A state lawmaker has introduced a bill aimed at preventing an unmarried woman from coming to Utah to give birth and pursue adoption without informing the biological father of her plan, a problem highlighted in a Friday Utah Supreme Court ruling involving an unmarried Colorado father.

House Bill 308, sponsored by Rep. Christine Watkins, D-Price, would require pregnant women to give notice by mail or publication to out-of-state unmarried fathers if they plan to give birth and place infants for adoption in Utah. ...

"I am very sympathetic to fathers loving their children," said Watkins, who has two brothers and four sons. "A lot of fathers don’t want to give up on their children. I thought, ‘You know, let’s give these guys a chance.’"

Utah’s current law says that once a birth mother consents to an adoption or relinquishes her child, that decision may not be revoked. Watkins’ proposed bill changes that, too. If a biological father successfully asserts his parental rights, a birth mother would have 30 days to then revoke her consent to the adoption.

Labels: adoption, children, Fathers, single parenting, unmarried parents, Utah

VOTE

America is coming apart. For most of our nation's history, whatever the inequality in wealth between the richest and poorest citizens, we maintained a cultural equality known nowhere else in the world—for whites, anyway. "The more opulent citizens take great care not to stand aloof from the people," wrote Alexis de Tocqueville, the great chronicler of American democracy, in the 1830s. "On the contrary, they constantly keep on easy terms with the lower classes: They listen to them, they speak to them every day."

Americans love to see themselves this way. But there's a problem: It's not true anymore, and it has been progressively less true since the 1960s. ...

Over the past 50 years, that common civic culture has unraveled. We have developed a new upper class with advanced educations, often obtained at elite schools, sharing tastes and preferences that set them apart from mainstream America. At the same time, we have developed a new lower class, characterized not by poverty but by withdrawal from America's core cultural institutions.

To illustrate just how wide the gap has grown between the new upper class and the new lower class, let me start with the broader upper-middle and working classes from which they are drawn, using two fictional neighborhoods that I hereby label Belmont (after an archetypal upper-middle-class suburb near Boston) and Fishtown (after a neighborhood in Philadelphia that has been home to the white working class since the Revolution).

To be assigned to Belmont, the people in the statistical nationwide databases on which I am drawing must have at least a bachelor's degree and work as a manager, physician, attorney, engineer, architect, scientist, college professor or content producer in the media. To be assigned to Fishtown, they must have no academic degree higher than a high-school diploma. If they work, it must be in a blue-collar job, a low-skill service job such as cashier, or a low-skill white-collar job such as mail clerk or receptionist.

People who qualify for my Belmont constitute about 20% of the white population of the U.S., ages 30 to 49. People who qualify for my Fishtown constitute about 30% of the white population of the U.S., ages 30 to 49.

I specify white, meaning non-Latino white, as a way of clarifying how broad and deep the cultural divisions in the U.S. have become. Cultural inequality is not grounded in race or ethnicity. I specify ages 30 to 49—what I call prime-age adults—to make it clear that these trends are not explained by changes in the ages of marriage or retirement.

In Belmont and Fishtown, here's what happened to America's common culture between 1960 and 2010.

Marriage: In 1960, extremely high proportions of whites in both Belmont and Fishtown were married—94% in Belmont and 84% in Fishtown. In the 1970s, those percentages declined about equally in both places. Then came the great divergence. In Belmont, marriage stabilized during the mid-1980s, standing at 83% in 2010. In Fishtown, however, marriage continued to slide; as of 2010, a minority (just 48%) were married. The gap in marriage between Belmont and Fishtown grew to 35 percentage points, from just 10.

Single parenthood: Another aspect of marriage—the percentage of children born to unmarried women—showed just as great a divergence. Though politicians and media eminences are too frightened to say so, nonmarital births are problematic. On just about any measure of development you can think of, children who are born to unmarried women fare worse than the children of divorce and far worse than children raised in intact families. This unwelcome reality persists even after controlling for the income and education of the parents.

