People who have children out of wedlock

It fucks up the kids. They need a stable two parent home. All the research points to this.

Stupid thread.

Very old people's thread R2. Very old people who are nearly all dead now.

This thread would be more appropriate for Christianity Today.

I just assumed it's Rupert Murdoch.

My parents were married. It was pure hell.

Athough I don't find it "immoral" or anything, it's plain to see that this behavior strongly correlates with being a trashy ass person. Most are terribly lacking in foresight. Statistically more educated people are more likely to be married before having kids. The cool smart people we know who don't get married because "it's just a piece of paper" are outliers. Really at this point you can no longer look like a rebel who is sticking it to conservative society by having children out of wedlock, because it's so common. You're just trashy.

Emmie Slattery is the role model for sluts having sex outside of marriage.

It's very selfish and uncaring to give birth to a bastard.

Such a dated concept.

Gays have been able to legally marry for less than a decade and get all snooty about marriage and children.

Please.

With or without kids, marriage in the U.S. will no longer be seen as a route to financial and social stability for the middle class, because there’s no room for error if you’re financially grafted to someone who turns out to be irresponsible, mentally unstable or an addict, for example. Any slip-up by one spouse will take the other one down because housing, insurance, and health care expenses are currently much too high compared to personal income. Unless that changes, unmarried co-parenting sounds like a sane alternative for those who desire an affordable exit strategy if the relationship fails.

Everything you've posted in horseshit R7.

"out of wedlock"

Are you an Amish 98 yr old, OP?

TRADITIONAL MARRIAGE ONLY - that's what Jesus told us. Praise Him.

“Well, I don’t know about you, but I learned MY lesson, put a ring on it!”

Rupert, born in 1917.

Also, being married does not automatically create a stable environment for kids. Marriage does not automatically turn people into good parents. It’s no surprise that divorce surged in the early days of women’s lib when wives realized that being beaten and raped by their husbands was not OK, and was certainly not a healthy influence on their children.

OP is also against gays having children. You know, you need a mother and a father.

I never said anything of the kind!

OP, before you speak on anyone else's kids, do you care to explain your BRUTAL attack on your own daughter a few days back? Bitch, I have the receipts!!!

Some of us just so happen to find physical violence just as trashy!

I don’t have a daughter. How absurd!

I’m surprised that you don’t type in cursive, OP.

Next from OP: a blowhard screed on interracial marriage.

OP. I assume you are American? It’s much more common in Europe.

Are you also a member of the family research council?

I read a funny interview with Kirsten Dunst where she said her mom was hounding her about getting married to Jesse Plemons. They already had one kid and she was pregnant with a second one and she told her mother no! It’s my wedding and I want to have a few drinks at it! So it’s going to have to be after the kid is born and I’m done breast feeding!

They did get married, but I liked the practicality of her response to her mom. I’m not getting married while I’m pregnant because it’s MY wedding and I wanna get drunk and have a good time!

Lol OP.

Nothing wrong with owning up to who you are. Most Americans are trash. Better than thinking a marriage license means you're not trash, which is basically every person in my extended family.

#1 on OP's Hit Parade.

Sorry, messed up the link.

BASTARDS!

Perhaps marriage needs to be reframed as a partnership and not a romantic adventure. Mature people realize this (over 40 or so) but many young women hang onto this romantic notion of marriage. I’m not necessarily saying have an open marriage but be prepared for affairs. And if it’s too many affairs that cause problems then the partnership should be dissolved.

The problem isn't that parents don't get married. The problem is that people procreate casually, rather than mindfully. You should be in a committed relationship with someone if you have a child together. It's better for the child. Nobody wants a bunch of "uncles," half-siblings, and step-siblings.

I also think it's ridiculous how people are engaged and have fiancés / fiancées for years. You're either married or you're not. That Seinfeld episode where the woman said: "Has anyone seen my fiancé?" applies to this.

