Should We Care That More Women Are Having Children Without Having Husbands?

By Bella DePaulo, Ph.D.

Created Mar 1 2012 - 2:21am

Yes, I know all about the latest angst about single mothers, set off a few weeks ago by the article in the New York Times, "For women under 30, most births occur outside marriage." I wasn't going to go there. I have written about single parenting over and over again. In some ways, the myth that the children of single parents are doomed is one of the most exasperating to try to challenge. Too many people are just too sure it is true.
The issue is not personal to me because I'm a single mother—I'm not. It is not personal because I was raised by a single mother—I wasn't. It is personal to me as a social scientist and as a defender of singles of all stripes against insulting and untrue stereotypes.
The scientific problem with the sober and scolding claims that the children of single parents just aren't going to measure up to the achievements and well-being of the children of married parents is this:  Often, it is the studies cited in supposed support of those claims that just don't measure up. I've explained this in detail in the chapter on the children of single parents in Singled Out. There is one reader in particular who likes to find my blog posts on this topic and write a comment with a long list of studies that purportedly do show that the children of single parents are doomed. That person misses the point. When I critique a particular study on the topic, my methodological criticisms are not specific to that one study. They are commonplace across lots of studies.
I changed my mind about addressing the latest hand-wringing about the growing number of under-30 women having children without having husbands because I discovered a great essay on the topic by Katie Roiphe. She is the writer I applauded in another recent post,What's the big deal about single people? (I think I have a new favorite cultural critic.) In her piece, she points to the ways in which the supposedly objective story in the New York Times was actually quite condescending to single mothers.
She also argues that the subtle judgmentalism of the Times is

"in many ways more pernicious than the overt moralizing of conservatives on the downfall of family and marriage. It is easy to dismiss the Santorum faction for its cartoonishly old-fashioned view of extramarital sex, and this group is at least forthright about its view, whereas the subtle psychologizing put-down of the New York Times-style liberal, the slight hint of self-congratulation that they are not a single mother in Lorain, Ohio, bringing their son to the bar where they work, is more poisonous for its pretense of fairness and open-mindedness."

By following the links in "The New York Times condescends to single moms," I discovered another essay of Roiphe's, "Shaming the single mom: Do we all secretly think that single moms are crazy?"
It is a fairly lengthy essay, but even if you are not particularly interested in the topic of single mothering, I think you may appreciate the insights and the writing. One of the sections I especially liked was Roiphe's explanation of why the small stuff matters. It is an issue that I—and many other singles, whether parents or not—often confront. Why do we complain about small slights and minor injustices?
When Roiphe was pregnant, someone tried to talk her out of having her baby by suggesting that she "should wait and have a 'regular baby'." A pregnant friend of hers was told that she "should wait and have a 'real baby'." Here's Roiphe's analysis:

"Such small word choices, you might say. How could they possibly matter to any halfway healthy person? But it is in these choices, these casual remarks, these throwaway comments, these accidental bursts of honesty and flashes of discomfort that we create a cultural climate; it's in the offhand that the judgments persist and reproduce themselves. It is here that one feels the resistance, the static, the pent up, irrational, residual, pervasive conservatism that we do not generally own up to."

Roiphe also offers an incisive take-down of another prejudice that many singles face, that they are "greedy, selfish, narcissistic, or anti-social." Take a look at that part, too, and share the good feeling of knowing that more and more people are writing about single life in enlightened ways.