In 1960, just 2% of all white births were nonmarital. When we first started recording the education level of mothers in 1970, 6% of births to white women with no more than a high-school education—women, that is, with a Fishtown education—were out of wedlock. By 2008, 44% were nonmarital. Among the college-educated women of Belmont, less than 6% of all births were out of wedlock as of 2008, up from 1% in 1970. ...

Religiosity: Whatever your personal religious views, you need to realize that about half of American philanthropy, volunteering and associational memberships is directly church-related, and that religious Americans also account for much more nonreligious social capital than their secular neighbors. In that context, it is worrisome for the culture that the U.S. as a whole has become markedly more secular since 1960, and especially worrisome that Fishtown has become much more secular than Belmont. It runs against the prevailing narrative of secular elites versus a working class still clinging to religion, but the evidence from the General Social Survey, the most widely used database on American attitudes and values, does not leave much room for argument.

Labels: class, culture, economics, Marriage, out-of-wedlock births, religion, single parenting

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ELYRIA, Ohio — Dinner (chicken and mashed potatoes) was long over, teeth were brushed, and a rousing game of Monopoly had come to a close. It was 9 p.m., and the children nestled into bed under blankets emblazoned with superheroes.

The tranquil domestic scene plays out nightly here, not in a family home, but behind a brightly lighted storefront next to Tuffy’s auto repair, the site of a new child care center that is open 24 hours a day.

Day care is slowly becoming night care in today’s economy, as parents work ever longer days, take on second jobs and accept odd shifts to make ends meet.

“No one works Monday through Friday, 9 to 6 anymore,” said Tiffany Bickley, a cook whose 6-year-old daughter, Airalyn, recently started going to the center, ABC & Me Childcare. “No one.”

About 40 percent of the American labor force now works some form of nonstandard hours, including evenings, nights, weekends and early mornings, according to Harriet B. Presser, a professor of sociology at the University of Maryland. That share is expected to grow with the projected expansion of jobs in industries like nursing, retail and food service, which tend to require after-hours work.

At the same time, working hours are less predictable than they once were. ...

“You don’t want to put your 2-year-old at a child care center at 2 a.m.” said Gina Adams, a senior fellow at the Urban Institute. “It just doesn’t feel right.”

There are some indications now that this might be changing. The National Association of Child Care Resource and Referral Agencies said it was hearing from members that providers were offering more nontraditional hours, though it added that it did not formally track the data.

While overnight care is still relatively rare, evening hours are no longer so unusual, providers say. Donna McClintock, chief operating officer for Children’s Choice Learning Centers Inc., which runs 46 employer-sponsored child care centers across the country, said that demand for nontraditional hours had grown and that centers providing care after-hours care made up a large part of the company’s recent growth. About a fifth of the company’s centers have added nontraditional hours in the past few years, she said.

Labels: child care, children, culture, day care, economics, parenting, single parenting

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OXNARD, Calif. — Sarah Comito rolls out of bed before dawn most days and slips quietly out of her house. Before her rambunctious toddler wakes up, she heads off to work as a waitress in an upscale weight-loss resort in Malibu.

The hour-long commute is exhausting, but the 33-year-old is thankful to make the trip when she remembers where she and her husband were four years ago: living in a tent in a nearby river bottom, strung out on methamphetamine.

Now Comito fears the progress they have made since then could be lost as California cuts her from a vital child care assistance program, more than doubling the cost of her son’s day care to $600 a month. On a $10 hourly wage, she said she’d be better off quitting her job and staying home with her son while her husband works as a professional tree cutter. But if she stops working, they can’t make rent.

“The only thing I can do is attempt to prepare for the worst,” Comito said, while watching 3-year-old Matthew dart across the yard at the couple’s working-class apartment complex in Oxnard.

For years, child care assistance programs offered low-income parents such as Comito a lifeline. But state legislatures dealing with multibillion dollar budget deficits during the recession have been targeting child care subsidies as one way to help balance their state budgets.

