Marriage, divorce, and cohabitation

[sailaway21]

A most interesting interview with the author of Living Together; myths, risks, and answers.

http://article.nationalreview.com/?q...FlYjhmZGIxYzg=

I think I'll have my daughter read this one!

[sailaway21]

And divorce/single motherhood is costing us something like $112 billion per year according to this study. http://www.americanvalues.org/coff/pressrelease.pdf
Where's the national outcry?

[MMR]

from the CNN article on the study: "Scafidi's calculations were based on the assumption that households headed by a single female have relatively high poverty rates, leading to higher spending on welfare, health care, criminal justice and education for those raised in the disadvantaged homes."

I question the basic assumption of that study (seems rather sexist and patriarchal to me). I was a single mom for 10 years. Raised 4 kids with little or no child support, little or no family help, and no help from the government. Kids are smart, successful, relatively well adjusted, college grads or college bound.

[2Gringos]

I am on my third marriage. My first ex, with my kids, definitely did NOT live at a poverty level with me paying her $ 549 a week in child support. Plus she kept a three quarter of a million dollar house. And she worked part time.

[camaraderie]

Actualy MMR...those assumptions hold up pretty well in the aggregate...though there are many examples of success in spite of the obstacles. You are right about the sexist aspect as the evidence suggests that, when income is eliminated as a factor, moms due as well (or as poorly) as dads in raising kids alone. It is the lack of a second parent that hurts.
Furthermore...since many single mothers are under-educated, teenagers themselves in poverty...households headed by single mothers do less well overall than households headed by single fathers.

I think these articles Sway has indexed show very little in the way of serious scientific analysis and are little more than props for a particular point of view. Nevertheless, it is pretty clear from more rigorous studies that 2 parent households are better for kids in general and that poverty and all the fallout from an impoverished life is less in two parent households.

[MMR]

Originally Posted by camaraderie

.....the evidence suggests that..it is the lack of a second parent that hurts.

or a strong support network, be it family, community, church.

Furthermore...since many single mothers are under-educated, teenagers themselves in poverty...households headed by single mothers do less well overall than households headed by single fathers.

So single fathers aren't under-educated? or, if under-educated, can do better than single moms? Help me understand the data/reasoning here.

If you substitue "single-mom" with its unwed mother / lack of values connotation with "widow" or "widower", the emotive "feel" of the study results changes.

Sorry. Hit a button there. Personal experience...

[AjariBonten]

Here we go again ......................

Anyway, I'll join this discussion for a post or two; as it is a subject I am involved in, being employed (at least for the next 30 days, another story...) in the Human Services field.

First, I agree with Cam, the articles presented are somewhat slanted in tone, but do highlight an issue that has some factual basis.

You are right about the sexist aspect as the evidence suggests that, when income is eliminated as a factor, moms due as well (or as poorly) as dads in raising kids alone. It is the lack of a second parent that hurts.

I don't think that single dads would be any better educated or equipped to provide for their precious little snowflakes than single moms. BUT, statistically, most of the poor and uneducated single parents are mothers. NOT because of any positive trait of maleness. Quite the opposite; it is simply the fact that the poor and uneducated dads (sperm donors) are frequently gone with the wind. Someone is going to end up with the kid, and it's usually gonna be the mom (the host).

That simple fact is going to skew the stats towards there being more poor/uneducated single moms than poor/uneducated single dads.

Yes, Mrs. Chuckles; there are many many laudable exceptions to the statistics. (my current dear wife being one; raised 2 kids to 18 yrs, single with no child support or gov. assistance )

And yes, a second parent does not guarantee a successful family; but, having been a single parent yourself, can't you admit that a second (responsible) adult could make a major difference?

It's a 'responsible' part that is key; which is my biggest complaint about the tone of the second article. So may 'conservatives' promote eliminating divorce as a be-all end-all fix to these situations. Believe me, there are MANY women and kids that are FAR better off without the males they are attached to. (Even if they have to live under a bridge to do it)

We need to better support families, of all forms, that are raising children. If we don't we will all pay for our collective failure.

[MMR]

Originally Posted by AjariBonten

We need to better support families, of all forms, that are raising children. If we don't we will all pay for our collective failure.

Agreed. Especially the "of all forms". Two parents are better than one. Extended family support is better than just two parents. Strong community (church, school, social clubs) provide essential cultural backup, etc. The critical objective is the successful nurturing and raising children (the future).

The form of a successful "family" is varied, is my basic point. Iwouldn't want to see it defined too narrowly.

As a single parent, I surrounded myself and my kids with a "created" family of friends - that's why the kids were "successfully" raised. To JUST catagorize me as a 'single parent' misses and ignores the extended family that was created (perhaps because it isn't the normal form?). Maybe we need another word meaning "one biological parent with extend family support" to recognize the "created" collaboration inherent in "two parent" terminology.

[camaraderie]

MMR..."So single fathers aren't under-educated? or, if under-educated, can do better than single moms? Help me understand the data/reasoning here."

