A new study from Johns Hopkins University has found that 57 percent of children born to “millennial” women aged 26 to 31 are now being born out of wedlock.
CNSNews.com is reporting that the study, entitled “Changing Fertility Regimes and the Transition to Adulthood”, found that a majority of children born to millennial-aged women are now being born out of wedlock, with 63 percent being born to women who lack a college education.
The report found that the only group in this age bracket that follows the more traditional pattern of having children within marriage are college graduates, 90 percent of whom have their children inside marriage.
As a result, “It is now unusual for non-college graduates who have children in their teens and twenties to have all of them within marriage,” the study’s authors said.
“Of the 57 percent of births outside of marriage, 26 percent were to cohabiting mothers and 31 percent were to women who were not in stable relationships,” CNS reports. “Among non-college grads, 29 percent of the 63 percent of births outside of marriage were to cohabiting mothers and 34 percent to unattached mothers.”
The study also found that millennials are delaying marriage into their late twenties and early thirties.
“The lofty place that marriage once held among the markers of adulthood is in serious question among early adults,” the study says.
Knot Yet, a similar study about the trend among the young to delay or even forgo marriage, also found that most women without a college degree tend to have children in their early twenties but without the benefit of marriage.
“A majority of first children born to parents under thirty are born outside of marriage and exposed to the economic, social, and familial fallout associated with a nonmarital birth,” the report states.
Why do poorer couples and those without college degrees tend to have children earlier and outside marriage? It could be due to the fact that less-educated women “do not have access to the kinds of jobs that would propel them into a comfortable middle-class lifestyle,” Knot Yet speculates.
As a result, when marriage and raising kids after a career no longer seem attainable, they opt for cohabitation and motherhood for meaning and satisfaction.
“They end up setting a lower bar for deciding on the father of their child than for choosing a husband.”
This is in spite of the fact that according to the Hopkins study, and many other studies, cohabitation is the most unstable environment for raising children, especially among young parents.
“We know that early non-marital childbearing is associated with union dissolution because of the high break-up rates among unmarried parents in the first several years after a birth,” the Hopkins report states.
This can lead to more complicated family situations where the child’s father lives outside the home, thus forcing the child into a relationship that involves visitation and step siblings. Studies have found that this kind of paternal relationship tends to result in a multitude of emotional and behavioral problems in children compared to those who grow up in an intact family with a biological mother and father present.
In spite of the ready availability of information about the detrimental effects of childbirth outside marriage on both women and children, the current percentage of out-of-wedlock births in the U.S. has increased 46 percent since 1970 when the rate of non-marital births was only 11 percent.
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