The cuts have come at just the time many parents need that help the most because full-time, well-paying jobs are in such short supply. ...

Some parents give up jobs and turn to the welfare system if they can’t find affordable child care, but that isn’t an option for those who have already used up their entitlements, said Danielle Ewen, a past director of child care and early education for the Center for Law and Social Policy.

Labels: child care, children, economics, motherhood, poverty, single parenting, welfare, work/family policy

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How were parents portrayed on screens of various sizes this year?

Does that tell us anything about our expectations for parents out in the real world? (Disclaimer: I don't really think any of us get our role models from TV parents. Still, in the aggregate, film and TV are mirrors of what we want to see. And even without that academic spin, it makes for an interesting end of year lens to use, particularly when you line all these shows and movies up and see how god-awful most screen parents are...)

Thelma Adams has been thinking about this, and the former film critic for US Weekly compiled a year-end list for amc's filmcritic.com that she titled "Top 10 Most Memorable Movie Moms of 2011." Scanning them I found myself squirming at what passes for motherhood in Hollywood.

Labels: culture, Fathers, motherhood, parenting, single parenting

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Must parenthood make your marriage miserable? Contemporary depictions in the press and popular culture might make you think so. ...

These modern day portraits of parenthood raise vital questions: Do women and men today experience parenthood differently depending on whether they are married or unmarried? And, if they are married, is parenthood itself an obstacle to a good marriage?

In a new report "When Baby Makes Three: How Parenthood Makes Life Meaningful and How Marriage Makes Parenthood Bearable" (PDF), just published in the latest issue of the State of Our Unions, we examined nationally-representative survey data, including a new, nationally-representative study of more than 1,400 married couples (18-46), to respond to these questions.

Contrary to the celebratory pieces on voluntary single motherhood by journalists like Roiphe, we found that married parents generally do experience more happiness and less depression than parents who are unmarried. For instance, among women, 50 percent of married mothers report that they are "very happy" with life, compared to 39 percent of cohabiting mothers and 25 percent of single mothers, even after controlling for differences in education, income, and race/ethnicity. The transition to parenthood is hard, but being married helps soften the blow.

We also found that the impact of parenthood is not negative on outcomes such as marital stability or whether one perceives one's life to have meaning. In fact, married parents -- especially women -- are significantly more likely to report that their "life has an important purpose," compared to their childless peers. For instance, 57 percent of married mothers reported high levels of a sense of purpose, compared to 40 percent of childless wives.

Yet the picture is somewhat more complex than that. Readers may be familiar with recent debates among scholars and in the media about whether having children negatively impacts the quality of marriage. Much was made of Harvard professor Daniel Gilbert's book, Stumbling on Happiness, published in 2006, which concluded, based on a review of recent studies, that "marital satisfaction decreases dramatically after the birth of the first child -- and increases only when the last child has left home." In 2009, at the New York Times' Motherlode blog reporter Lisa Belkin shared a British researcher's summary of existing studies in the U.S. and Europe which found, on average, that parents have lower levels of happiness, life satisfaction, marital satisfaction, and mental well-being, compared to non-parents. Likewise, we also found that parenthood is typically associated with lower levels of marital happiness among contemporary couples.

But we also found something that surprised us. A substantial minority -- about 35 percent -- of husbands and wives do not experience parenthood as an obstacle to marital happiness. These couples seem to navigate the shoals of parenthood without succumbing to comparatively low levels of marital happiness. What is their secret? We identified ten aspects of contemporary social life and relationships -- such as marital generosity, good sex, religious faith, thrift, shared housework, and more -- that seem to boost women's and men's odds of successfully combining marriage and parenthood.

