsessed, then so am I!
What the heck? Are we going to give high fives to women who have sex with idiots and don't care if they get pregnant and then become single moms? Yeah, that's the ticket.
Quoting mehamil1:Because we're fucking human.
Everyone is human and this is happening so much more in just the recent past, even just since 2002. I would really like to understand what is at the root of this sudden jump in numbers.
The facts are that there has been a dramatic increase in the numbers of single parents just since even 2002. Something is causing this and it cannot be birth control failure since birth control did not suddenly become less reliable since 2002.
Quote:
"After having relative stability in births to unmarried women from the mid 1990s to 2002, we've seen really big increases between 2002 and 2007," said Stephanie J. Ventura, director of the Reproductive Statistics Branch at the CDC's National Center for Health Statistics and author of the report.
In the United States, out-of-wedlock births increased by 26 percent between 2002 and 2007, according to the report. In 1980, the rate of out-of-wedlock births was 18 percent.
Though the reasons for the increase are not clear, Ventura said, one factor might be that having a child when you're not married is no longer stigmatized.
http://health.usnews.com/health-news/family-health/womens-health/articles/2009/05/13/more-single-women-are-having-babies
Quoting Veni.Vidi.Vici.:
Quoting jessilin0113:
Because I'm pro-choice in all things reproductive and it's not my business?The repercussion of other people reproducing in a way that is not 'responsible' and/or conducive to our society as a whole is the real topic IMO.
It is, thank-you for pointing this out.
Quoting stacymomof2:Not high fives. Just staying out of people's personal business. Would it be better to lecture and pontificate? Tell the kid he or she is doomed to failure, or that their mom is easy and their dad is a loser? What good will that do, to go back to the times when kids were made to feel outcast or raised in institutions? That is ridiculous. Also it's silly to assume the worst of every single mother. I know plenty of iffy parents where both parents are there, creating havoc.
Why not just have the courtesy to treat them like any other person?
We usually agree on a lot, Iga, but on this one I am inclined to disagree with you. I don't thing anything good ever came from judging people for their personal reproductive choices. And of course once the kid is born, there is no good to be had in making them feel like an outcast.
Quoting lga1965:
Quoting eviesmom453:
Maybe they don't think being a single parent is a death sentence?
You are obsessed!
well, hell, if she is obsessed, then so am I!
What the heck? Are we going to give high fives to women who have sex with idiots and don't care if they get pregnant and then become single moms? Yeah, that's the ticket.
No one is thinking the worst of every single mother. You are misunderstanding the entire issue. PLEASE try to understand this issue from a place other than one of judging.
If no one talks about the very real negative repercussions that befall many BUT NOT ALL children raised by single parents and the suffering of many of those single parents, the problem will continue its explosive growth.
Quoting stacefaceninja:I don't think anyone sets out to have a kid with someone they think will run off. Regardless of what anyone says, it is impossible to know what someone is always going to do. Perfectly happy married father's of four leave just as often and as heartlessly as crackhead baby daddy's. JMO
REALLY? You SERIOUSLY believe this?
Perfectly happy married father's of four leave just as often and as heartlessly as crackhead baby daddy's.
Quoting momtoscott:I doubt very much that the majority of single moms, or single dads, thought that they were reproducing with somebody who was going to walk away. I certainly have misjudged a lot of people over my lifetime and no know no one who hasn't. At least not IRL, some people I know on the internet claim to have accurately planned every aspect of their lives. Kids change relationships in unpredictable ways.
Yes they do, which is why it is generally better to have a solid foundation and a commitment between two good, decent people before bringing children into the world. It doesn't make a guarantee but it makes it MORE LIKELY that the couple will remain together to raise the child.
The highlighted part. THAT is the issue. I don't know how anyone could possibly expect to truly understand underlying social issues without taking a broad (i.e. actually long term) view of human nature, kinship systems, and behavior over time. 10 years as a gauge?? That's utterly ridiculous.
The focus is not on the right place. Short-sightedness is causing you to miss the actual underlying issues and insted focus on a correlation.
Quoting futureshock:
Quoting mehamil1:Because we're fucking human.
Everyone is human and this is happening so much more in just the recent past, even just since 2002. I would really like to understand what is at the root of this sudden jump in numbers.
The facts are that there has been a dramatic increase in the numbers of single parents just since even 2002. Something is causing this and it cannot be birth control failure since birth control did not suddenly become less reliable since 2002.
