I work with kids of all ages (and young adults) at church, and I tell them frequently -- particularly the girls -- that the surest way to ensure a life of poverty and hardship is to have a child outside of marriage. Now I've got some statistics to back that up.
Children of all races and ethnic groups who live in homes with married parents are less likely to live in poverty, new census data show.Here are some overall povery statistics from the Census Bureau.More than 95 percent of white children who lived with married parents in April 2000 had incomes above the poverty line, said the new report, which is based on Census 2000 data.
Similarly, more than 80 percent of Hispanic children, 81 percent of American Indian children and 88 percent of black and Asian children escaped poverty if they lived with married parents.
Overall, 16% of children live in poverty according to the Washington Times article, but the Census Bureau says 20.8%, including around 30% of blacks and Hispanics.
Comparing the CB numbers with the WT numbers: 12% black children with married parents are poor vs. 30% of black children without married parents; 20% of Hispanic children with married parents are poor vs. 30% of Hispanic children without married parents.
There are many other factors that contribute to poverty as well, but trying to raise children outside of marriage is certainly one of the most important.
The three best ways for someone to sabotage his life are
Don't get a High School Diploma
Get married before you are 21
Have a child out of wedlock or while you are a teen
No big mystery there, either.
"His" or "Her", although the last one is a her only.
Phelps: "His" is generally appropriate except for instances where the female gender is specifically required. I find the recent prediliction for "his or her" to be pointless and wordy; if you must use gender-neutral phrasing, use "their". It's not appropriate either, but at least it's concise!
You might want to rewrite the last sentence of this post. As is, it sounds like you're claiming that marriage contributes to poverty in the sense that being married makes one more likely to be poor.
Charles Murray and others have harped on this point. To avoid poverty and government dependency, in this country at least, is almost effortless...if you want it.
But human characteristics exist in a normal distribution. That includes hard sense and self-respect. There will always be some to whom the prospect of fifty years of State-cushioned squalor is no deterrent to a life of thoughtless self-indulgence -- and there will always be hundreds of thousands of bright young "social welfare" graduates who'll gladly collect government salaries to administer it to them.
There's all kind of interesting statistical information online that will hammer home the idea that the quickest route to poverty is to have kids too early, and out of wedlock. Our rich, single actresses have tried to glamorize the concept of being a single mom, but it doesn't work that way in real life.
At this site (http://www.census.gov/hhes/poverty/poverty02/r&dtable5.html), one can compare the percent of people living below the poverty line and see that a higher percentage of blacks and Hispanics are below the poverty line than are whites and Asians.
The "conventional wisdom" says this is due to racism, but then look at this site (http://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/nvsr/nvsr50/nvsr50_10.pdf). The tables show that the largest percentage of first children are born to 25-29 year olds for Whites, and 30-34 year olds for Asians. But for blacks, the largest category is at 15-19 years, and for Hispanics, it's at 20-24 years.
Is it a coincidence that the groups with the highest rates of poverty are also the groups at which women have children the youngest? No, and it's likely that black poverty is related to the fact that nearly 1/5th of all the black children born in 2001 were born to mothers aged 19 or younger.
These data alone don't prove that early births cause poverty, rather than the other way around, but the data do suggest that poverty and early birth rates go firmly hand-in-hand.
K: Excellent info, thanks! I've put up a new post on the topic.