| Read Replies (1) | Respond to of 230619 | | | I took a look at the abstract for the Heritage article you linked here. It's classic blame the victim logic. The reason for poverty is the bad families of the poor. So what should be done. More information so there will be more two parent families. Not more assistance, not better schools, not better after school programs, etc. etc. etc. Just more information. A very, very bare cupboard. Nonexistent in fact.
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I'm not a social scientist, but it would seem to me you, presumably, as one would have gone to the underlying data on which the abstract was based. Isn't that how it is supposed to be done?
Tell me why the charts, on which the abstract was based, are flawed--if you can.
Some of this difference in poverty is due to the fact that single parents tend to have less education than married couples, but even when married couples are compared to single parents with the same level of education, the married poverty rate will still be more than 75 percent lower. Marriage is a powerful weapon in fighting poverty. In fact, being married has the same effect in reducing poverty that adding five to six years to a parent’s level of education has. [2]
Decline in Marriage and Growth in Out-of-Wedlock Childbearing Regrettably, marriage is declining rapidly in the U.S. The current decline is unusual. As Chart 2 shows, throughout most of the 20th century, marital childbearing was the overwhelming norm in the United States. Nearly all children were born to married couples.
For example, when President Lyndon Johnson launched the War on Poverty in 1964, 93 percent of children born in the United States were born to married parents. Since that time, births within marriage have declined sharply. In 2010, only 59 percent of all births in the nation occurred to married couples.
The flip side of the decline in marriage is the growth in the out-of-wedlock childbearing birth rate, meaning the percentage of births that occur to women who are not married when the child is born. [3] As Chart 3 shows, throughout most of U.S. history, out-of-wedlock childbearing was rare. When the War on Poverty began in the mid-1960s, only 6 percent of children were born out of wedlock. Over the next four and a half decades, the number rose rapidly. In 2010, 40.8 percent of all children born in the U.S. were born outside of marriage. [4]
Out-of-Wedlock Childbearing Not the Same as Teen Pregnancy Out-of-wedlock births are often confused with teen pregnancy and births. In fact, few out-of-wedlock births occur to teenagers. As Chart 4 shows, of all out-of-wedlock births in the United States in 2008 only 7.7 percent occurred to girls under age 18. Three-quarters occurred to young adult women between the ages of 19 and 29. [5] The decline in marriage and growth in out-of-wedlock births is not a teenage issue; it is the result of a breakdown in relationships between young adult men and women.
A Two-Caste Society In 2008, 1.72 million children were born outside of marriage in the United States. [6] Most of these births occurred to women who will have the hardest time going it alone as parents: young adult women with a high school degree or less. As Chart 5 shows, nearly two-thirds of births to women who were high school dropouts occurred outside of marriage. Among women who had only a high school degree, well over half of all births were out of wedlock. By contrast, among women with at least a college degree, only 8 percent of births were out of wedlock, and 92 percent of births occurred to married couples. [7]
The U.S. is steadily separating into a two-caste system with marriage and education as the dividing line. In the high-income third of the population, children are raised by married parents with a college education; in the bottom-income third, children are raised by single parents with a high school degree or less.
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