My mother married my father solely because she got pregnant, and admits it was one of the biggest mistakes of her life. She was in her mid-thirties, wanted a child, and was a firm believer in doing "the respectable thing," which led to a bad marriage and a traumatic divorce.

I respect those who make choices aligned with their personal convictions rather than succumbing to societal pressures. Marriage has never seemed particularly romantic or desirable to me; it's a business arrangement, and when it's over, someone usually owes someone else money. There's something to be said for staying in a relationship out of genuine desire rather than obligation, and I don't think that's a bad lesson to pass on to children.

Just having children is trashy, “wedlock” or not

[quote] My mother married my father solely because she got pregnant, and admits it was one of the biggest mistakes of her life. She was in her mid-thirties, wanted a child, and was a firm believer in doing "the respectable thing," which led to a bad marriage and a traumatic divorce.

When you have a child like that there is going to be pain and suffering. What’s more important is making the child legitimate and the woman trying to mitigate the decline in her reputation.

Statistically the kids are very disadvantaged, lower academic and professional performance, a greater pull of resources and lower output. I see that in my area and in my husband too, his dad left and there were lots of things he just didn't get, or know, cause mom was gone working or whatever. So I nurtered those needs for him. Straight men are often shitty fathers and the moms are hugely irresponsible for breeding at all, but expect more with the abortion laws changing. What I hate most is the commercials for feeding the hungry kids. I will not pay to feed your brats! I already do, in my property taxes for the school district. I'd pay for women to get birth control pills though.

OP "out of wedlock?" You sound like you're stuck somewhere in 1955. I have two sisters. Both of them have great jobs, and MBAs. They're single. When they were in their 30's my mother told them one evening over dinner that she would not be at all upset if they decided to have or to adopt a kid. Why not? They're f inancially and professionally secure. They both are home owners. They have a nice circle of long time friends. When I think of all the single parent households who have succeeded with far less, thru great difficulties, I can see no reason why this should be anathema socially.

R38, being a single parent and having a child out of wedlock are not synonymous. There are many single parents whose kids are not bastards. Also, a person who wantonly has a child out of wedlock may marry later so there are two parents.

There is a difference between having a kid with no father (a father who has left them) and a kid with a father in their life. Having the kid when married doesn't necessarily mean the father is in the kid's life and having a kid out of wedlock doesn't necessarily mean the father isn't in the kid's life.

I'm "Statistically disadvantaged" kid who graduated from Wharton with my MBA, and I'm now a senior VP at a medium sized corporation. My mother is my hero.

R41, congratulations and be proud of your accomplishments - and own your statistical abnormality. You are the exception, surely you must realize this, no?

R42 It's cute how sincere that comes across.

No, but what came off as a 'you said what about my mother motherfucker?' seemed to lack a fucking iota of self awareness.

There, fixed it for you.

About 78% of black w women giving birth are unmarried while the number for whites and Asians is around 30%. That’s really all you need about most problems affecting the black community today. I don’t think anything changes either until that number goes down significantly,

R44 You couldn't tell that poster was doing a typical 'Let's be' post?

The statistics are deceiving. A lot of the disadvantages that kids from single-parent families face are financial, because there’s only one breadwinner. Sometimes one parent is parent than both when it comes to child-rearing — if one of the parents is toxic. Ironically, if the single parents in all these dysfunctional relationships were to marry, statistics about the wellbeing of kids in two-parent families compared to single-parent families would start going in the other direction because the custodial parents would no longer be shielding their child from the mentally unstable or abusive partner.

*Sometimes one parent is better than both when it comes to child-rearing…

Sorry for the typo.

These statistics are worthless. A person who is financially and personally stable isn’t really any more at risk of raising a misfit and dropout than a married person of the same profile. It’s the fact that having children outside of marriage is more common among socially disadvantaged people that leads to the disparity in outcomes. Marriage itself doesn’t serve as a magical protection against having dysfunctional children.

