Secondhand Children

It's been weeks since the last one, so on Sunday, The New York Times Magazine featured yet another cheery, upbeat article on single mothers. As with all its other promotional pieces on single motherhood over the years, the Times followed a specific formula to make this social disaster sound normal, blameless and harmless -- even brave.

These single motherhood advertisements include lots of conclusory statements to the effect that this is simply the way things are -- so get used to it, bourgeois America!

"(A)n increasing number of unmarried mothers," ... look a lot more like Fran McElhill and Nancy Clark -- they are college-educated, and they are in their 30s, 40s and 50s."

Why isn't the number of smokers treated as a fait accompli that the rest of us just have to accept? Smoking causes a lot less damage and the harm befalls the person who chooses to smoke, not innocent children. [snip]

Smoking has no causal relationship to crime, has little effect on others. Controlling for income, education and occupation, it causes about 200,000 deaths per year, mostly of people in their 70s.

Single motherhood, by contrast, directly harms children, occurs at a rate of about 1.5 million a year and has a causal relationship to criminal behavior, substance abuse, juvenile delinquency, sexual victimization and almost every other social disorder.

If a pregnant woman smokes or drinks, we blame her. But if a woman decides to have a fatherless child, we praise her as brave -- even though the outcome for the child is much worse...

[statistically worse: making the successful job many single mothers do all the more impressive. Still, valid points and an example of the selectiveness of our chattering class's political correctness - and evidently not unique to the US...]

READ MORE


Britain has produced unteachable 'uber-chavs'

Britain has produced a generation of "uber-chavs" who are unteachable and unemployable, a senior teaching official has claimed. Ralph Surman, a national executive member of the Association of Teacher and Lecturers, said a significant number of young people who were brought up by single mothers in the 1980s are now doing nothing with their lives, have no work ethic, few social skills and cause higher crime rates...

READ MORE