Time for Churches to Devote Attention to Family

From The Atlantic by Olga Khazan:

First comes love, then comes marriage, then comes … actually reverse that. First comes the baby, then, we’ll see.

For people who don’t have a college degree, having a child in wedlock has become the exception, not the rule. According to a new analysis presented at the Population Association of America, among parents aged 26 to 31 who didn’t graduate from college, 74 percent of the mothers and 70 percent of the fathers had at least one child outside of marriage. Even among mothers who had high school degrees or some college but no B.A., the majority of births occur among moms who are either single or cohabiting.

For the study, researchers examined the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth, which interviewed 9,000 young people born between 1981 and 1998 annually from 1997 to 2011. They found that the more education a mother has, the less likely she is to have a baby out of wedlock:

Of mothers with no high school diploma, 87 percent had at least one baby while unmarried….

There are several things going on here:

First, the cornerstone theory of marriage no longer applies. …

Second, marriage is increasingly something only educated people do. …

Women without college degrees see a dearth of husband options around them. …

It’s harder to plan when you’re poor.  …

Having a baby can be a marker of adulthood.