The New Unmarried Moms

I think when teens get pregnant now, they're just way more open about it than ever before.

I would like to think that has people born in the 60s and since then are a lot more open with their kids and actually do the things needed to make sure their kids are protecting themselves if/when they become sexually active.

 

Yeah, but as the article points out, early 20's is the 16.

They may be delaying parenthood by a few years, but they're still facing the same problems.

 

Marriage is passé in Scandinavia, so unmarried doesn't really mean the same thing it does here.

Here, it pretty much means fatherless. Not so there.

 

Oh, I know. Was just directly answering Mizzou's post guessing that teen pregnancies are way up.

 

I'm not sure what difference that makes - except that we now have to identify what problem it is we're really talking about here: are these unwed mothers and their children a moral problem? A social problem? A racial problem? A money problem? A crime problem? A Wall Street Journal problem?

 

All of it except the first thing -- morality is individual -- and the last, which I don't even know what that means. I suspect it's some deliberately obtuse phrase you're using to not just come out and say what you mean.

Children in those families significantly underperform in school, in careers and in society as a whole. And they drag the next generation down with them. It is fact. To deny this, or wonder as you are what we're really talking about here, requires willful ignorance and an interest in academic jacking-off about the problem more than addressing it.

 

The original post was a link to an article in the Wall Street Journal.

 

Ah. So your point was then that there is no achievement gap between these groups except the one dreamed up by the WSJ?

That's even more willfully ignorant than what I thought you were saying.

 

No.

I was asking if the article was in any way in error in identifying these problems.

 

And the willful ignorance continues.

I get it, you like just batting stuff around and taking the discussion in weird dead ends just for kicks, but you aren't even playing in the real world anymore. It is not possible to argue that children of single mothers do as well as children of two-parent households. An individual can do it, but the odds are pretty overwhelming against.

 

What about the children of single mothers with $100,000-plus annual incomes compared to those of two-parent households with $40,000 and lower annual incomes? What about cases where custody and monetary support are split functionally?

 

That's a politically/religiously/morally/whatever charged topic of study, but there is quite a bit of research that the two-parent kid is going to come out ahead. But, OK, in that subset of single mothers making $100,000 or more, yeah, the kids have a better shot.

I thought it was understood that we were comparing apples to apples, though.