Labels: children, culture, Marriage, parenting, single parenting

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The younger the parent and the younger the child, the more likely a family is to be poor, according to a new Child Trends report, Two Generations in Poverty: Status and Trends among Parents and Children in the United States, commissioned by Ascend: The Family Economic Security Program at the Aspen Institute. As policy makers ponder the merits of alternative measures of poverty, the Child Trends report outlines the disproportionate effects of poverty on young children, young parents, and children and parents in single-mother families.

Among the report's highlights:

The younger the parent, the more likely a family is to be poor. Households headed by young parents (18-24) are more likely to be poor than households headed by older parents, regardless of marital status.
The younger the child, the more likely a family is to be poor. Families with young children (0-6) are more likely to be poor than families with older children.
Overall poverty rates mask much higher rates for some sub-groups, such as single-mother families, whose poverty rate was 40.7 percent in 2010, compared to 8.8 percent for married-couple families.

Labels: children, Marriage, out-of-wedlock births, poverty, single parenting, unmarried parents

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The Michigan Court of Appeals has released for publication its September opinion in Moon v. Michigan Reproductive and IVF Center [pdf]. In that case, Allison Moon sued a fertility clinic because it would not provide services to her as a single woman. Reversing the trial court, the Court of Appeals ruled that the clinic was subject to the state's anti-discrimination law and could not avoid litigation on the basis of a doctor's alleged right to choose his patients. ...

A place of public accommodation includes a "health facility" whose services are "available to the public." Such a facility cannot discriminate on the basis of marital status.

The defendant did not dispute that it was a public accommodation, but it did argue that the law requires a doctor-patient relationship to be consensual and that therefore the doctor could decline to treat anyone. The court ruled that the doctor can decline to treat a patient, but not on one of the grounds identified in the anti-discrimination statute. "A contrary interpretation," the court held, "would allow a doctor to follow his personal prejudices or biases and deny treatment to a patient merely because he is African-American, Jewish, or Italian."

Labels: Artificial Reproductive Technology, discrimination law, IVF, single parenting

VOTE

Two months ago, I posed the question, Who's Had the Worst Recession: Millennials, Gen-Xers, or Boomers? A Pew analysis of Census data released yesterday makes a strong case that it's the youngest generation that faced the worst of the economy -- and that's even before the recession started. ...

Pew's study this week adds an interesting wrinkle to the story. Even before the Great Recession, young families were already falling behind. The big loud statistic from the study is that household wealth for young families has fallen by 70 percent since 1984, while net worth for families with older heads-of-household is up 48 percent. As a result, the wealth gap between young and old families has quadrupled from 10X to 47X in the last 30 years.

Some of this yawning gap between old and young is demographic. The rise in single family households means that more young, poor households have one breadwinner instead of two. As more young people go to college and accumulate debt, they're putting off marriage to work and pay down college loans. Partly as a result of these changes, under-35 poverty levels nearly doubled in the last four decades (see graph to right). Meanwhile, politics came to the aid of the old. The creation of Medicare helped to cut senior poverty levels in half. Social Security is still growing faster than low-income wages.

But much of this change has nothing to do with counting breadwinners per household. Something in the economy dragged down income for new entrants. In households headed by adults younger than 35, Pew reported, the typical adjusted annual income has grown by 27% -- four times slower than for older households. ...

For much of the 20th century, unemployment rates for women and men moved in tandem. But in the Great Recession, unemployment among men surged. Although guys have made up some of the gains in the slow recovery (job growth has been most brisk among low-wage positions) the fact that women now make up a majority of college grads suggests that they will hold on to and extend the gains they made over the last few decades.

But it's terribly misleading to look at graphs like these and conclude that women are somehow winning anything. We're all losing. For a while, women were just losing less dramatically. Still, female unemployment has been over 8% for two years, and if men came out worse in the sharp downturn, women are recovering more slowly in the aftermath. The local government recession has struck at industries like teaching that are female-dominant, while men have made some gains in industries like mining.

Labels: economics, men, poverty, single parenting, women

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Ours is an unusual friendship. One of us is a gay man who has written a book in favor of gay marriage. The other is a straight man who has written a book opposing gay marriage.

