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A front-page New York Times article put an exclamation point on a decades-long trend when it reported that more than half of births to mothers under age 30 now occur out of wedlock.
We are casting aside the institution of marriage and with it the notion that children should be raised in stable two-parent families. This is a social catastrophe.
The benchmark for discussions of illegitimacy is always the controversial 1965 report on the perilous state of the black family.
http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,2107496,00.html
The rest is behind a paywall, unfortunately as one has to be a subscriber with Time to read the entire piece
Here is an excerpt from the NYT piece:
Almost all of the rise in nonmarital births has occurred among couples living together. While in some countries such relationships endure at rates that resemble marriages, in the United States they are more than twice as likely to dissolve than marriages. In a summary of research, Pamela Smock and Fiona Rose Greenland, both of the University of Michigan, reported that two-thirds of couples living together split up by the time their child turned 10.
In Lorain as elsewhere, explanations for marital decline start with home economics: men are worth less than they used to be. Among men with some college but no degrees, earnings have fallen 8 percent in the past 30 years, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, while the earnings of their female counterparts have risen by 8 percent.
“Women used to rely on men, but we don’t need to anymore,” said Teresa Fragoso, 25, a single mother in Lorain. “We support ourselves. We support our kids.”
Reviewing the academic literature, Susan L. Brown of Bowling Green State University recently found that children born to married couples, on average, “experience better education, social, cognitive and behavioral outcomes.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/18/u...cur-outside-marriage.html?_r=1&pagewanted=all
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