Quote:
"After having relative stability in births to unmarried women from the mid 1990s to 2002, we've seen really big increases between 2002 and 2007," said Stephanie J. Ventura, director of the Reproductive Statistics Branch at the CDC's National Center for Health Statistics and author of the report.
In the United States, out-of-wedlock births increased by 26 percent between 2002 and 2007, according to the report. In 1980, the rate of out-of-wedlock births was 18 percent.
Though the reasons for the increase are not clear, Ventura said, one factor might be that having a child when you're not married is no longer stigmatized.
http://health.usnews.com/health-news/family-health/womens-health/articles/2009/05/13/more-single-women-are-having-babies
Quoting eviesmom453:But why do you care what anyone else does? Don't you have your own life to worry about? I am a single Mom and I intend on keeping it that way. In no way, does my life affect YOU:)
Quoting lga1965:
Quoting eviesmom453:
Maybe they don't think being a single parent is a death sentence?
You are obsessed!
well, hell, if she is obsessed, then so am I!
What the heck? Are we going to give high fives to women who have sex with idiots and don't care if they get pregnant and then become single moms? Yeah, that's the ticket.
Your personal situation may not affect her but as an aggregate many people collectively having children out of wedlock and men abandoning those children DOES have a negative impact on society.
Why Illegitimacy is a Social Problem
Understanding Illegitimacy
1.72 million out-of-wedlock births amount to an overwhelming catastrophe for taxpayers and society.
The
steady growth of childbearing by single women and the general collapse
of marriage, especially among the poor, lie at the heart of the
mushrooming welfare state. This year, taxpayers will spend over $300
billion providing means-tested welfare aid to single parents. The
average single mother receives nearly three dollars in government
benefits for each dollar she pays in taxes. These subsidies are funded
largely by the heavy taxes paid by higher-income married couples.
America
is rapidly becoming a two-caste society, with marriage and education at
the dividing line. Children born to married couples with a college
education are mostly in the top half of the population; children born to
single mothers with high-school degrees or less are mostly in the
bottom half.
The disappearance of marriage in low-income
communities is the predominant cause of child poverty in the U.S. today.
If poor single mothers were married to the fathers of their children,
two-thirds of them would not be poor. The absence of a husband and
father from the home also is a strong contributing factor to failure in
school, crime, drug abuse, emotional disturbance, and a host of other
social problems.
Single mothers are inherently in far greater
need of government support than married couples, so an increase in
single parenthood leads almost inevitably to an increase in government
benefits and services and a thriving welfare industry to supply them.
http://blog.heritage.org/2010/04/12/understanding-illegitimacy/
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Broken Homes, Broken Hearts
Karl
Zinsmeister of the American Enterprise Institute has said, "There is a
mountain of scientific evidence showing that when families disintegrate,
children often end up with intellectual, physical and emotional scars
that persist for life." He continues, "We talk about the drug crisis,
the education crisis, and the problem of teen pregnancy and juvenile
crime. But all these ills trace back predominantly to one source: broken
families."
Broken homes and broken hearts are not only the
reason for so many social problems. They are also the reason for the
incumbent economic difficulties we face as a culture. The moral
foundation of society erodes as children learn the savage values of the
street rather than the civilized values of culture. And government
inevitably expands to intervene in family and social crises brought
about by the breakdown of the family.
Social commentator Charles
Murray believes that "illegitimacy is the single most important social
problem of our time--more important than crime, drugs, poverty,
illiteracy, welfare or homelessness because it drives everything else."
The public costs of illegitimacy are very high. "Children born out of
wedlock tend to have high infant mortality, low birth weight (with
attendant morbidities), and high probabilities of being poor, not
completing school, and staying on welfare themselves. As a matter of
public policy, if not of morality, it pays for society to approve of
marriage as the best setting for children, and to discourage having
children out of wedlock."
In her famous article in Atlantic
Monthly entitled "Dan Quayle Was Right," Barbara Dafoe Whitehead warned
Americans of the cost of ignoring the breakdown of the family:
If we fail to come to terms with the relationship between family
structure and declining child well-being, then it will be increasingly
difficult to improve children's life prospects, no matter how many new
programs the federal government funds. Nor will we be able to make
progress in bettering school performance or reducing crime or improving
the quality of the nation's future work force--all domestic problems
closely connected to family breakup. Worse, we may contribute to the
problem by pursuing policies that actually increase family instability
and breakup.
