All About The Kids

Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

This guy will use any stick to beat his favorite horses so I’m not endorsing his analysis.  The rise in births to unmarried mothers could be due to some other factor – unpopularity of shotgun marriages, for instance.

 But his claims that mixed race children grow up without fathers, and without paternal support, are interesting as they tie to other factors.  Children raised by single mothers are more likely to live in poverty.  Boys having no positive male role model more easily slip into violence and crime.

 It’s worth asking if the rise in illegitimacy might be related to the present furor over Black incarceration rates, police shootings protested by Black Lives Matter, 1,000 people shot (so far) in predominantly Black neighborhoods in Chicago, and Democrats’ collective fantasy that passing more gun laws will solve society’s problems.  Maybe traditional sexual morality restrained more than it appeared; maybe knocking down those barriers let loose more than we anticipated. 

 Oddly, why did unwed childbearing rates drop across the board in the 1990’s?  Newt Gingrich pushed through welfare reform and Clinton signed it in 1996, but the rate took a dive before the effects of the law could have been felt.  Why did women stop having babies out of wedlock, and why did they start up, again?

 Anyway, the charts are interesting. 

 Joe Doakes

The link between unwed parents and poverty is pretty iron-clad.

4 thoughts on “All About The Kids

  1. The temporary drop in unwed births corresponds roughly to the advent of abstinence based sex ed. The current rise corresponds nicely with when it was ended for the most part. Just sayin’.

    (I’m no huge expert in sociology, but I did take a look at a few of the studies that purported to “refute” abstinence, and one here in MN did not even have a statistical test or even a plausible control….they still got paid, of course)

  2. I knew a few working folks on welfare in the 90s. Basically they used it as a way to tide themselves over between jobs they didn’t look all that hard for. When it became clear that there might be time limits associated with it, and when it became clear that kids wouldn’t be an excuse for not working, those folks got a lot more serious about getting and keeping jobs. They went from treating welfare as a sort of reduced-pay extended vacation to a safety bank that had to be rationed.

    Again, anecdote and not data, but just what I observed.

  3. When you pay someone to do nothing, don’t be surprised at what you get as the primary product.

  4. I remember when people were embarrassed to be on welfare, let alone ask for it.

    Now, DemonRATs tout it as a birth right.

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