Thursday, September 19, 2013

Hardly a mystery

The Atlantic is puzzled by the "mysterious and alarming rise of single parenthood in America":
You probably remember the headlines about “Breadwinner Moms” a few months ago. The Pew Center had published a report finding women are the best-paid workers in a record 40 percent of households with children under 18. That’s practically quadruple the 1960 number.

But a little detail was often lost in the large-font headlines. Sixty percent of “breadwinner-mom” families are really just single-mom families. In fact, single moms account for precisely one-quarter of U.S. households. Single dads make up another 6 percent.

In other words, the biggest story here isn’t the rise of female earners, exactly, even though that’s a distinct and powerful trend. This is really a story about a more astonishing fact: Single parents have more than tripled as a share of American households since 1960.
This is not a mystery at all. Women have been taught to believe that marriage is oppressive, stifling, and akin to slavery.  They've been taught that they have to go to university and spend their prime fertile years in college and getting their career established.  They've been told they need men like fish need bicycles.

Men, on the other hand, have been told that they have to wait until they are nearly 30 before a woman will tire of riding the carousel and be willing to settle down and marry them. They've also been informed that if they do marry a woman and she doesn't want to be married anymore, they will still be responsible for supporting her financially after the end of the marriage.

And both sexes have been told that marriage is nothing more than two people, of any sex, race, or religion, who happen to want to tell other people that they are temporarily committed to each other in some fashion that may, or may not, involve sexual monogamy.

Frankly, taking all these factors into account, the only mystery is that single parents - or more precisely, single mothers - haven't increased by more than a mere factor of three.

19 comments:

Revelation Means Hope said...

It shows that there is still power in tradition, and still power in the teachings of Christ. Unfortunately very few are actively preaching the later one.

Anonymous said...

This wasn't little-noticed: Me-gyn has the top show at Fox News because Lou Dobbs and Juan Williams noticed this and needed to be cowed back into the corner because they rained on a "Rah! Rah! Team Woman! Grrrrrl Powah!" moment. It's like how, this morning, they said - it's OK unemployment is high, because it's two basis points higher for men than women, so this is retributive justice...except the only reason women are employed is at 20 hour/week jobs waitressing and helping out at nursing homes, hence the similar "crisis of the underemployed" brought about by women's policies (i.e., Obamacare).

Anonymous said...

The cold hard reality is we have elected to replace marriage as our organizing philosophy for the family with child support. Child support is the answer to the question: "How am I supposed to raise my children when I'm not married to their father?" The right answer of course is "You aren't", but either way child support is the answer we chose.

Our switch to a child support based family model is generally denied because on the surface it appears as if we have two systems. Many women do still marry before having children. The problem is child support is always just a phone call away, even if you marry the woman before having children with her. So the choice for women is the child support model upfront, or this new marital instrument which works much like convertible bonds.

One thing which is forgotten is until the early 1970s child support wasn't a given for children born out of wedlock. Some states had separate "bastardy" laws which were separate from the process used for (then fault) divorce, but other states like Texas didn't even have these stigma attached laws. The Supreme Court declared this unconstitutional in 1973 with Gomez v. Perez (409 U.S. 535). While this was a classic example of progressive legislation from the bench, you will be hard pressed to find a conservative today who doesn't enthusiastically support the idea of child support for illegitimate children.

Anonymous said...

I think a unemployment insurance is a good analogy for modern marriage, but with a twist. Currently, if you are laid off from a job, you are eligible for unemployment. If you are fired for cause, you can be denied unemployment, but you can usually get it anyway, because it's not worth it for the employer to dispute it. However, if you quit the job voluntarily, you are not eligible for unemployment.
Imagine if you were eligible for unemployment after quitting your job. Employers would really have to kiss their employee's asses to keep them, and employee motivation and work quality would be much worse. Employment would still pay more than unemployment insurance, but the frustration level needed to quit would be far lower. Employers would be at a significant disadvantage in a system like this, compared to the current system.

Marriage is like this now. Women can quit anytime they want, and continue getting money. In comparison, men are like the employers, who are at a disadvantage in the marriage, and have to kiss ass to keep the wife, because she can keep a large part of her support from him even if she leaves.

Outside of a few leftists, nobody would seriously expect unemployment insurance to pay if the employee quits, but that is how marriage works today.

Trust said...

People who support giving men the same right to opt out of parenthood that women have are accused of wanting men to have license to knock up women and leave.

The accusers never consider how much more often children are placed in these situations is a direct result of paying the person most in control of pregnancy to get pregnant.

Jack Black said...

The single parent phenomenon is really just the expanding under class. As the middle and upper classes reproduce in small numbers the underclass continues produce a lot of children. I tutored a women who had 8 kids by the time she 28, no fathers. Being poor, rich, and middle class is largely genetic and the underclass is clearly winning that genetic race to the bottom.

Crowhill said...