[T]he evidence from social-science research is
coming in: The dissolution of two-parent families, though it may benefit
the adults involved, is harmful to many children, and dramatically
undermines our society."
http://www.leaderu.com/orgs/probe/docs/broken.html
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The Real Welfare Problem Is Illegitimacy
Heather Mac Donald
Illegitimacy
is the greatest cause of long-term poverty in this country; unless it
comes down, the poverty rate won't, either. While some welfare mothers
will thrive under the new welfare-to-work regime and will succeed in
creating a stable home for their children, the majority will drift in
and out of low-paid work for the rest of their lives, futilely seeking
the grail of a permanent, "living-wage" job.
But the most
pressing goal for welfare reform is ensuring the welfare of the
children. While having an illegitimate child often dooms the mother to a
life of poverty, illegitimacy may doom her child to far worse. Prisons,
foster-care homes, and homeless shelters teem with fatherless children.
An
unwed teen's baby is three times more likely to fail at school, three
times more likely to commit suicide, and from 20 to 33 times more likely
to suffer child abuse than are the children of low-income married
parents. His prospects in later life are just as grim: 70 percent of
long-term prisoners, 60 percent of rapists, and 75 percent of
adolescents charged with murder grew up without fathers. The risks to
children living outside a two-parent home go beyond social failure, as
witness New York City's never-ending cortege of tiny coffins containing
children beaten, suffocated, and scalded by their mothers' boyfriends.
No urban reform could have a greater effect, if successful, than attacking the culture of single parenthood.
http://www.city-journal.org/html/8_1_a1.html
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Single Mothers And The Illegitimacy They Bring
America Keeps Encouraging The Biggest Social Problem To Get Bigger
By Herb Denenberg, The Bulletin
Wednesday, April 08, 2009
The
eminent social scientist Charles Murray says, “Illegitimacy is the
single most important social problem of our time — more important than
crime, drugs, poverty, illiteracy, welfare or homelessness because it
drives everything else.”
“Seventy-two percent of juvenile
murderers and 60 percent of rapists come from single-mother homes.
Seventy percent of teenage births, dropouts, suicides, runaways,
juvenile delinquents, and child murderers involve children raised by
single mothers. Girls raised without fathers are more sexually
promiscuous and more likely to end up divorced. A 1990 study by the
Progressive Policy Institute showed that after controlling for single
motherhood, the difference between black and white crime rates
disappeared.”
A British journalist Martin Newland in Maclean’s
magazine wrote, “Increasingly, but belatedly, politicians are beginning
to identify the decline of marriage and the family as the major cause of
… social dysfunctions including ill health, crime, rampant promiscuity
and welfare dependency.”
A 2008 study led by Georgia State
University economist Benjamin Scafidi found that single mothers — unwed
or divorced — cost the U.S. taxpayer $112 billion every year. That
estimate doesn’t include the huge expenditure of law enforcement
resources in dealing with the behavior flowing from single motherhood.
http://thebulletin.us/articles/2009/04/08/herb_denenberg/doc49dc278e8e4ff020049158.txt
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$112-billion: What Divorce and Illegitimacy Costs the Taxpayer
Sunday, June 29, 2008
By David R. Usher
The
Institute for American Values (IAV) has issued a major report titled
“The Taxpayer Costs of Divorce and Unwed Childbearing“, conservatively
estimating the cost to taxpayers at $112 billion.
This is a very
conservative estimate because it either understates or does not include
federal expenditures driving decisions to not marry or to have children
for profit. Programs that stimulate marriage-absence include Temporary
Assistance to Needy Families (TANF), and programs that are widely abused
to abort marriage such as the Violence Against Women Act (VAWA), and
the Victims of Crime Act (VOCA).
It is estimated that
three-quarters of our massive national health care insurance problem
would go away if mothers simply married the fathers of their children.
http://mensnewsdaily.com/2008/06/29/112-billion-what-divorce-and-illegitimacy-costs-the-taxpayer/
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Fatherless America: Confronting Our Most Urgent Social Problem.
Evidence
abounds that fatherlessness correlates very highly with poverty,
criminal behavior, and myriad other social dysfunctions.
Fatherlessness
is...the leading cause of declining child well-being in our society. It
is also the engine driving our most urgent social problems, from crime
to adolescent pregnancy to child sexual abuse and to domestic violence
against women."
http://www.thefreelibrary.com/Fatherless+America:+Confronting+Our+Most+Urgent+Social+Problem.-a017380722
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Is Yoga a religion?
- futureshock
on Dec. 8, 2012 at 9:46 PM