Obviously, people shouldn’t partner with abusive or mentally ill people. But two relatively stable partners will provide a more financially stable home than one. Not to mention the potential support that allows one person to devote more time to staying home with infants and babies.

Whether or not one should have children depends much less on marital status or even whether or not you are partnered than on how well equipped to be a good parent.

> Are you emotionally mature? > Do you face crises calmly? > Do you have a reliable source of adequate income? > Do you have enough of an education to support your children in their education? > Do you live in safe, secure, and stable housing?

If you can’t answer YES to all of the above, you should refrain from becoming a parent.

But sadly, it is easier to have kids than it is to become a barber or a tattoo artist.

R37, maybe straight women don't want to pay for your PreP

R45, Asians actually have lower % of out-of-wedlock pregnancy than whites, not equal, but I guess some people have to pretend that whites are "the best" at everything

There’s no way to stop people from partnering with dysfunctional people and having kids with them, R50, unless we criminalize it. Also, mental illness and addiction can develop later in life. I’ve known a lot of “stable” people with kids who ended up divorcing for irreconcilable differences and had to choose the lesser evil of joint-visitation instead of having the kids live in a powder keg environment. That said, in the U.S. mental health care is getting more expensive and less accessible. Housing and other expenses are too high. If Anericans had better wages and mental health care, two-parent marriages might flourish again.

I can't decide if OP is Rick "Frothy Mix" Santorum or Mike "Deeply closeted, sick pervert who just happens to be speaker of the US House of Representatives" Johnson.

We get it. None of you can move on from the 1970s.

In the ‘80s, there was a local columnist who called Detroit the city of fiancées, as in so many reported crime stories involved a decedent who left behind a fiancée.

When you quote statistics please include income disparities and earing power in the various demographics: White Men, White women, Black men and Black women.

you may continue...

I know what you mean, op. I agree that it's trashy to have children out of wedlock. I used to be trashy, though I no longer consider myself to be. I had my son when I was 19, uneducated and single. I managed to get a degree and tried my best, but I often wonder if things would've been better had I had a supportive partner. Certainly my son would've loved to have a more involved father. My kid is now grown and I've told him many times, no kids before marriage, please. I feel bad for these young girls having babies when their boyfriends don't even respect them enough to marry them. Maybe I'm old fashioned, but I base my assessment on personal experience. Then again, my parents were married and my Dad was a raging alcoholic, so who knows?

[quote]I had my son when I was 19, uneducated and single. I managed to get a degree and tried my best, but I often wonder if things would've been better had I had a supportive partner. Certainly my son would've loved to have a more involved father.

If you had waited for a supportive partner and had a child with them instead, of course things would be different. The child would be different. And your son would not exist.

This is why abortion needs to be legal and accessible

Abortion should be mandatory to keep the birthrate down. World is overpopulated. You should need a license to be able to have a kid.

My parents are married. My mother regards herself emotionally as being a single mother with the biggest "kid" being my father.

Also, just because a couple stay married/together for a long time, doesn't mean they are both happy. She knows she should have left decades ago, but that he would have fought dirty and made her life hell.

Where I live, I'm the odd one because I'm gay and married but because I'm married at all. I have nieces and nephews who are teenagers and in their 20s who were born out of wedlock and no one thinks askance of it; their parents have remained together for 20+ years.

Here the average age of first marriage is just short of 37 for men and 34 for women, but the marriage rate is 3.1 per 1000, or quite significantly lower than that of the U.S. at 5.1 per 1000.

Many people see marriage as simply unnecessary, a money/gift grab, and a huge expense. Ask them why they never got married and they will say they thought about it -- years after living together or after they had kids -- but didn't really see a point to it.

The protections and official benefits for married vs unmarried couples are few and small.

"askance" is a great word, r64. I don't see it often.

Thanks!

There are too many baby mamas and baby daddies, especially in black communities.