I think Ajari has done it better than I can. The uneducated, impoverished sperm donors are gone...leaving the uneducated, impoverished egg donors alone with no support system. So we end up with fathers who ARE single parent households largely being older and divorced with more resources than the teenage skewing on the matriarchal side. Nothing surprising, or admirable in that...just factual in aggregate. I might guess that if you stripped out the teenagers and just compared DIVORCED parents over say the age of 25, you would find no such gender bias.
Dedicated single parents of either gender can raise successful families and well adjusted kids as I'm sure you have done KKR. Still...it is harder by far...but sometimes necessary. Each case is different and these generalized arguments can never be a substitute for a case by case consideration of the facts and the issues.

[sailaway21]

I think that attention paid to the first article would reveal that the truly important decision-making occurs prior to marriage or co-habitation. Surely we've proven that closing the barn door afterwards is of overall detriment to the children. There are very few situations where the overall family economic structural resources available to child-rearing can be the equal of the two parent household after divorce. You've got to be pretty rich. The emotional resources are more than halved in any event. This is not to say it cannot be done; my childhood is a testimonial to my mother's ability to do the "impossible" in such circumstances. The support group that MMR mentions was essential.

The second post was in back-up to the first and meant only to illustrate the magnitude of the problem. The real question is what we as a society can do to turn the tide of divorce. The majority of kids raised in a divorced household end up divorced themselves and there is a significantly higher percentage of unwed mothers, and child abuse, coming out of divorced households making the problem even worse as we know that unwed mothers tend to produce daughters who fiollow in their paths. These statements are not meant to be sexist, it's just that women tend to bear the brunt of the problem.

The first article makes note of the fact that cohabitating couples actually have a higher divorce rate than couples who did not do so. And we've got decades of statistics on the matter. Whatm I found particularly interesting was the number of couples who, previously cohabitating, seperated their living arrangements and ceased pre-marital sex only to not marry after all. From what I know anecdotally, many couples cohabitating decide to marry once the woman becomes pregnant. This leads me to believe that, given the information cited, had they not been cohabitating and not having sex they might have avoided what turns out to be a bad marriage over fifty percent of the time.

I know that ideas have consequences, and that most of us grew up living under ideas that became wide spread during the sixties. No one would have imagined that the ready availability of birth control, coupled with the resultant social change, would have resulted in an increase in pregnancy, much of it unwed pregnancy. Coupled with the advent of the "no fault" divorce concept we've seen not only an inexorable rise in divorce but a rise in divorce in households with children. In my opinion, the concept of both cohabitation and premarital sex have both been a bill of goods that have proven rotten to the long term happiness of single Americans, particularly women.

I acknowledge the argument that you cannot stop young people from having sex, and that it has always occurred, but I'm painfully aware as a parent that to just give up the standard of celibacy is to lose the war before a shot has been fired. The least we can do is to not condone the idea that living together is somehow a test drive for marriage. Most of us know that, regardless of our premarital relationship, things often change once we're married in ways we could not readily anticipate. Again, in my opinion, we have arrived at a point where it is both too easy to have a child out of wedlock as well as too easy to get married impulsively. Most young people, like we were, did not regard themselves as being impulsive yet view matters much differently later.

Daniel Patrick Moynihan, the late Senator from New York, warned of these events back in the late sixties, primarily in reference to the black inner city community. Our society has not done much to solve that problem within the black inner city community while we have seen the same behavior erupt into the populace as a whole. From a sociological standpoint this is a huge step backwards in our culture. We're condemning our children to a far worse future than what will result from the frequently touted effects of the federal budget deficit holds for them.

I'm particularly concerned about the effects on young girls. The psychologists tell us that these young girls need desperately their father for their proper maturation, in particular their proper sexual maturation. the absence of the father results in many young girl's premature sexual relations in search of male affection. We also know that step-fathers are far more likely to be abusive, including even sexual abuse, than the biological father. I can fully understand the high divorce rate of children from divorced families as they lacked the example of a functional marriage in their own lives. It's scary, to me, how much we emulate our parents. I think the emotion, "oh my god, I've become my father/mother" is familiar to all of us parents. The reason I feel this is so important is that, once our kids leave our household they begin to make their own decisions and our influence begins to wane, as it should. If they have not the example of a good marriage between their biological parents there is very little we can do to prevent them from making the same mistakes that so many have in the past, and so many more are now making in the present. I am cautiously optimistic that the tide is slowly turning in these matters, mostly from the emergence of books like the above and from some encouraging statistics on abstinence, but it's a huge body of water that ide must effect.

Let me state unequivocably that I am not criticizing individual divorcees, those who've cohabitated, or step parents. I come from a divorced family, I am delighted beyond belief to be a step parent, and I briefly cohabitated with my wife just prior to our marriage. My sole point is that we are hardly doing our best for our future generations by following the path we are on and it's high time we start to ask why. I think we need to rethink some of the laws we have passed as well as some of the advise we may have thought valid in the past that we are passing on to our children. If I come across as a fuddy-duddy and old fashioned I'll wear it. But I've come to this point honestly and I feel we've all been sold a bill of goods. What are we to do about it?