In addition to all you've said, we've also started to glorify single motherhood.

Anonymous said...

@Crowhill - I would submit that we have been glorifying it for some time. In church settings, I have often heard the sentiment that single mothers, "won't have to wait in line to get into heaven." I think this has been going on since the 70's.

Crowhill said...

@JDC, of course you're right. Our moronic culture has been doing this for many years. I meant "started" in the context of a longer time frame, I should have been clearer.

ThirdMonkey said...

My wife was raised by a single-mother feminist who left her father when she was 5. She spent 18 years teaching her that men were undependable and that she needed to concentrate on her career. Contrary to her upbringing, she married at me two months after graduating high school, never finished college, and never had a career. We are expecting our fourth child in March, much to her mother's horror. My mother-in-law is disabled, and her two other children are too busy to pay her any attention, so we have moved her less than 5 miles from us so that we can care for her. For the most part, she missed out on her other grandkids, despite living in the same town, because of her career. Now that her career is over, she and her cat spend 3 or 4 days a week with my kids. We love her despite her feminism, and after 15 years she finally trusts that I won't abandon her daughter and our children. We're just gonna keep doin' what we're doin'. She might not get it , but my daughter will.

mmaier2112 said...

Why would she be horrified about having a fourth grandkid? How moronic.

tz said...

And both sexes have been told that marriage is nothing more than two people...

Shouldn't it read:

And both sexes have been told that marriage is nothing other than two or more people...

"Caesar" provided "bread and circuses", so the single moms and really all the voting women are only breadwinners because our current incarnation of "Nero" (hey, isn't that "black" in latin/italian?) won the election. Most circuses have a carousel on the midway, as well as sideshows and freakshows, as well as a big tent with a three branch, oops, ring circus proper occurs with lots of clowns and such.

Even the ordinary barbarians didn't support single motherhood. Detroit has 80% born out of wedlock, and no small number of abortions. More than a "factor of 3". Note this is some anniversary of a church that was bombed and several black girls killed. And other advocates call gun violence genocide. How is the Abortion KKKlnic genocide going? How many, 100k every year?

Child support for illegitimate children used to be called "adoption". I can see that injuring the child for the mistakes of the parents is itself unjust, but we've carved out a constitutional right to sex. Think you're transgeder? You can get surgery (there is a condition where people want someone to amputate one of their limbs at a precise point - we don't indulge them). For all the regulation - we recognize smoking (but look at a tv show or add from 1950-1963!) causes problems, nuclear power is feared, as are chemicals, but sex is more powerful and destructive.


Weouro said...

And his solution isn't to figure out a way to keep father, mother, and child together but to turn single-motherhood into "a dream." It'll be hard to do with more and more Rattlifers opting out.

Jill said...

AAHHHHHHHH! Yes, that was an angsty scream. I'm that weird person with mouth open on the bridge. I do not like the marriage/hook-up market my nearly adult children are entering. I do not want my children marrying people who have grown up in broken homes, and I frankly don't care how prejudicial that sounds.

Stg58/Animal Mother said...

Man on the street 2013:

Person 1: Hey nice to meet you, I'm Bill.
Person 2: I'm Batman!
Person 1: Uh buddy you're crazy!
Person 2: Just kidding my name is John and I was born a man, but I am really a woman.
Person 1: How brave of you. Let's celebrate your choices! What do you want me to call you?
Person 2: Juanita!
Person 1: I love people like you! You are so much better than I am!

Doom said...

It's just a return to barbaric, pagan, times. Which makes perfect sense. Most people aren't high enough functioning to be scientific, as if that would help in any case, and without limits, even moral. Society and culture, with religion and state, are all part of it. Excluding one dram of the required components and advanced society musts whither. And so it will. Culture has been purposefully corrupted. Education has been reduced to baby sitting. Religion is being outlawed, Christianity, probably Judaism, for now.

Not all of it was simple evil planners. Mobility has been a huge boon to the destruction, limiting the impact of family and social contacts. We have all become strangers, even to our families.

I'm still not certain if those who have crafted this culture honestly believed science, education, and political correctness had a chance of further developing, or even sustaining civilization, or whether they meant to crush it. To turn us all into people like Col. Kurtz. In the secular, he is correct. Which makes modern atheists laughable... they lack the... courage of their convictions.

Anonymous said...

@Doom

Paganism? Even pagans didn't promote this shit.

Unknown said...

Don't forget that welfare, no-fault divorce, and child support laws all give women a blank check to pop out children with no need to be responsible to the person paying the bills.

Stg58/Animal Mother said...

My wife was raised by a single-mother feminist who left her father when she was 5. She spent 18 years teaching her that men were undependable and that she needed to concentrate on her career.

So let me see if I understand. Your wife's mother leaves your wife's father when your wife was 5, then complains that men are undependable? Did your father in law depend on your mother in law to stay married to him longer than five years?

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