Top Quotes: “Promises I Can Keep: Why Poor Women Put Motherhood Before Marriage” — Kathryn Edin

Introduction

“If unmarried parents’ unions were as stable as marriages, we wouldn’t worry so much about the effects on children. Indeed, in some European countries, couples maintain decades-long partnerships without ever marrying. Perhaps at some future point, lasting relationships outside of marriage will be common in the US too, and whether a child’s parents are married won’t be as important. But that’s not the case today: marriage is still the way that Amer. couples sustain long-term relationships.

When urban children born outside of marriage reach kindergarten, more than 3/4 — 78% — will have experienced either family instability — at least one parental relationship change — or family complexity — at least one half-sibling. Only 18% will live in families that look pretty much like marriages — no breakups, no new partners, and no children from outside relationships to complicate matters. A very small minority, 4%, will live in a family that fits the stereotypical image of a single mother, spending all of their childhood years with a parent who’s been stably living solo since their birth.

Consequently, children born to so-called single mothers — more often unmarried couples — may see a series of mother and father figures entering and exiting their lives, along with half siblings, stepsiblings, and other kin.”

“Contrary to popular perception, poor women who have children while unmarried are usually romantically involved with the baby’s father when the child is born, and 40% even live with him. More surprising still, given the stereotypes most Americans hold about poor single moms, the vast majority of poor, unmarried new parents say they plan to marry each other. But the survey also shows that their chances for marriage or for staying together over the long term are slim.”

“Marriage was a dream that most still longed for, a luxury they hoped to indulge in someday when the time was right, but generally not something they saw happening in the near, or even the foreseeable, future. Most middle-class women in their early- to mid-20s, the average age of the mothers we spoke to, would no doubt say the same, but their attitudes about childbearing would contrast sharply with that of our respondents. While the poor women we interviewed saw marriage as a luxury, something they aspired to but feared they might never achieve, they judged children to be a necessity, an absolutely essential part of a young woman’s life, the chief source of identity and meaning.

To most middle-class observers, a poor woman with children but no husband, diploma, or job is either a victim of her circumstances or undeniable proof that Amer. society is coming apart at the seams. But in the social world inhabited by poor women, a baby born into such conditions represents an opportunity to prove one’s worth. The real tragedy, these women insist, is a woman who’s missed her chance to have children.”

“[Many] romantic relationships proceed at lightning speed — where a man woos a woman with the line ‘I want to have a baby with you,’ and she views it as high praise; where birth control is quickly abandoned, if practiced at all; and where conception often occurs after less than a year together. Stories like Antonia’s reveal why children are so seldom conceived by explicit design, yet are rarely purely accident either.”

“Poor women often say they don’t want to marry until they’re ‘set’ economically and established in a career. A young mom often fears marriage will mean a loss of control — she believes that saying ‘I do’ will suddenly transform her man into an authoritarian head of the house who insists on making all the decisions, who thinks that he ‘owns’ her. Having her own earnings and assets buys her some ‘say-so’ of power and some freedom from a man’s attempts to control her behavior. After all, she insists, a woman with money of her own can credibly threaten to leave and take the children with her if he gets too far out of line. But this insistence on economic independence also reflects a much deeper fear: no matter how strong the relationship, somehow the marriage will go bad. Women who rely on a man’s earnings, these mothers warn, are setting themselves up to be left with nothing if the relationship ends.

So does marriage merely represent a list of financial achievements? Not at all. The poor women we talked to insist it means lifelong commitment. In a surprising reversal of the middle-class norm, they believe it’s better to have children outside of marriage than to marry unwisely only to get divorced later. One might dismiss these poor mothers’ marriage aspirations as deep cynicism, yet demographers project that more than 7 in 10 will marry someone eventually. What moral code underlies the statement of one mother who said, ‘I don’t believe in divorce — that’s why none of the women in my family are married’? And what does it take to convince a young mother that her relationship is safe enough from the threat of divorce to risk marriage?”

