The preliminary birth data for 2010 just released by the National Center for Health Statistics reveal that, for the first time since 1995 and only the second time since 1950, the American illegitimacy ratio (the percentage of live births that occurred to unmarried women) decreased in 2010. That’s nice, but don’t pop the champagne. We’re talking about a drop of two-tenths of 1 percentage point, from 41.0 percent to 40.8 percent. (Linger over either number for a second. More than two out of five American children are now born to unmarried mothers.)
The more interesting aspect of the data is shown in table 7: Even though the overall ratio dropped, the ratio for every age group increased. How could this be? Because the group with the highest proportion of nonmarital births, teenagers, accounted for a smaller proportion of all births in 2010—9.3 percent of all births, compared to 10.0 percent in 2009—while women with the lowest ratio, those 30 and older, increased their share of all births from 37.4 to 38.6 percent.
It is unequivocally good news that teenage births are falling. Other things equal, mothers in their 20s and 30s are more mature than mothers in their teens, and consequently likely to be better mothers. But that the illegitimacy ratio is continuing to rise in every age group is ominous. As the years go on, nonmarital births decreasingly reflect adolescent thoughtlessness. They increasingly reflect the opinion of adult women that it is okay to bring a baby into the world without a male committed to its protection and care, and the opinion of adult men that it is okay to create a child without fathering it. That’s depressing.
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David Brooks identifies and explains the issue fair enough (because you outline the growing gap), then totally blows the proper response. Why not recognize the change has been society rewards bad behavior and stop doing so?
I agree that an illegitimacy rate of 41% is simply unacceptably and weirdly high. And the reason for that very high rate is that by becoming a mother, a young woman can obtain more money, sympathy, respect, and attention than she would otherwise get. If the father has a job, he pretty much has to pay child support until the child is 18. Yet giving birth out of wedlock is seldom admitted to in maternity and parenting forums in Facebook and the like.
I agree that welcoming marriage when one is of undergraduate age, a common reality before, say, the 1970s, could do a lot to calm the roiling sexual urges of youth. But marrying your high school sweetheart and having your first child at 19 is one thing. To have sex with a casual acquaintance and become pregnant at 17 or 18 is another thing entirely. 100 years ago, family mores and church attendance in childhood and adolescence prepared women to begin responsible motherhood before 21-25. In the old days, young couples often lived near the families of origin of one or both of husband and wife. Hence there was a support network of family elders. Nowadays, many people do not grow up and mature morally until sometime in their 20s, and make it very clear that they do not tolerate moral disapprobation directed at them by their elders.
Is it a proven assumption that mothers in their 20s and 30s make better parents? I know it seems like a good assumption, but is it really? I’m not arguing for 13-year-old mothers, of course, but there was a time when 18- and 19-year-old high school graduate girls were considered perfectly capable of being fine mothers, and of course there was a time when girls considerably younger were considered fully capable of motherhood. Are we defining the range up because of what we know, or because of what we think we know?
There tend to be downsides to every choice. As the father of five fairly widely-spaced children, I’ve been parenting nearly all of my adult life — and I’ll be parenting minor children for another 13 years. In some ways I’m a much better parent now, but not just because I’m older, but because I have 25 years of parenting experience. Sometimes age works against me. There’s something to be said for the saying that parenthood is a young person’s job. It takes energy and mental and emotional flexibility. People do start to get set in their ways, and I’ve seen more than one case where a first-time parent in their 30s or 40s is not really emotionally ready for parenthood after decades of the habits built up from being an adult who is not a parent. I don’t want to call them selfish habits, but I’m not sure what other term applies.
By stigmatizing starting a family young, at 18, are we actually contributing to illegitimacy and abortion? Because all the while we’re telling adult teens that they should wait, get an education, get established, they’re still having all the urges and desires that adult men and women have always had. Isn’t it possible that if we were more supportive of married committed relationships at a younger age, we’d be seeing less illegitimacy as a simple matter of fact?
We promote the myth that getting pregnant straight out of high school is a path to ruin, that you’ll never get educated, never get a decent job, that the mother will stay an ignorant housewife and the father will slave away at a low-skill job to support the baby, both of them throwing away whatever promise they once had. But this near-Dickensian portrayal of young parenthood is far from the truth. It’s possible to live a very successful life having had children at an early age in the context of a committed marriage. I’ve had one.