The paradox of the growing rate of single parenthood is that teenage pregnancy and birth rates have plummeted since the 1990s. (The comparable figure for those with a college degree was just 12 percent.) In 2010, Sawhill notes, 58 percent of first births to those with high school diplomas or some college were out of wedlock. The stereotypical single mother used to be a high school dropout. Meantime, single parenthood is invading the ranks of the middle class, often involving children with multiple partners. The average woman today has her first baby before she is married. The prevalence of single parenting is largely a function of the never-married. This scenario sounds creepy, with its undertones of Big Brother and eugenics framed this way, it would be neither a realistic nor desirable development.īut this thought experiment, provoked by a new book by Brookings Institution scholar Isabel Sawhill, illuminates two important societal and technological realities.įirst, as Sawhill describes in “Generation Unbound: Drifting into Sex and Parenthood Without Marriage,” single parenthood is becoming the unhealthy “new normal.” Once, single parenthood was the consequence of divorce or the province of the poorest and least educated. WASHINGTON - Imagine that all women in the Unites States, upon becoming sexually active, were automatically fitted with an intrauterine device or other form of long-acting birth control.
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