“Our mothers [have a] remarkable confidence in their ability to parent their children well and [hold themselves to tough] standards. It’s possible for a poor woman to judge her mothering a success even when the child fails in school, gets pregnant as a teen, becomes addicted to drugs, or ends in juvie. The women whose stories we share believe the central tenet of good mothering can be summed up in 2 words: being there.”

“These mothers, we discovered, almost never see children as bringing them hardship; instead, they manage to credit virtually every bit of good in their lives to the fact that they have children — they believe motherhood has ‘saved’ them.”

“Philly is often known as a ‘city of firsts.’ Its proud list of accomplishments [include] the nation’s first capital, first bank, first hospital, first free library, and the first to provide all of its citizens with a public education.”

“America’s 5th-largest city entered the 21st century with almost 1/4 of its citizens, and nearly 1/3 of its children, living in poverty. This is precisely why it was a perfect site for our research. Because of the high rates of poverty there, we found poor whites, blacks, and Latinxs living in roughly similar circumstances. Though racial minorities often live in high-poverty neighborhoods, cities where whites live in the same circumstances are rare. The white urban poor usually live in mixed-income neighborhoods, and thus have considerable advantages over the minority poor — better schools, better parks and rec facilities, better jobs, safer streets, and so on. But in Philly, the high poverty rates in several former white ethnic strongholds — those once-proud industrial villages — create a rare opportunity for students of race and inequality to study whites, Latinxs, and black people whose social contexts are quite similar. This unique feature of our study may explain why we found the experiences and worldviews of these groups to be so similar, and why class, not race, is what drives much of our account.”

“During her second year in the field, Kefalas became pregnant with her first child, and this new common ground provided just the entree she needed. Residents’ reactions to her pregnancy were almost as informative as the interviews themselves. Most assumed she’d had difficulty getting pregnant, as she was already 30, and one described the pregnancy as a miracle. Another proclaimed with gleeful delight ‘that the doctors were proved wrong, right?’ Most couldn’t believe that any woman would postpone childbearing into her 30s by choice.”

Lightning-Speed Relationships

“To the outside observer, begging one’s girlfriend for a baby just days or weeks after initiating a new romance might seem to be little more than a cynical pickup line, and that’s certainly how it is sometimes used. But in the social world of young people like Antonia and Emilio, nearly everyone knows that a young man who proclaims his desire to have a baby by a young woman is offering high tribute to her beauty, for this avowal expresses a desire for a child that will have her eyes and her smile. The statement’s significance extends beyond praise for her physical charms, though. A man who says these words with sincerity bestows an even higher form of flattery: she’s the kind of woman he’s willing to entrust with the upbringing of his progeny, his own flesh and blood. Yet expressing the desire to have a baby together is far from a promise of lifelong commitment. What it does reflect is the desire to create some sort of significant, long-lasting bond through a child. Lena, a white mom of a 1-year-old, who’s only 15 when we talk with her, says her boyfriend told her he ‘wanted to get me pregnant…so that I wouldn’t leave him. So that I’ll stay with him forever. Then he said [to me], ‘When you have kids by somebody, they’ll always go back to you.’ And when Lisette, an 18-year-old black mom of 2 toddlers, discovered she was pregnant, ‘[The father] said to me, ‘You know, I got you pregnant on purpose because I want you in my life for the rest of my life.’’ For Lena and Lisette and the men in their lives, marriage is both fragile and rare, and the bond that shared children create may be the most significant and enduring tie available.

The heady significance of the declaration ‘I want to have a baby with you’ is also fueled by the extraordinary high social value the poor place on children. For a lack of compelling alternatives, poor youth like Antonia and Emilio often begin to eagerly anticipate children and the social role of parents at a remarkably tender age. While middle-class teens and 20-somethings anticipate completing college and embarking on their careers, their lower-class counterparts can only dream of such glories. Though some do aspire to these goals, the practical steps necessary to reach them are often a mystery.”

