physorg | In the past five
decades, the meaning of single motherhood has changed dramatically,
McLanahan and Jencks write. Single mothers today are far less likely
than their predecessors to have ever been married. Now, single
motherhood usually occurs earlier in a child's life, or even at the very
beginning. It is not uncommon for women to be single when their first
child is born. Also, the high rate of partner turnover during a mother's
peak fertility years means that children now experience multiple men
entering and exiting 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," said 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."
Another change is that unmarried motherhood has spread fastest among
mothers who have not completed college. For blacks, the number of
children living with a mother who lacks a high school diploma has
increased from 56 percent in 1980 to 66 percent in 2010. For whites, the
percentage of children whose mothers lack a high school degree has remained essentially unchanged, hovering at around 18 percent between 1980 and 2010.
The official poverty rate in 2013 among all families with children
was 40 percent if the family was headed by an unmarried mother and only 8
percent if the family was headed by a married couple. Among blacks, the
rates were 46 percent in single-mother families and 12 percent in
married-parent families. Among Hispanics, the figures were 47 percent
and 18 percent, and among whites the rates were 32 percent and 4
percent, respectively.
