The Story: “It used to be called illegitimacy,” says the New York Times. “Now it is the new normal.” Once largely limited to poor women and minorities, motherhood without marriage has settled deeply into middle America: More than half of births to American women under 30 occur outside marriage.
The Background: In 1965, Daniel Patrick Moynihan, then a top Labor Department official and later a U.S. senator from New York, warned of a “tangle of pathology” that was resulting from the number of black children—-25 percent—-that were being born out of wedlock. Today, 73 percent of black children, 53 percent of Latinos and 29 percent of whites, are born outside marriage.
About 92 percent of college-educated women are married when they give birth, compared with 62 percent of women with some post-secondary schooling and 43 percent of women with a high school diploma or less. Almost all of the rise in nonmarital births has occurred among couples living together, which in the United State, are more than twice as likely to dissolve than marriages.
Why It Matters: The shift toward illegitimacy is having a detrimental affect on children. According to the National Fatherhood Initiative, children who live without their biological fathers and are, on average, at least two to three times more likely to be poor, to use drugs, to experience educational, health and emotional and behavioral problems, to be victims of child abuse and to engage in criminal behavior than their peers who live with their married, biological (or adoptive) parents.
In contrast, children with involved, loving fathers are significantly more likely to do well in school, have healthy self-esteem, exhibit empathy and pro-social behavior and avoid high-risk behaviors.
If we as a church and as a society want to show our love for children, one of the most important things we can do is restore the importance of marriage and fatherhood in culture that denigrates both.