“Thoughts of children–when to have them, who with, what they’ll be like–often preoccupy the hopes and dreams of Brehanna, Jason, and their peers throughout adolescence and into the early adult years. Visions of shared children stand in vivid, living color against a monochromatic backdrop of otherwise dismal prospects. An unabashed confidence that they’re up to the job of parenting feeds the focus on children that most poor youth display, and this is at least partly because they’ve already mastered many of its mechanics.”

“She asked, ‘How many of you help take care of younger siblings or cousins?’ Almost all raised their hands. Then she asked, ‘How many of you know how to change a diaper or make up a bottle?’ Again, dozens of hands shot up in the air. ‘I didn’t know how to do either until I was 30 and had a baby!’ she admitted to the group.

A childhood embedded in a social network rich with children–younger siblings, cousins, nieces & nephews, and the children of friends–creates the illusion of a near Dr. Spock-like competence in childrearing.”

“Children come early to couples in W. Kensington and other decaying neighborhoods in Philly’s inner core–in fact, most conceive their first child within a year of being together. As talk of shared children is part of the romantic dialogue poor young couples engage in from the earliest days of courtship, this isn’t surprising. Nonetheless, for these mothers, only 1 in 4 children is conceived according to an explicit plan–about 1 in 5 for our black and Puerto Rican mothers, and 1 in 10 for our whites.

Some youth decide to begin trying to get pregnant so they can escape a troubled home life. Roxanne, a white mother of an adult child, a teen, and a 1-year-old, now in her early 40s, recalls the first time she and her boyfriend had sex. ‘We went down to the shore. I remember we had sex 8 times in a row without using anything. He agreed [to try and get pregnant, and it worked the first time]. I got pregnant to get out of my house, to get away from my father, to get away from my mother, I couldn’t stand living there any more.’ Young women like Roxanne hope that motherhood will somehow free them from the trauma of difficult personal situations, though they’re not always sure exactly how the rescue will be accomplished.”

Community

“Trust among residents of poor communities is astonishingly low–so low that most mothers we spoke with said they have no close friends, and many even distrust close kin. The social isolation that is the common experience of those who live in poverty is heightened for adolescents, whose relationships with parents are strained by the developmental need to forge an independent identity. The ‘relational poverty’ that ensues can create a compelling desire to give and receive love. Who better to do so with, some figure, than a child they can call their own? Pamela, a white middle-aged mother of 7 children, ranging from 14–28, reflects, ‘I think [I got pregnant[ mainly because I wanted to be loved. I went through my childhood without it. Somehow, I knew that…I would grow up and have kids, and it was something that was mine. Nobody could take it away from me. It was something that would love me. I would be able to love it unconditionally.’”

“The vigilance and care that most birth control methods require are hard to maintain when women like Tasheika see so few costs to having a baby. These young women often reject the idea that children–or at least the first child–will damage their future prospects much. Most believe that becoming a mother only gets in the way if a girl lets it.”

“Children, whether planned or not, are nearly always viewed as a gift, not a liability–a source of both joy and fulfillment whenever they happen upon the scene. They bring a new sense of hope and a chance to start fresh. Thus, most women want the baby very much once the pregnancy occurs. This is partially a reflection of neighborhood norms about how a young woman ought to respond to a pregnancy, as the few mothers who admit a less favorable reaction often express shame about it. While everyone knows that accidents happen–and these youth say not that everything, especially children, can or should be planned–the way in which a young woman reacts in the face of a pregnancy is viewed as a mark of her worth as a person. And as motherhood is the most important social role she believes she’ll play, a failure to respond positively to the challenge is a blot on her sense of self.”

“Virtually no women we spoke with believed it was acceptable to have an abortion merely to advance an educational trajectory. Something else, they say, must be present to warrant that decision–the desertion of the child’s father, an utter lack of support from the young woman’s own mother, rape or incest, an uncontrollable drug or alcohol addiction, homelessness, or impossible financial straits.