[quote]R12 With or without kids, marriage in the U.S. will no longer be seen as a route to financial and social stability for the middle class, because there’s no room for error if you’re financially grafted to someone who turns out to be irresponsible, mentally unstable or an addict, for example. Any slip-up by one spouse will take the other one down because housing, insurance, and health care expenses are currently much too high compared to personal income. Unless that changes, unmarried co-parenting sounds like a sane alternative for those who desire an affordable exit strategy if the relationship fails.

An even saner alternative: don't marry (and don't procreate with) an "irresponsible, mentally unstable" person.

How many of us grew up in two-parent households with at least one parent who was, at best, disinterested in us?

The negative effects are lasting. Ask my therapist.

An even saner alternative: don't marry and don't procreate. Starve the beast of human suffering at the root. Give no part of yourself to the unfair, uncertain soup of humankind. Let those animals fight each other beneath your serene throne.

Permanent engagements displease me. That's why I gave you Donald Trump.

R15

Praise the Lord indeed. As any Christian thinking person knows sex outside of marriage is a sin, Praise the Lord and wait until marriage.

But if you can’t wait until marriage don’t be a threat to society don’t be a spreader of infectious disease or cute little bastards——wear a fucking condom.

The Lord has spoken to me. Wear a fucking condom.

Them harlots!!!

The not so veiled racism in this thread disgusts me.

[quote] The not so veiled racism in this thread disgusts me.

If it’s any consolation, the thread is also very misogynistic and homophobic.

I'm from a small city in the midwest US (@100,000 people), and lived there for forty years. The social structures and cultural influences really do play a part. The city was settled by, and is a majority Catholic city, lots of Catholic institutions (pre-k through postdoc Ed offered there by a ton of different parishes, schools, centers, programs etc).

Family planning and birth control are taught one basic way in public schools, and a much less informational way in the Catholic curriculum.

There is also a huge generational gap where people my age (45) and younger are lapsed Catholics or were born to lapsed parents. Both of my parents lapsed in the late 60s/ early 70s. I was born a decade later. So my generation & younger do not go to church weekly and are essentially living a non-religious life. Church is just for special occasions like weddings. The flip side of this: these kids may have gone through the parochial school system, a weekly reinforcing of Catholic values, and they are minors. Suddenly, they are 18, move out on their own, still live in town, have had almost no family planning education, and are now having kids at random. This is a big issue in this city. Kids do not know what the fuck to do with their bodies. "The talk" from their parents may not have happened. Over the last two decades I've known so many young people who never used birth control, would just keep having kids (remember this is a Catholic city), guys would have multiple kids all over town, I knew one guy at work who had two girls named Tiffany knocked up at the same time. We hired a busboy a few years ago who was fifteen, and was about to become a father. Many of them just seem really dumb. They don't know how to use birth control.

Out of wedlock? Jesus is this the 50's?

OP still qualifies to wear white on her wedding day.

R64, what country do you live in? How do they know what name to give the children?

Bastards.

Why don’t these girls go to Abortion Hut in the mall and get that whiny creature sucked out of them?

Corky was right. I can't deal with you people, because you people are bastard people!

When I read R75’s post (re: living in a “Catholic city”) I felt like I was reading about life on another planet. Even though we’re in the same country. I accept his observations at face value. But at the same time I’m scratching my head. In 2023 there are people who don’t know HOW to use birth control? They don’t know what to do with their bodies without THE TALK?

No wonder Trump has the level of support he does.

[quote]what country do you live in? How do they know what name to give the children?

R78: The customary way, with two surnames -- the first surname of the father + the first surname of the mother

R82

Many of these who have unwanted babies, who don’t use birth control, in the same way so many gay men will not use condoms, are not the Catholics and not even the most typical Republican voters.

Many come from the deep democratic base. The non MAGA voter.

I know plenty of middle-class couples who got together in the 1970s or early 80s, had and raised two or three children together and are STILL together. They didn't get married because young Boomers were against the God- and State-sanctioned aspects of weddings. And guess what? It turns out you don't need God to tell you you're OK in order to have a long, healthy relationship.

