The Homa Files

According to the WSJ, unmarried teenage pregnancies are declining … but 20-somethings who are delaying marriage aren’t delaying having children.

Say, what?

Here are some factoids from the WSJ article …

Today’s typical unmarried mother is a high-school graduate in her early 20s

• About 2/3s of American women have had their first child by the time they turn 30, usually outside of marriage.
• 41% of all America’s births are out-of-wedlock.
• 60% of those births are to women in their 20s,; 20% are to teens
• 58% of first births among working and lower middle classes in the U.S. are now to unmarried women.
• Among college grads , only 12% of first births are outside marriage.
• For high-school dropouts,  83% of first births are outside marriage.
• Many unmarried mothers in their 20s are living with their baby’s father when they give birth.
• But about two-fifths of those couples break up before their child’s fifth birthday; that’s three times the rate for married couples of their age.
• Young unmarried mothers often go on to have another child (or children) with another partner (or partners),
• Children born to stable, married parents are more likely to graduate from high school and from college
• 1/3 of all unmarried young adults say they would be at least a little happy if they did find themselves pregnant.

Draw your own conclusions

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This entry was posted on March 18, 2013 at 7:35 am and is filed under Birth rates, Marriage - families. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.