The irony here is that a substantial number of the mothers we spoke to willingly admit that they themselves have had abortions in the past–about ¼ of the total. In absolute terms, the poor have more abortions than the middle class, but that’s because they also have more pregnancies. Affluent youth are far more likely to terminate any given pregnancy than those raised in poor, minority, or single parent households. Even among the most disadvantaged, it’s those youth who are performing poorly in school who are least likely to respond to a pregnancy by seeking an abortion. The class contrast is even starker when we look at only those with ‘unplanned’ births. Affluent teens faced with an unplanned pregnancy choose abortion about ⅔ of the time, while their poor counterparts do so only about half of the time. Still, a large number of youth from poor backgrounds do have abortions.”

“In choosing to bring a pregnancy to term, a young woman can capitalize on an important and rare opportunity to demonstrate her capabilities to her kin and community.”

“Even in the most impoverished of communities, most youth understand that bearing children while young, poor, and unmarried isn’t the ideal way of doing things. Yet they also recognize that, given their already limited economic prospects, they have little to lose if they fail to time their births as precisely as the middle class does. And though most single moms readily acknowledge that having a child before establishing a stable 2-parent household or landing a well-paid job may not be the best way of doing things, their sense of when the right time might be often seems quite vague. In the meantime, they typically perceive little disadvantage to bearing a child while unmarried or still in their teens or early 20s.”

“For a white college-bound adolescent raised on Philly’s affluent Main Line, each year of postponed childbearing will likely lead to higher lifetime earnings. In fact, if she can hold out until her mid-30s, she’ll likely earn twice as much as if she’d had a child right out of college. Just imagine how her economic prospects would plummet if she brought a pregnancy to term at 15! From this privileged vantage point, a disadvantaged young woman’s willingness to bear a child well before she’s of legal age is beyond comprehension.”

“The young people who live in these neighborhoods–whether they play by society’s rules or not–share the same dismal prospects for lifetime earnings.”

Fathers

“One of the most reliable barometers of the state of the couple’s relationship just after a child’s birth is how the mother decides to name the baby. Lola, a 24-year-old Puerto Rican mother of a 2-year-old daughter, tells us, ‘I know one of my friends decided not to give the father’s name to the child…because he said, ‘It’s not my baby.’ But in the hospital, during labor, he showed up, and then she gave her his last name. At one point, I wanted to take Alice’s [last] name off because I figured I’m the one–I supported her for a year before he decided to help me. I was like, ‘If I’m the one supporting her, then I’m the one playing the role of the parents, then she should have my name…Why have the name [of a father] that’s not there for her? At the time, I wasn’t getting no child support, no visits from her. I was like…’Why should I give [him] that title?’

Danielle, a white mom in her mid-20s with 2 children (ages 5 & 9), also punished her second baby’s father, who’d deserted her during the pregnancy, by denying him the privilege of giving the baby his last name. ‘After I’d had her, I called his work…to let him know that he had a baby girl. So early Monday morning my phone rang and it was him. He was like, ‘Can I come and see her? What’s her name?’ He wanted to know why I didn’t give her his last name, and I said, ‘Well, you wasn’t around. You’re lucky you’re on the birth certificate!’

Men clearly read the failure of the mother to give the child their name as a signal that they have failed her during pregnancy. Sometimes, however, the meaning goes deeper. One 19-year-old black mom named Tyhera, with a 3-year-old daughter, tells of her boyfriend’s heartbreak and shame when his first baby’s mother gave the child her own last name, thus signaling that she’d give him no role in the child’s life. ‘The first one, he didn’t even get a chance to take care of her. The girl had another boyfriend, so the boyfriend took on that responsibility for the child. The little girl has the mom’s last name…she didn’t even name her after the real father. She didn’t give her his last name.’

