Letters to the Editor
-
Anti-male Hate
All this talk about men leaving and no one dares mention all the attempts fathers, married and unmarried, have made to try to change laws that give them absolutely no rights to parent their children, leading to effective endorsement of banning fathers from children's lives.
Keep talking in the feminist BS echo chamber, and telling yourself men walk away.
It's easier than facing the truth that a lot of women are selfish and infantile and see a child more as an achievement or accessory than a human being.
-
Difficult subject--
Up front, let me say that I spent my entire career in social services, primarily child protection. Some of my thoughts--
In the mid to late 70's, my work friends and I discussed the number of unmarried very young moms in our caseloads who came from intact families. Their parents weren't rich or even middle class by the standards of the day, but they were still married to each other and owned small, well kept houses in working class neighborhoods. Their daughters lived on welfare in the projects, with several children, often by different fathers. The fathers rarely paid child support (this was before it was an AFDC requirement) but visited irregularly and brought pampers. This was the beginning of the revolution of unmarried mothers.
Without any doubt, I will state that virtually all children born to single mothers suffer negative consequences. They are more often born to poverty and remain in poverty. Financial assistance to mothers is time limited and no longer allows mothers to have support for more than a short vocational education. It is difficult to support one person on $10 to $15 an hour and almost impossible to support two or three or four. Even children born to single mothers who already are professionals will have a lower standard of living. Child support does not equal the financial benefit of the father in the home.
Research shows that fathers who were married to their child's mother are more consistent in paying child support than fathers who were not married to the mother.
Young unmarried women living in poverty themselves perpetuate that poverty for their children.
Children benefit from having fathers who have close and consistent day in, day out, interaction with them. A professional friend of mine, who had a child out of wedlock, was visiting me one time. When she left the room, her son, then about ten, came up to me and whispered wistfully "You knew my dad, didn't you?" My friend had brothers and a father who were very involved in her son't life, but he craved contact with his real father.
One poster said that having children is a symbol of status in some of our cultures in this country. That is definitely true. In some of the cultures, having children is seen as what a young woman just does. Just as in other cultures, it is expected that a girl will finish high school and go to college, it is expected in others that a girl will start having babies in her mid-teens and finish her family in her early twenties. To not do that would be the same as a bright upper middle class girl who decided to get a GED instead of graduating high school and go to work as a CNA.
I am not advocating stoning unmarried women with children or throwing them and their children on the waste heap. We should provide significantly more and better supports for these families. We also need to provide more and better supports for the young (and not so young) men who are providing the sperm (and Pampers)so they can get the education and jobs they need to function as successful husbands and fathers. But looking back at my experiences in the 1970's--many of those girls were African American and their parents married and began a life together in the 40's and 50's when being a Black man in this state (Florida) was anything but a piece of cake. (If you think education and a job for a young black man are hard now, well, go back 50 years.)
How do we change behavior without shame? In training dogs and children (which actually are pretty similiar), you reward the behavior you want to increase and you ignore the behavior you want to decrease unless the behavior has dire consequences. I'd say the behavior here does have some pretty dire consequences. What is interesting to me is that the behavior already as significant negative consequences (continued, often permanent poverty)so we need to figure out how society or culture is actually rewarding the behavior enough to outweight the negative consequences. Then, maybe we can figure out how to change it.
I don't have a solution, either. Sorry.
-
not the teens
Ms Yoffe states:
"But according to the most recent statistics from the Centers for Disease Control, teenagers account for only 23 percent of current out-of-wedlock births. That means the vast majority of unwed mothers are old enough to know what they're doing: Unwed births are surging among women ages 25 to 29." Teenage births have been in decline for 15 years (though there was a recent spike 1n 2006).
Though Yoffe doesn't break down the educational or economic demographics of these women, maybe "Juno" isn't the right film to characterize the phenomenon, but "Knocked Up." Wouldn't many women in this age bracket have a job, and at least a HS diploma, if not a BA/BS? The question to ask, I think, is this: are a significant number of these grown-up women *choosing* single motherhood: planning the baby without intending to keep the father? Or are most of these women unexpectedly finding themselves pregnant, and saying "I can manage without having to get married." And how many women are facing the poverty and misery other posters have suggested (are these 20-somethintg women having their *first* baby out of wedlock, or are these former teenagwe mothers now having their second and third babies)?
In each of these cases, "shame" seems rather silly.
If the women are poor and without a support system, then the "shame" lies with a society that refuses to care for its most vulnerable people.
If the women are financially and emotionally ready for a baby, why shoud they feel "ashamed" for not enduring a shotgun wedding and a miserable marriage that will likely end in a contentious divorce?
Ideally, people get married, then have babies, and then live happily ever after. But we don't live in a fairy tale.