One of us argues that the advent of gay marriage could help to strengthen marriage as a social institution. The other warns that accepting gay marriage is likely to weaken the institution for everyone. Not much to agree about.

But here’s an interesting thing: Both of us are married, and both of us live or work in political jurisdictions -- New York state and Washington, D.C. -- that define marriage as the union of two persons. So we recently asked ourselves a question: What does it mean for us to disagree about gay marriage, now that gay marriage is the law where we make our homes and pursue our livelihoods?

For David, the opponent of gay marriage, what seems most important as the shouting stops is conciliation. His side must confront and reject anti-gay bigotry. Is opposition to gay marriage by itself proof of bigotry? No. But is far too much of the opposition largely fueled by prejudice? Yes. Looking to the future, is it important for all of us to understand and affirm the equal dignity of homosexual people and of homosexual love? Yes.

For Jonathan, the proponent of gay marriage, what seems most important as the shouting stops is getting marriage right, for all people. Winning the legal right is important for same- sex couples, but it’s hardly the end. Over the long run, will same-sex marriage shore up marriage’s privileged social status, or diminish it? Gay Americans and their communities all have an interest in establishing that their right to marry can support and perhaps even strengthen American commitment to the institution that is now open to them.

Supporting the Gift

What has always mattered most, to David, regarding marriage law is what he calls the gift: the possibility that a child will be raised in love by both biological parents -- the two people, the man and the woman, whose sexual union brought the child into the world. In states where gay marriage is the law, can he continue to advocate and work for that gift? Might Jonathan support him? The answer to both questions is yes.

Labels: adoption, culture, David Blankenhorn, domestic partnership, donor conception, gay marriage, homosexuality, Jonathan Rauch, Marriage, religious liberty, single parenting, unmarried parents

VOTE

A few months ago, I was late. You know what I mean: My usual period day came and went without a spot, and suddenly every wave of exhaustion, every twinge of anxious nausea, became a harbinger of a very unintended pregnancy, a sign that my NuvaRing had failed me. I’m married, happily at that. And I’m a mother, happily as well. But our family feels “complete,” as demographers put it, at one child. And so my husband and I had to make a choice—or so we thought, for a very tense week before my body made the choice for me. As we lay awake at night whispering pros and cons for continuing the pregnancy, stopping only when our daughter padded in to snuggle under our covers in the predawn hours, I wondered if our mere deliberating might call into question my soundness as a mother. If I, already happily immersed in parenting, chose to terminate, wouldn’t I be unusual for doing so, maybe even stigmatized as a sort of prenatal Medea?

I was wrong. Women who are already mothers have more abortions than anyone else, and by an increasingly wide margin. When Guttmacher Institute researchers last ran the numbers in 2008 [pdf] they found that 61 percent of women who terminate a pregnancy in this country already have at least one child. That was before the recession, though—before the poverty rate rose to swallow 40.7 percent of women who head families, many of whom know they can’t afford another child.* So I asked the National Abortion Federation, a professional association of abortion providers, to run the numbers on the women visiting their clinics and calling their hotlines in the past few years. The resulting figures shocked NAF President Vicki Saporta, who called to tell me that every year since 2008, a whopping 72 percent of NAF clients looking to terminate a pregnancy were already mothers, up at least 10 percent from the years before the economy crashed.

But while the typical abortion patient is a mother, very few people seem to realize it. ...

For her part, Rachel Jones, a senior research associate at the Guttmacher Institute, thinks that public perceptions of who aborts and why are skewed mostly as a result of all the political heat around late-term abortions and adolescent abortions (minors have only 7 percent of all abortions). In other words, she argues, mothers who abort are invisible not because anyone is conspiring to keep them that way, but because so much attention is focused on other women.