Mahkiya Washington refused to give Ebony Mike’s last name because he denied the child was his throughout most of the pregnancy. After she was born, Mike’s rejections turned to enthusiasm. ‘He was happy, and it was [his] child then, and he said, ‘Put my name on the birth certificate!’ But his new attitude was too little, too late. ‘I was like, ‘No, her last name is mine’s!’’ Mahkiya knows full well that her refusal to give her child Mike’s last name is a public slap in the face.”

“While mothers’ own mothers may mourn what might’ve been, they know the odds that their child would jump the class divide were never good, baby or no baby. Thus, the sense of loss an early pregnancy brings is, in my cases, purely hypothetical. Mahkiya’s story offers a powerful example of these tensions in a would-be grandmother or great-grandmother’s response. Her kin may’ve hoped the young honor student would succeed in her bed for a middle-class life, and they do mourn the loss of this dream. Yet they rapidly recover from this disappointment. When Mahkiya finds herself pregnant, they staunchly support her decision to have the baby. In fact, her grandmother advises her not to end the pregnancy, cautioning that Mahkiya–at 18–may never have another chance.

Denise recounts a similar story. Unlike Mahkiya, she chose to end her first pregnancy, conceived at age 15, in the wake of a boyfriend’s desertion. She tells us her kin are still scandalized by that decision. When, at 16, Denise informs her mother, aunt, and grandma that she’s pregnant once again, they successfully pressure her to ‘go through with it.’ Denise then investigates another way out of her situation–adoption–but they firmly reject this option as well, characterizing it as ‘giving the baby away’ and assuring her that they, her family, will help her get through this.”

“Couples who remain together usually manage to avoid child support, unless she claims welfare and is thus forced to participate so the state can reimburse itself for her benefits. But if the couple breaks up, the child support system will appropriate a considerable portion of the father’s income. If he doesn’t pay, the police will visit him on his job and harass him in full view of his employer and coworkers. Then his driver’s and other professional licenses can be revoked, and he may be imprisoned for the debt on a contempt of court charge or fined. And if he flees across the state line to avoid paying support, he can be jailed on a felony charge. More important, the mother will retain almost complete control over the child, regardless of whether he pays child support or not. Meanwhile, she can, on a whim, block his access to his child. Even worse, from his POV, she can introduce another man into the child’s life, one who may take the father’s place.

Young men are aware that once they’re out of the mother’s life, they may find themselves out of their children’s lives as well, even though they might be required to bear the burden of an 18-year financial commitment. Though we didn’t interview fathers for this study, this scenario surely runs through a young man’s head when he learns of the pregnancy. Ironically then, while pregnancy may ignite his fear that fatherhood means the end of his life as he’s known it, his girlfriend sees it at the point at which her life has just begun.”

“Despite their best intentions, few of these fragile relationships survive for long. A large national survey shows that when poor unmarried women give birth, 80% are still romantically involved with their child’s father, and 40% are even living together, either with kin or out on their own. Thus, women labeled ‘single mothers’ in government stats are rarely truly so at the moment of birth. When asked about their long-term prospects, almost all of both the mothers and the fathers predict that they’ll stay together and eventually marry. However, in the weeks and months after the mother leaves the maternity ward, these bright outlooks quickly become clouded, and surveys show that few of these couples stay together long enough to watch their children enter preschool. One year after birth, half will have split, and by the time the child turns 3, fully ⅔ will have done so.”

“Conflicts over money don’t usually erupt simply because the man cannot find a job or because he doesn’t earn as much as someone with better skills or more education. Money usually becomes an issue because he seems unwilling to keep at a job for any length of time, usually because of issues related to respect. Some of the jobs he can get don’t pay enough to give him the self-respect he feels he needs, and others require him to get along with unpleasant customers and coworkers, and to maintain a submissive attitude toward the boss. 35-year-old Neil, a black mom of 3 children aged 15, 12, and 2, says her relationship with her younger child’s father faltered for this reason. ‘Whenever he got a little decent job, something negative would happen, you know? And next thing I knew it, he would come home [saying], ‘I don’t have a job no more’ because of something somebody said or something somebody else did.

