VOLuntarilyConservative

Sara McLanahan at Princeton University and her colleagues have found that boys who are raised by single mothers are twice as likely to end up in prison by age 32, that girls who are born outside of marriage are three times as likely to have a teenage pregnancy, and that teens born outside of marriage are about twice as likely to drop out of high school, compared with their peers who are raised in intact, married families.

Moreover, we should take cold comfort from the fact that many of these nonmarital births are, in Ms. Henriquez's words, to "women [who] may be living with a partner." It is true that most of the recent growth in nonmarital childbearing has been driven by births to cohabiting couples. But cohabiting couples are notoriously unstable, in large part because their relationships are not anchored by the legal, social and moral commitments associated with marriage. One study by Pamela Smock at the University of Michigan and Wendy Manning at Bowling Green State University found that 50% of children born to cohabiting parents saw their parents part by age 5, compared with only 15% of children born to married parents.

Read the whole Wall Street Journal article. It's rather frightening, given the rising number of unmarried mothers. I would have to run comprehensive statistics of our firm's case files to come up with an exact number, but I would guess that the percentage of children that we represent that come into the custody of the State who are from unmarried parents has to be around 75% of our entire caseload. I would be interested in if the Department of Children's Services has statistics on this.

Marriage matters, folks.

Labels: Marriage