But why do mothers have so many abortions in the first place? Jones co-authored a qualitative study titled "I Would Want To Give My Child, Like, Everything in the World: How Issues of Motherhood Influence Women Who Have Abortions," which found that most mothers who abort say they are doing so to protect the kids they already have. As Jones points out, that rationale is tough to demonize politically, especially when you consider that most women making this choice are contending with some combination of low income, unemployment, and a lack of health insurance, or are struggling to raise kids on their own.

Labels: abortion, culture, economics, motherhood, poverty, single parenting

VOTE

More people are getting married later and later. Last I read, the average age at marriage for men in the US was 28 and for women it was 27. (Clearly, women in their 20s dig older men.) There is an obvious and interesting implication of this that I first a sociologist talk about around 12 years ago. He noted that there exists this increasingly long period of time in human development between when people are sexually maturing (I only mean capable of having sex and making babies) and when people are settling down into marriage. It’s really pretty amazing to think about this. It has huge implications, since the average person is not settling into marriage until 15 years after when they become interested in, and capable of, having sex. ...

I’m not actually much interested in Vegas but I am interested in the Vegas mindset. The core idea, of course, is that what happens in Vegas does not touch the rest of your life. It’s a no-harm, no-foul, place with a firewall around it. You can do whatever you like in Vegas and it won’t affect the rest of your life. I have a theory about this. It has two parts.

Part 1. What happens romantically between the ages of 18 and 34 (or whenever a person settles down in marriage and family life) affects the rest of life.

Part 2. People are now more likely to believe than in the past that what happens before they settle down will not affect their prospects for life-long love and happiness.

Part 1 is really pretty easy to document. Part 2, then, is the hypothesis that matters here.

Labels: "emerging adulthood", age at first marriage, cohabitation, culture, Marriage, out-of-wedlock births, premarital sex, single parenting

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Hi all, I'm so excited to have Brad Wilcox with us today. As you've probably heard and read, the rate of American couples who live together without being married are rising dramatically -- it grew 13 percent in 2010 alone. And while it may be a simpler, more convenient arragement for many couples, that doesn't mean it's without complexity -- especially when the couples break up.

Wilcox's report deals particularly with the ramifications cohabitation can have on children. We'd love to get your thoughts and questions on this societal shift. Has it worked for you? Do you see risks?

I'm also working on an upcoming story about the potential pitfalls of cohabitation, so if you have stories you're willing to share, I'd love to hear from you: mccarthye@washpost.com.

Okay, let's get going!

Labels: children, class, cohabitation, culture, divorce, economics, Marriage, parenting, single parenting, unmarried parents

VOTE

Marriage matters, but why?

For more than 20 years, social scientists have consistently found that children do better raised by their mothers and fathers united by marriage.

For most of that time policymakers have focused on the problem of "father absence," and it is a real problem. Very few boys and girls have involved, loving, supportive fathers if the man that made them is not married to their mama.

But a new crop of research is challenging the idea that the main or only problem with the decline of marriage is the absence of fathers. An equally big or even bigger problem may be the churning romantic lives of unmarried and divorced mothers. ...

Many family scholars, consistent with the liberal leanings of the academy, are responding to the accumulating evidence that marriage matters by urging society to make cohabiting and dating relationships as stable as marriages. Good luck with that one.

Here's the bottom line: When mothers' romantic lives churn, babies' and children's lives churn too.

Mothers, marriage matters because it restrains our romantic yearnings and our romantic losses. The restless search for soul mates is not really compatible with making your child feel he or she is the center of your world, infinitely beloved.

Labels: children, cohabitation, culture, dating, family structure, Maggie Gallagher, Marriage, motherhood, out-of-wedlock births, single parenting, unmarried parents

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...It's not, in fact, in question whether we produced a permanent change; we did. There was a substantial structural decline in the percentage of families in poverty which persisted into the aughts. I could have included the percentage of female headed families in poverty, or children in poverty, and they would have shown the same trend: all of them clearly inflected downwards around welfare reform. All ticked up during the 2001 recession, but clearly settled at a level much lower than their pre-reform average. I find this hard--actually, impossible--to square with Klein's assertion that if you think the purpose of reform was to help needy families, then no, it hasn't worked.

