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Pastimes : Let's Talk About Our Feelings!!! -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Zoltan! who wrote (19551)	3/31/1998 3:14:00 PM
From: Grainne	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 108807

Duncan, I already provided a url to an article about the relationship between poverty and illegitimacy. Did you read it? Affluent, middle class girls with futures are not choosing to have three or four babies and go on welfare. I also think it is pretty irrelevant to discuss the rate of unwed mothers during the Depression. So what? There have definitely been changes in American families, and there is not as much social stigma attached to single parenting as there was then. One huge difference is that young women who get pregnant do not automatically marry the father of the child, a system which locked countless people into long, miserable, loveless marriages in the past. So there are several factors interacting, not all of them necessarily totally negative in their implications. All these things are quite complicated. The society may be richer than it was in the thirties, but it is the underclass that is having all these babies, for the most part, and they are definitely not getting richer. There is not necessarily a causal connection, and you are making one. You have simplified everything to the degree that it no longer makes sense. For example, take the statement "in the 1960's black families were strong". Lyndon Johnson developed the idea of the Great Society, in fact, because in the South he was familiar with, he was horrified by the poverty and hunger in black families. Hungry families are not strong families!! One of the things we did as a nation was bring blacks over here as slaves, and although we freed them, we did not give them the forty acres and a mule, the steps up, so that they could become useful and prosperous in our society. Black families were more intact in the sixties than they are now, but since then several things have happened. One is that as the result of desegregation, the black middle class, who once provided crucial role models, has left for the suburbs. The national decline in good jobs that would support families that did not require higher education has also fractured the black family, in particular. Men who cannot support themselves, or families, tend to create a lot of social pathology, and this needs to be dealt with in constructive ways. But in any event, poverty does foster illegitimacy RIGHT NOW, in the sense that the women who are having all these babies are mostly poor. Did you read the Guiliani article you posted carefully? If you look at demographics, you will see that my statement is true. It is not the wealthy Central Park single mothers who are making demands on city services, it is the poor teenaged ones whose parents are poor, and mostly on public assistance. Incidentally, I read an article recently, which I did not save, unfortunately. But it was the results of a study which showed that illegitimacy on its own is not a predictor of any particular problems in children, but that poverty is the culprit. They compared the illegitimate children of poor women with children born out of wedlock to middle class mothers--the Murphy Brown sort of women who deliberately choose to have children on their own. Surprisingly, these children did slightly better in school, by all measurable standards, than children from two parent families in the same social class. The study concluded that it is the stability of the household, and things like children being read to and responded to and loved, and having consistent discipline, that ensure good performance in school. The illegitimate children of poor women have many strikes against them, in contrast. Poverty is really the key here, not anything else.