I also know very long-term gay couples who didn't get married when marriage equality was legislated, because they maintain it's heteronormative and not for them. It didn't cause a ripple in their relationships, whether they already had children or not.

How do you deal with these couples, R1?

R39, perhaps you should look up the term in the dictionary before you give your own definition

R86, you’re showing your ignorance.

I find this topic interesting when it comes to British nobility. You still can not inherit a title if your parents were unmarried, even if they later married. Even if your parentage is proven by DNA. So the son born right before his parents marriage can be Mr. Henry Thomas, while the son born after the marriage can be Lord Gerald Thomas, who will inherit his father's title. There are many examples of this in the nobility. So it still does have some effect, in some places anyway.

Oh, and I was going to say, if I were the elder, but bastard, son, I'd be really pissed at my parents!

I'm a bastard. I'm fine.

R88, yes, the mother just needs to get married before the birth for a man to make an honest woman of her and legitimize the child. They can divorce immediately thereafter.

R67, tell that to some naive 20-year-old chick who got knocked up by her loser boyfriend 😒

R64, where are you from? Just wondering

My parents were married…and I regret that every day of my life. For every good day there were a week’s worth of bad.

OP = Dan Quayle

A lot of people just get married because the bridezilla wants a day where she gets to wear a tiara and $12K dress. There's also a lot of pressure on couples to have big, fat weddings - especially if they already have kids.

Really dumb reasons to get married.

There are also people who feel pressured to have kids by a certain age, even though the person they procreate with is not their ideal partner, and they're hoping someone else will eventually come along. There's a lot of people in unhappy rships/marriages waiting for someone to come along to make the drama of splitting from their current partner worth it.

[quote] I find this topic interesting when it comes to British nobility.

That’s quite enough, Mary.

[quote]Many of the telegrams flaunt an anti-immigrant prejudice toward the Swedish Bergman and the Italian Rossellini, saying that “we don’t want you here,” that she would not be allowed in the U.S. or that she was deserving of “banishment from your home, foster country and career.” One labeled Rossellini with the Italian pejorative “Dago” while another referred to the director as “Mossolini the spaghetti eater.”

People who want children and can afford to raise them, please, have a child. But don’t be broke and poor and uneducated. Don’t have kids to be like everyone else. Don’t have children to be an extension of yourself. And please, don’t let your religion dictate how many kids you should have. It should be that simple.

A couple years after the fact, R95, The Atlantic, hardly a right-wing magazine, had a cover story entitled, “Dan Quayle was Right.” He was.

There has been a huge transformation in the way children are raised in the United States: the erosion of the convention of raising children inside a two-parent home. This shift is often not publicly challenged or lamented, in an effort to be inclusive of a diversity of family arrangements. But this well-meaning acceptance obscures the critical reality that this change is hurting our children and our society.

The share of American children living with married parents has dropped considerably: In 2019, only 63 percent lived with married parents, down from 77 percent in 1980. Cohabitation hardly makes up for the difference in these figures. Roughly a quarter of children live in a one-parent home, more than in any other country for which data is available. Despite a small rise in two-parent homes since 2012, the overall trend persists.

This is not a positive development. The evidence is overwhelming: Children from single-parent homes have more behavioral problems, are more likely to get in trouble in school or with the law, achieve lower levels of education and tend to earn lower incomes in adulthood. Boys from homes without dads present are particularly prone to getting in trouble in school or with the law.

Making the trend particularly worrisome is the wide class divide underneath it. In my research, I found that college-educated parents have largely continued to have and raise their children in two-parent homes. It is parents with less than a four-year college degree who have moved away from marriage, and two-parent homes, in large numbers. Only 60 percent of children who live with mothers who graduated from high school, or who have some college education but did not graduate, lived with married parents in 2020, a whopping 23 percentage point drop since 1980. Again, cohabitation does not erase the education divide. Neither does looking at the numbers across race and ethnic groups.