So yesterday I discussed whether welfare reform "worked". It certainly caused a lot of people to move into work, where they were eligible for the Earned Income Tax Credit and for advancement to better positions. It caused the structural poverty rate to fall.

But few program changes are entirely win-win, and this was no exception. Even as many families have climbed out of poverty, some families have plunged deeper into it; as I understand it, mostly those headed by women with severe mental illness, drug and alcohol problems, or personality disorders. Before, if your mother was smoking crack, she could at least still collect her welfare check. Cutting off the check after five years, or cutting benefits as some states did, didn't mean she stopped smoking crack. It just meant there was less money around the house.

Those people are unambiguously worse off since welfare reform. ...

But I think that progressives ignore the possibility (indeed, what I take to be the near-certainty) that this is an inevitable tradeoff. If we provide benefits sufficiently generous to support people who are too screwed up to provide themselves with a very minimal living standard, we will also encourage people who aren't that screwed up to stay home rather than going to their tedious, low wage job. (Especially young people, who are not known for their patience or foresight). Despite a broader trend of more people having babies without first getting married, the rate of childbirth among unmarried mothers between the ages of 15-19--those whose children who are most at risk of poor life outcomes--declines noticeably post 1995. Though of course correlation is not causation, this at least suggests that welfare reform may have helped both mothers and children by encouraging young women to make better long-term choices about when to have babies.

Labels: children, culture, motherhood, out-of-wedlock births, poverty, single parenting

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New research out of Britain's Institute for Fiscal Studies found that the education level of parents has a greater effect on children's social and cognitive development than their marital status, reports the Guardian.

The researchers also pointed out that married couples tend to have a higher level of education than co-habiting, unmarried couples.

"It is true that children born to married couples are on average more cognitively and emotionally successful than children born to co-habiting couples," Ellen Greaves, research economist at the IFS, told the Guardian. "But careful analysis shows that this largely reflects the differences between the types of people who decide to get married and those who don't."

Labels: children, class, cohabitation, economics, Marriage, single parenting, United Kingdom, unmarried parents

VOTE

Q. Ethical Dilemma Involving Sperm Donation: I am a broke 26-year-old Ph.D. student. I have a female friend who's 35, single, and loaded. She's previously had bad relationships and "given up on men"—but she's desperate to be a mom. She doesn't want to go down the anonymous sperm donor route for various reasons and has asked me to father a child. The deal is that we'll live together until she is impregnated, she will sign whatever forms to say she doesn't want child support or my involvement, and I will get $15,000. She said I'm the ideal sperm donor candidate because I'm a healthy, intelligent, easygoing, single male. I've donated sperm before and also had casual sex. This deal seems to be a combination of the two, and I make money out of it in the end (and boy do I need it badly). What's your view on this—should I go ahead?

Labels: culture, donor conception, Fathers, single parenting

VOTE

The role of fathers in the modern American family is changing in important and countervailing ways. Fathers who live with their children have become more intensely involved in their lives, spending more time with them and taking part in a greater variety of activities. However, the share of fathers who are residing with their children has fallen significantly in the past half century.

In 1960, only 11% of children in the U.S. lived apart from their fathers. By 2010, that share had risen to 27%. The share of minor children living apart from their mothers increased only modestly, from 4% in 1960 to 8% in 2010.

According to a new Pew Research Center analysis of the National Survey of Family Growth (NSFG), more than one-in-four fathers with children 18 or younger now live apart from their children—with 11% living apart from some of their children and 16% living apart from all of their children.1 ...