Other mothers say that their boyfriend’s inability to ‘stay working’ can be attributed to sheer laziness. Mariah, an 18-year-old Puerto Rican mother of a 4-month-old, recalls, ‘I used to tell him, ‘Get a job! Get a job! Get a job!’ He always said, ‘Oh, I don’t work no 9–5.’’ 20-year-old Tasheika, a black mother of 3 young children, gripes, ‘He wants to be in the fast life and do things. He don’t want to have a steady job or nothing. I said to him, ‘That’s what a family is–you have to bring a paycheck home!’”

“Women usually outnumber men [in these neighborhoods], especially in the black neighborhoods. This means that a young father who’s struggling to become a family man has ready access to scores of willing sexual partners who won’t impose substantial burdens, at least at the start of a new romance.”

“The transition to parenthood means that the demands on young men dramatically increase just as the rewards of the relationship are radically reduced.”

Marriage

“70% of new unmarried mothers believe the chances are good to certain that they’ll marry their child’s father, at least at the magic moment of birth. However, current stats suggest that their chances of realizing their dreams are slim. Fewer than 1 in 6 nonmarital births will eventually lead to a marriage between the parents, though 70% of moms who give birth outside of marriage will marry someone one day.”

“Though virtually every mom we spoke with said she thought a woman should wait to marry until her schooling is complete and she’s established a career–somewhere between 25–40–many believe that the ideal time for childbearing is between the late teens and mid-20s.”

“Poor women today almost universally reject the idea that marriage means financial reliance on a male breadwinner. Furthermore, it’s vitally important that both they and their male partners be economically set prior to marriage. Champagne, a 17-year-old black mother of a 6-month-old, explains that she’ll get married ‘after everything is situated the way I want it to be situated, then I’ll be ready to get married. After I have a house and a car and everything, and I’m financially stable, got a job, and everything and can pay [for the wedding].’ Note Champagne’s use of the word ‘I,’ not ‘we.’ Low-income women are waging a war of the sexes in the domestic sphere, and they believe that their own earnings and assets are what buys them power. Equally important, these material things provide insurance against a marriage gone bad. Most are strongly opposed to divorce and see marriage as risky and the hazard of divorce high.

Women reason that if they have a reliable income and hold title, or partial title, to assets such as a house and a car, they can control their mate’s behavior with the threat–spoken or not–that they’ll end the marriage and remove the children if their husband cheats, beats them, fails to stay working, or tries to make all the decisions.”

“Though women like Deena seem to genuinely aspire to marriage, they fear marriage will alter the balance of power they’ve achieved in the relationship so far and activate more traditional sex roles their male partners tend to hold.”

“The harshest condemnation is reserved for those who marry because of pregnancy. Such marriages, they believe, are almost certain to end in divorce, and thus benefit neither the couple nor the child.”

Conclusion

“Many Americans believe that though the poor don’t have much in the way of economic resources, they compensate by forming unusually rich social and emotional ties. But in the neighborhoods we studied, nothing could’ve been further from the truth. Indeed, many mothers tell us they cannot name one person they would consider a friend, and the turmoil of adolescence often breeds a sense of alienation from family as well. Thus, mothers often speak poignantly about the strong sense of relational poverty they felt in the period before childbearing and believe they’ve forged those missing attachments through procreation, a self-made community of care. Brielle, a 32-yearold black mom of 4 children aged 3–11, says, ‘A lot of people…say [young girls have babies for money from welfare. It’s not for that…It’s not even to keep the guy. It’s just to have somebody to take care of, or somebody to love or whatever.’ 19-year-old Keisha, a black mom of a 1-year-old, paints the following picture of her bleak social landscape: ‘I don’t have nobody that I can talk to. I don’t have no friends, only got my baby. I can’t even talk to my mom. I don’t have nobody but my child.’”

