Chuck Bednar for redOrbit.com – Your Universe Online
A new report co-authored by experts from Princeton and Harvard Universities to mark the 50th anniversary of the controversial “Moynihan Report” is asking the question: was the sociologist and future New York senator right in his assessment of the children of unmarried mothers?
In his 1965 study, Daniel Patrick Moynihan argued that growing up in homes which did not have a male breadwinner present led to children winding up in a life of poverty, joblessness and crime – especially among African Americans. The study was widely denounced at the time, but five decades later, the researchers decided to re-examine the trends that it predicted would occur.
Writing in the journal EducationNext, authors Sara McLanahan of Princeton and Christopher Jencks of Harvard reported that the percentage of children raised by unmarried mothers has more than doubled amongst both blacks and whites since 1965, and over half of all American children will live in fatherless homes at some point before their 18th birthday.
The percentage of children under age 18 living with an unmarried mother has increased substantially since the 1960s, with the largest increase seen among blacks. (Credit: EducationNext)
Over the past 50 years, the percentage of children raised by unmarried mothers has risen from 25 to 50 percent among blacks and 7 to 19 percent among whites, McLanahan and Jencks wrote. They added that the absence of a biological father increases the likelihood that a child of any race will exhibit antisocial behaviors like aggression, rule-breaking and delinquency, and that as a result, those youngsters are 50 percent less likely to finish high school or attend college.
The ratio of single-mother families in terms of race has changed little over the years, the authors noted. In 1970, 31 percent of single-mother families were black, 68 percent were white and the remaining one percent were “other race.” In 2013, 30 percent of single-mother families were black, while 62 percent white and 8 percent “other race,” based on the findings of the Princeton-led Fragile Families and Child Wellbeing study.
One thing that has changed over the years, according to McLanahan and Jencks, is the meaning of single motherhood. Modern single mothers are far less likely than their predecessors to have ever been married, they wrote, and single motherhood is far more likely to occur earlier in a child’s life than in the past. Furthermore, the offspring of modern single mothers are far more likely than ever before to have multiple male father-figures enter and exit their lives.
“Both the departure of a father and the arrival of a mother’s new partner disrupt family routines and are stressful for most children, regardless of whether the father was married to the mother or just living with her,” explained McLanahan, director of the Bendheim-Thoman Center for Research on Child Wellbeing at Princeton’s Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs. “Likewise, this shift to never-married motherhood has probably weakened the economic and emotional ties between children and their absent fathers.”
An increasing number of single mothers have not completed their high-school or college education as well, the researchers report. Among whiles, the percentage of single mothers lacking a high-school diploma has remained fairly constant (around 18 percent from 1980 through 2010), but among African Americans, it has increased from 56 percent in 1980 to 66 percent just 30 years later.
Poverty rates were much lower in two-partner families than in those headed by an unmarried mother, according to McLanahan and Jencks. In 2013, the poverty rate among families with children was 40 percent in families headed by an unmarried mother, but only 8 percent in those headed by a married couple. Similar rates were reported among blacks (46 percent vs. 12 percent), Hispanics (47 percent vs. 18 percent) and whiles (32 percent vs. 4 percent).
The percentage of births to unmarried mothers is twice as high for blacks as for whites, and across all groups the rate has increased over the last 50 years. (Credit: EducationNext)
“The fact that single motherhood is increasing faster among women with less than a college degree means that children growing up with a single mother are likely to be doubly disadvantaged,” said McLanahan. “They spend less time and receive less money from their biological fathers than children who live with their fathers.”
“At the same time, the mother – who is now the primary breadwinner – has lower earnings than the typical mother in a married-parent family,” she added, noting that changing these trends would require helping less-educated women invest their time time in education and career-related endeavors, to encourage the use of more reliable contraceptive methods, and to find a way to improve the economic prospects of the fathers of these children.
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