Up and Coming Weekly is a weekly publication in Fayetteville, NC and Fort Bragg, NC area offering local news, views, arts, entertainment and community event and business information.
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THIS WEEK WITH MARGARET In the News THIS WEEK WITH MARGARET by MARGARET DICKSON When I was in about the 7th grade, a young woman from our small Haymount neighborhood vanished. She had been a sophomore in college, but suddenly she was no longer in school and her whereabouts were unknown, at least to me. I was both deeply curious and clueless. I also understood that the adults in my life, including my own parents, were inexplicably reluctant to discuss her mysterious disappearance even when I asked directly. Life rolled on, of course, and our neighbor eventually re-surfaced. She completed college, moved to another city in North Carolina, married and had a family. I still receive a lovely Christmas card from her every year, always with a photograph of her and her husband surrounded by an ever-growing fl eet of beautiful grandchildren. when they have children, in contrast to 43 percent of women who have a high-school diploma or less. Statistics, if they are accurate, give us a snapshot of what exists at a given moment in time, in this case, in 2009 in the United States of America, but they may or may not indicate what is coming in the future. The fact that births outside marriage are rising and have passed the halfway mark among young American women does, however, point to where we are heading in the marriage and family department. The questions then become, what all this means and whether it matters. Both are wide open for debate. More than half the children born today to American women younger than 30 are born to unmarried mothers. It was not until years after her disappearance that I came to understand that this young woman, who had been my neighbor every day of my life up to that point, had been sent away to who-knows-where to give birth to a baby out of wedlock. She was the fi rst person I thought of earlier this month when I read a news story from the New York Times news service which begins, "It used to be called illegitimacy. Now it is the new normal … Once largely limited to poor women and minorities, motherhood without marriage has settled deeply into middle America." The reporters, Jason Deparle and Sabrina Tavernise, mean that literally. In the span of two generations, our nation has moved from shaming women who have children outside of marriage and erasing those children through adoption and other means to the statistical reality that more than half the children born today to American women younger than 30 are born to unmarried mothers. Let that sink in a moment — more than half, 53 percent. The big picture, of course, is more complicated and more troubling. While 2009 government data analyzed by the research group Child Trends does confi rm this growing trend among young women, it is not the case for all women. When we look at mothers of all ages, including those over 30, most are married when they give birth, a full 59 percent. But there are signifi cant demographic divides that raise concerns. The racial differences referenced by the Times reporters remain, with 73 percent of African-American children born outside marriage, 53 percent of Latino children, and 29 percent of Caucasion children. Even more striking is the educational divide. About 92 percent of college-educated women are married Is this fact of birth in America contributing to the growing division between the "haves" and the "have nots?" What are the implications for the growing numbers of children born to unmarried, less-educated mothers compared to those born to more-educated married mothers? Almost certainly, that means the fi rst group will grow up with less stability and fewer fi nancial resources than the second group. Does coupling that with diminishing educational funding and other safety nets from both state and federal governments mean the social, educational and fi nancial gaps will grow wider still? The only certainty in life, of course, is change, and the rules of society are always evolving in everything from fashion to language to the personal relationships we fi nd acceptable. We do not expect things to remain as they were when we were young, and they do not. The challenge is always to keep that change moving in a positive direction. What happened to my neighbor and millions of women before and after her was cruel beyond measure. She survived, though, and judging from the family photographs I receive, has thrived even though there is almost surely a broken place in her heart for the child she birthed but never had the opportunity to know. Social scientists, politicians, and many ordinary folks wonder and debate why this change has come about. Was it the Baby Boomer-driven sexual revolution of the 1960s, the women's-rights movement, the expectation of government handouts or a complex mix of those and other factors? Whatever its causes, the fact that more and more children are being born to unmarried women whose educational levels will likely limit their futures cannot be good news. MARGARET DICKSON, Contributing Writer, Up & Coming Weekly, COM- MENTS? Editor@upandcomingweekly.com. VISIT US AT: www.upandcomingweekly.com WWW.UPANDCOMINGWEEKLY.COM FEB. 29 - MARCH 6, 2012, 2012 UCW 5