“The one question we asked that proved most revealing [was]: ‘What would your life be like without children?’ We assumed this question would prompt stories of regret over opportunities lost and ambitions foiled, and some did indeed say what we’d expected to hear. But there were startlingly few ‘if only’ tales of how ‘coming up pregnant’ wrecked dreams of education, career, marriage, or material success. Instead, moms repeatedly offered refrains like these: ‘I’d be dead or in jail,’ ‘My child saved me,’ I’d be in the streets,’ ‘I wouldn’t care about anything,’ and ‘It’s only because of my children that I’m where I am today.’ For all but a few, becoming a mom was a profound turning point that ‘saved’ or ‘rescued’ them from a life either leading nowhere or going very wrong. Rather than derailing their lives, they believe that their children were what finally set them on the right track.”

“When people may have sex, live together, and even have children outside of marriage, and when unmarried women are no longer treated like social pariahs, marriage loses much of its day-to-day significance. But at the same time, the culture can afford to make marriage more special, rarefied, and significant in its meaning. Therefore, we argue that while the practical significance of marriage has declined, its symbolic significance has grown.

Conservative social commentators often charge that the poor hold to a deviant set of subcultural values that denigrate marriage, but these claims miss the point entirely. The truth is that the poor have embraced a set of surprisingly mainstream norms about marriage and the circumstances in which it should occur.”

“We argue that the growing divide in material circumstances of the poor and the affluent has led these groups to make radically different family adaptations to the new cultural norm about marriage. Consider first how most members of the middle class have adjusted to the new standard. They’re waiting much longer to marry–often entering into lower-commitment, ‘trial marriages’ first in order to be ‘sure’ — and they frequently divorce when their relationships fall short of the high expectations they hold. Meanwhile, the poor have been delaying marriage and divorcing more too, but they’ve also been marrying less overall. We believe that the primary reason for the rather striking class difference in marriage rates that has emerged since the 50s and 60s is quite simple: though the poor and the middle class now have a similarly high standard for marriage, the poor are far less likely to reach their ‘white picket fence dream.’”

“In a 2007 survey, poorly educated women were much more likely than the more highly educated to agree that motherhood is one of life’s most fulfilling roles.

The poor view childlessness as one of the greatest tragedies in life. Surveys show that the differences between the social classes are striking: female high school dropouts are more than 5x as likely and male high school dropouts more than 4x as likely as their college-educated counterparts to say they think childless people live empty lives. This stat even takes into account other distinguishing differences such as their race and age, and their parental and marital status. For most women living in impoverished, inner-city communities, remaining childless is inconceivable.”

“The public often assumes that early childbearing is the main reason why so many girls from poor inner-city areas fail to complete high school, go on to college, gain valuable work skills, or earn decent wages, but there’s virtually no evidence to support this idea. Ironically, however, any childbearing at all, and especially early childbearing, has huge opportunity costs for middle-class women. Disadvantaged girls who bear children have about the same long-term earnings trajectories as similarly disadvantaged youth who wait until their mid to late 20s to have a child. Nor do they seem to suffer significantly in other domains. Current research suggests that the initial disadvantage is what drives both the early childbearing and the other negative outcomes that one observes over time. In other words, early childbearing is highly selective of girls whose other characteristics–family background, cognitive ability, school performance, mental health status, and so on–have already diminished their life chances so much that an early birth does little to reduce them much further.”

“Over the last half-century, new opportunities to gain esteem and validation have opened for Amer. women. But these new alternatives–the rewarding careers and professional identities–aren’t equally available. While middle-class women are now reaching new heights of self-actualization, poor women are relegated to unstable, poorly paid, often mind-stultifying jobs with little room for advancement. Thus, for the poor, childbearing often rises to the top of the list of potential meaning-making activities from mere lack of competition.