Almost all fathers who live with their children take an active role in their day-to-day lives through activities such as sharing meals, helping with homework, and playing. Fathers who live apart from their children are much less likely to be involved in these types of activities. Many compensate by communicating with their children through email or by phone: four-in-ten nonresident dads say they are in touch with their children several times a week. At the same time, however, nearly one-third of fathers who do not live with their children say they talk or exchange email with them less than once a month. Similarly, one-in-five absent fathers say they visit their children more than once a week, but an even greater share (27%) say they have not seen their children at all in the past year.

The analysis of the NSFG was paired with a new Pew Research survey of attitudes toward fatherhood that finds a strong majority of the public saying children need a father in the home. Fully 69% say having a father in the home is essential to a child’s happiness. Only a slightly higher share (74%) says the same about having a mother in the home.

Labels: children, class, culture, economics, family structure, Fathers, Marriage, men, motherhood, out-of-wedlock births, parenting, race, single parenting

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...In fact, the fight for marriage equality works in tandem with the movement to strengthen the black family. Achieving marriage equality will actually help save the black family.

First, laws that prohibit same-sex marriage disproportionately harm black same-sex couples. According to the last Census, twice as many black same-sex couples are raising children as white same-sex couples. Black same-sex couples are also much more likely to be struggling economically. Achieving marriage equality will grant important benefits to these couples that will allow them to take care of and provide for their children and themselves.

But marriage equality helps the black community in a much broader way. Marriage equality is not just about relationship recognition. It's about family recognition, and the black community benefits from laws and policies that recognize the diversity of how families look, and demand equality for all families. ...

Likewise, marriage equality is not just about DOMA. It's not just about Prop 8. The fight for marriage equality is about fighting for equal recognition of all families. It's about combating the assumption that someone else can tell us what our families should look like. And in the black community, that assumption is dangerous, because black families are becoming increasingly nontraditional. Black families are more likely to be headed by single mothers. However, many of those mothers live with another person who helps raise the children, regardless of whether they are biologically or legally recognized as a parent. Black families are also more likely to consist of multi-generational households [pdf]. And the same policies that allow a same-sex couple to parent their children with access to all benefits they would otherwise receive grant those same benefits to aunts and uncles to raise their nieces and nephews and grandparents to raise their grandchildren. They are the same policies that allow a boyfriend to take time off work to care for his girlfriend's sick child even when there is no biological relationship. The principle that all families look different and all must be respected lies at the foundation of the struggle to strengthen the black family.

Labels: beyond marriage, children, cohabitation, culture, extended family, family structure, gay marriage, gay parenting, grandparents, Marriage, parenting, race, single parenting, unmarried parents

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One in four children in the United States is being raised by a single parent — a percentage that has been on the rise and is higher than other developed countries, according to a report released Wednesday.

Of the 27 industrialized countries studied by the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development, the U.S. had 25.8 percent of children being raised by a single parent, compared with an average of 14.9 percent across the other countries.

Ireland was second (24.3 percent), followed by New Zealand (23.7 percent). Greece, Spain, Italy and Luxemborg had among the lowest percentages of children in single-parent homes.

Experts point to a variety of factors to explain the high U.S. figure, including a cultural shift toward greater acceptance of single-parent child rearing. The U.S. also lacks policies to help support families, including childcare at work and national paid maternity leave, which are commonplace in other countries. ...

Single parents in the U.S. were more likely to be employed — 35.8 percent compared to a 21.3 percent average — but they also had higher rates of poverty, the report found. ...

The single parent phenomenon has been occurring over recent decades. The study noted the U.S. and England have higher teenage birthrates than other countries, partially contributing to the higher single-parent numbers, though the proportion of children born outside marriage was not significantly higher than the other countries.

Christina Gibson Davis, a professor at Duke University’s Sanford School of Public Policy, said changing gender roles, the rise of contraception, high incarceration rates in some communities and an acceptance of having children out of wedlock have all contributed to the growing number.

Labels: children, class, contraception, culture, economics, out-of-wedlock births, parenting, poverty, single parenting, unmarried parents, work/family policy

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