America is watching all kinds of numbers these days, the Dow Jones average and unemployment figures, for instance, and these statistics are important, but perhaps none more important than a recently disclosed fact about babies born in 2007.
An extraordinary 40 percent of them were the offspring of unwed mothers, a harbinger of poverty, educational mishap and misery all over the lot, and listen – this could be long-term misery, decades and decades of hardship, not some temporary kind of misery that you ordinarily get with even the most severe recessions.
Stick a child in a fatherless home and keep it fatherless and more often than not you keep the child poor, and you increase struggles in kindergarten, grade school, middle school and high school. You have very likely created a high school dropout. You have upped the likelihood of involvement with drugs, of criminal activity, of suicide, and it’s not just conservative worriers saying so, but social scientists of all ideological stripes.
The tendency for significant percentages of women giving birth without benefit of marriage is scarcely yesterday’s invention, but these latest calculations – 25 percent higher than five years earlier – underline just how bad things are getting, as do other data. Women in their 20s account for more births than any other age group, and in 60 percent of those births in 2007, had skipped any marriage vows, one news account says.
A major reason for the steady increases is that marriage is just not as big a deal with people as it used to be. Why, co-habitation is just as good, say some who may not have noted an expert explaining that, as high as divorce rates are, co-habiting partners are a whole lot more likely to split up and don’t usually wait as long.
The saddest part of the statistics is the increase in births by teens whose unwanted pregnancies had been in decline since the mid-90s. But how can anybody be surprised, given that the culture bombards these young people around the clock with all kinds of sexual encouragement, meaning that some are having sex even before they reach the teen years and that, by the end of high school, two-thirds have done so?
Some might say it’s just puritanical yapping that concerns itself with TV’s sexual excesses, but the respected RAND Corporation begs to differ, telling us that most teenagers are TV-drenched, that the drenching includes significant sexual content, and that the exposure has a direct relation to experimentation.
There is an antidote, says a report of The Heritage Foundation, after noting that “nearly one in five . . . girls will give birth in her teens.” Research shows parents can dissuade their adolescents from this hurtful recklessness with talk about values and consequences.
Let’s address another issue here, namely that the highest percentages of out-of-wedlock births occur among the most disadvantaged groups in our society, and that no other single factor may be as strongly determinant in keeping them disadvantaged. The thing most needed for them – and for all those bringing children into the world in these perilous circumstances – is cultural change, a change in attitudes, and an understanding that if we can get there, we will also do a great service to the mothers.
Patchwork programs by government will not make up for the lack of married parents in the home or even in rectifying what went wrong. The society went wrong. It adopted notions that defeat the human cause. But as we have seen in so many ways – in attitudes on race, as one example – social attitudes can improve. We start by facing the truth of how bad conditions have become.
Examiner columnist Jay Ambrose is a former Washington opinion writer and editor of two dailies. He can be reached at: [email protected].