But more than the lack of viable alternatives drives the desire to make meaning through children, often at such a young age. The daily stresses of an impoverished adolescence lived out in the environs of E. Camden or W. Kensington breed a deep need for something positive to ‘look to.’ The strong sense of anomie, the loneliness, rootless-ness, the lack of direction, the sense that one’s life has little meaning or has spun out of control–the very feelings that Jen Burke and Deena Valles describe in the period preceding pregnancy–create a profound drive to make life more meaningful.”

“While middle-class couples jealously guard their romantic relationships against the stress of childbearing–now waiting several years after marriage to have children, poor women seem to welcome the challenge that pregnancy presents. For them, a romantic relationship shouldn’t be protected but tested. Better to gauge a man’s worth early on than waste years investing in a lost cause.”

“Amer. children suffer from more family disruption than children anywhere else in the industrialized world. Though some European countries have similarly high rates of non-marital childbearing, unmarried European parents usually co-habit and tend to stay together for decades, whereas their US counterparts typically break up within a couple of years. US divorce rates among couples with children, while lower than for couples without, are also much higher than those of other W. industrialized countries. The fragility of both marriage and cohabitation mean that by age 15, only half of Amer. children live with both biological parents, whereas roughly 2/3 of Swedish, Austrian, German, and French children do so, as do nearly 90% in Spain and Italy. These sharp differences in the rate of family disruption are undeniably part of the reason that the US has the highest child poverty rate of any W. industrialized country.”

“Remarriage, the typical middle-class response to divorce, solves nothing for the typical child, as those with a stepfather typically achieve less and suffer more than those living with a single mother.”

“It’s well-established that by the time men reach their late 20s, they tend to ‘age out’ of crime and other delinquent behaviors. If we could find ways to convince poor men to postpone fatherhood until their late 20s, their behavior will likely prove less toxic to family life.

Of course, convincing men to wait means getting their female partners to wait as well, and, as noted above, waiting would probably improve their children’s lives too. Well-crafted social programs aimed specifically at reducing pregnancy among at-risk teens show promise. Several have been experimentally evaluated, and the results show that a well-organized program that engages poor teens in meaningful after-school activities over a significant period of time can decrease the teen pregnancy rate substantially. These programs range in cost from $1k-$4k per teen per year, but since experts estimate that the typical non-marital birth costs taxpayers roughly $3,750 annually over 18 years, these programs might eventually save, not cost, money. Research also shows that programs which engage these at-risk youth in service learning are especially effective, though the experts aren’t sure why. Dominique Watkins would probably quickly explain that having the opportunity to give of oneself, and the chance to feel useful to others, is, in many ways, what having children young is all about. Social programs that feed this need are on the right track.”

“One way or another, the wider culture has arrived at these high standards for marriage, and they’re unlikely to change now. Amer. society cannot now hold out one set of values for the middle class and expect the poor to abide by another lower standard. Conservatives are acting on the premise that not being married is what makes so many women and children poor. But poor women insist that their poverty is part of what makes marriage so difficult to sustain.”

“The government is already experimenting with asset-creation strategies on a modest scale, matching the savings of the poor with public dollars and limiting expenditures to down-payments on homes or investments in education. However, policymakers must keep in mind that to acquire assets, one must have surplus income–something neither welfare nor low-wage employment typically provides.”

“Putting the economy back into the policy equation is probably even more crucial for early-childbearing than for marriage. As long as they have so few other ways to establish a sense of self-worth and meaning, early childbearing among young women in precarious economic conditions is likely to continue. If they believe they have a reason to wait, more may take steps to prevent early pregnancy. During the late 90s, when America saw several years of unprecedented economic growth and very low unemployment, many of those on the bottom were swept up into the economic mainstream. Most people who wanted a job could suddenly get one, the tight job market moved wages for unskilled workers sharply upward, and for the first time in modern memory, the rate of nonmarital childbearing stopped increasing–it even declined somewhat.”