A clarion call went out decades ago when women were discarded by divorce without the ability to support themselves. Being a good mother and a housewife rarely prepared them for being alone with their own financial responsibilities.
Now women know the delusion of being ONLY a mother and a homemaker to their husband as a mirage. It is an idea little girls have when they are playing with dolls, but, by the age of 12 to 13 they clearly get the message the world is about work and if lucky a real career.
Today, the single parent be it men or women, is the norm. The real worries are still teen pregnancy, pay inequity for women and substandard pay for work in the USA. Marriage isn't a priority anymore with men or women. I think that is classic of an impoverished society.
By Rob Stein and Donna St. George
Washington Post Staff Writers
Thursday, May 14, 2009
Katrina Stanfield, 25, (click here) is raising her 3-year-old daughter in Middletown, Md., without a husband because she and her boyfriend decided that marriage would not work for them.
Heidy Gonzalez, 21, is living with her two children and their father in Mount Rainier, but tying the knot is not a priority for them now.
Emily Smatchetti, 38, is a single mother of a toddler in Miami because she had not found the right man and worried that time was running out. So she found a sperm donor.
The mothers are part of a far-reaching social trend unfolding across the United States: The number of children being born out of wedlock has risen sharply in recent years, driven primarily by women in their 20s and 30s opting to have children without getting married. Nearly four out of every 10 births are now to unmarried women....
Read it and weep. The depression and stress of low income creates too much tension for marriages to survive. Marriage is a temporary high that loses it's luster within the first few years. Two or three or four low income jobs to a marriage doesn't make it more viable.
The facts are the facts. Marriage when successful usually belongs to the Middle Class and wealthy. I don't create the facts or set the social mores for success in any aspect of the word.
Jill Filipovic
theguardian.com
...But here's the rub: (click here) stable marriages – the kind that are most likely to produce successful, socially mobile, healthy children – are disproportionately available to people who are already financially stable and well-educated. Those people are likely to marry later in life, when communication and relationship skills are well-honed, and they're less likely to experience the kind of profound economic stress that helps to end marriages in lower economic brackets.
They're also more likely to find marriageable partners and have a reason to delay childbearing until they're financially stable and emotionally ready. As Dana Goldstein details in this excellent piece, unplanned pregnancy is primarily disastrous for those who have a reason to delay. If there's little chance of college, a stable career and an upward financial trajectory, why delay childbearing? Marriage to an unsuitable partner, though, may logically be delayed or avoided all together. And when unemployed or chronically under-employed men are a financial burden on the family rather than a contributor, there's a real incentive to avoid tying the knot....
The top three reasons for USA divorces are young age, less education and less income, in that order.
In the United States, (click here) researchers estimate that 40%–50% of all first marriages, and 60% of second marriages, will end in divorce. There are some well known factors that put people at higher risk for divorce: marrying at a very early age, less education and income,... ...Barriers to leaving a marriage, such as financial worries, can keep marriages together in the short run. However, unless there is improvement in the relationship, eventually the barriers are usually not enough to keep a marriage together in the long run....
Like I said, the problems remain as teen pregnancies, pay inequity for women and substandard pay for work in the USA.