The result is less economic security for affected households and even wider inequality across households and childhood environments than economic changes would have wrought alone.

College-educated adults have seen their earnings rise over recent decades, and they have continued to get married at relatively high rates, typically to one another. Their household income has grown considerably. Meanwhile, adults without a college degree have experienced declining rates of employment and relatively modest increases in wages, while becoming more likely to set up households without a spouse or a partner. As a result of the decline in marriage, the economic security of the high-school educated has weakened even more.

A higher level of income is a key mechanism through which married parents transmit advantages to their children. One-parent homes generally do not have the same income as two-parent homes, even when we compare the homes of mothers of the same age, education level, race and state of residence. This largely reflects a simple fact of math: Two adults have the capacity to earn more than one. Even if one thinks, as I do, that the United States should provide more support to low-income families with children in order to help children thrive and also to secure a stronger work force and future for our country, we will most likely never have a government program that fully compensates single parents with the equivalent of the annual earnings of a spouse who works full-time.

Congress allowed the expanded child tax credit to expire at the end of 2021, rejecting a policy that provided families who met certain income thresholds with annual tax credits of $3,000 per child age 6 to 18 and $3,600 per child under 6. What are the odds that the government will start providing one-parent families with, say, benefits equal to the median earnings of an adult with a high school degree, which comes to around $44,000 a year? I would put the odds at zero. As long as that’s the case, income gaps between one- and two-parent homes will be substantial, and income matters a lot for kids’ prospects and futures.

Income differences are not the only driver of differences in outcomes. A second committed adult in the home can contribute considerable time and energy to taking care of children. We can and should do more as a society to try to compensate for these gaps in parental investments. But again, it is highly unlikely that government or community programs could ever provide children from one-parent homes with a comparable amount of the supervision, nurturing, guidance or help that children from healthy two-parent homes receive. That means a generation of children will grow up more likely to get in trouble and less likely to reach their potential than if they had the benefits of two parents in their homes.

It is an economic imperative to break the vicious cycle of a widening class gap in family structure — and more generally, a high share of one-parent homes outside all but the most highly educated groups in society.

That won’t be easy to do. For decades, academics, journalists and advocates have taken a “live and let live” view of family structure. Mostly this reflects a well-intentioned effort to avoid stigmatizing single mothers and to promote acceptance and respect for different family arrangements. But benign intentions have obscured the uncomfortable reality that children do better when they are raised in two-parent homes.

The result is the widespread normalization of one-parent homes outside the college-educated class and woefully little public support for programs aimed at strengthening families. Only 1 percent of the budget of the federal Administration for Children and Families is allocated to “promoting safe and stable families,” as compared to, for example, 15 percent for foster care.

On the other side of the issue, there are people inclined to blame single mothers for having or raising children outside of marriage. But it is not helpful to blame or shame women who are faced with the difficult choice between parenting alone or living with a partner who is an economic or emotional drain on the family. Surely we as a society can openly recognize the advantages of a two-parent home for children and offer a variety of kinds of support to couples who struggle to achieve a stable two-parent family arrangement without stigmatizing single parents and their children. Crucially, we need to bolster parents’ own capacity to thrive and be reliable providers for themselves and their children — including fathers, who were often left out of the conversation.

The issue is complicated, and solutions will necessarily be multifaceted. Just as scholars, journalists and policymakers acknowledge the need to improve schools and debate various reform ideas, those of us who discuss and debate questions of society and policy should be frank about the advantages of a healthy two-parent home for children and challenge ourselves to come up with ways to promote and support that institution.

We need to work more to understand why so many American parents are raising their children without a second parent in the home, and we must find effective ways to strengthen families in order to increase the share of children raised in healthy, stable two-parent homes. Doing so will improve the well-being of millions of children, help close class gaps and create a stronger society for us all.

I think they just should go out shopping in small stores for men's ties right after the rabbit test results come in.