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Those teenage moms — 13 Comments

  1. This is such a complex issue.

    In my family for example my mother had my oldest brother when she was 18 and if you do the math conception took place before she graduated high school and she married his father, her first husband, shortly after graduating. Two more children followed and much physical abuse before divorce a few years later. Eventually she married my father and was married to him for 40 plus years until his death.

    Conversely in the current generation of my family there are three couples that have never married but have been together for 10 plus years and have multiple children together.

    So, what is better my mother in an abusive marriage or my nieces and nephew unmarried but in long term relationships?

  2. Griffin:

    It is indeed a complex issue, and anecdotal stories—such as that of your family—don’t tell us much about the larger picture.

    But I would say the following—to the question of “which is better”—the real question is “for who”? And why not go for what is best, as a goal?

    If the younger generation are really in good long-term relationships, I happen to think that the commitment of marriage would be better for the kids, as a precedent and a message. But obviously, a good relationship that is stable is a good thing; it just would be better IMHO if it were in the context of a marriage. One wonders what the objection is to marriage, and my guess is that it has to do with the adults, because the kids would probably be happy to see it happen. As for your mother, obviously it was best to have the second marriage. But the question about the first is would it have been better for her to have been a single mother back in those days, than in the abusive marriage that she got out of? I don’t know the answer, but I think either alternative was pretty difficult. I’m glad she made the break and found a good husband.

  3. Neo,

    Yep you are correct about anecdotal evidence but it can be illustrative. And believe me it is much groused about by the older generations about why won’t they just get married but they have all kinds of reasons. There is no doubt that on the whole it is better for the children (and the adults) to be married but marriage is not the be all and end all answer either.

    Of course my mother ended up in the worst of all worlds as she was in an abusive marriage and then was a single mother for several years with a deadbeat ex husband.

    So the answer to me is marriage is best but stable and committed relationships are the key factor whether that includes marriage or not.

  4. I grew up in a rural area of Iowa. Three girls in my class of 32 students (that went all the way from1st through 12th grade) became pregnant in our teens. The first one was 13 at the time and married the 16 year old father. They married and had 2 moree kids after she came back to finish HS. Another girl became pregnant at 16. She refused to name the father and was sent to livee with relatives in another state. The last one was 18 and became pregnant during our senior year. She and her boyfriend married and remain married to this day.

    This a complicated issue and it is something that has been with us since the dawn of human history.

  5. Marriage implies a willingness to publicly commit, for better or for worse to another. Society’s interest in marriage lies in the possibility of children. Otherwise, marriage is simply another form of a business contract. Children have an obvious psychological need for stability. Nothing offers a greater sense of security to a child than knowing their parents have publicly consecrated their union before the eyes of God.

    Clearly, this is why prior generations took for granted that, the most sacred of ceremonies was properly conducted in a Church. In the Lord’s house…

    What a poor substitute is the hollow secularized version.

  6. With our (human) limited skill and perception, the prevailing wisdom suggests we should follow best practices, not to determine, but to engender preferred outcomes. So, we strive, survive, love, and live.

    That said, with evolution (i.e. chaos) in mind, what is your fitness function?

  7. Stability in a cohabitation arrangement is more difficult to come by for the working class and the poor:

    Mark Mather, a demographer at the Population Reference Bureau, a Washington, D.C.-based non-profit research organization, says education is the “main determining factor of whether this is a transition to marriage or maybe a short-term union.”

    “Those with less education are much more likely to break up,” he says. “They may enter a second or third cohabiting union. There tends to be a lot more instability.”

  8. I think another factor is that home making skills are no longer valued by society. It used to be that most women realized they had to make a home for their husband AND their children, to know that if your husband was going to have a hard day, it might be good to give him his favorite meal when he got home. And children need that kind of stability too.

    If the mom is changing boyfriend regularly, kids have no foundation, nothing to hold onto as they go out into a sometimes difficult world. They never learn what to look for in a partner and they don’t really learn self control. It’s me, me, me all the way.

  9. Good comments, all of you.

    While a committed relationship, married or not, is important for children, our social welfare system encourages single motherhood, with all of its attendant problems.

  10. Yawrate Says:
    October 17th, 2017 at 8:19 pm
    Good comments, all of you.

    While a committed relationship, married or not, is important for children, our social welfare system encourages single motherhood, with all of its attendant problems.
    * * *
    For the Left, this is a feature, not a bug.
    Cf. Obama’s campaign ad about “Julia” – the bride of the all-mighty government.

  11. Everyone here is talking past the fact that young males and females simply don’t join together in procreative sexual activity as much as they once did.

    Since the 1970s females have been told by feminists that attention to the clitoris is what leads to orgasms and that the vaginal orgasm per se is in fact a myth. It doesn’t seem to matter then that stone butch lesbians seemingly contradict all this by their cult of the strap-on dildo (which never gets soft, and can be longer and thicker than any hetero male penis), which then leads to the most advanced approach of all, fistfucking combined with the use of a vibrator directly upon the clit. The Hitachi vibrator allegedly cannot be resisted and will induce orgasm in less than one minute.

    Meanwhile hetero males have shifted their primary focus of desire to the ass, to anal intercourse.

    Norman Mailer used to tout the possibility of creating a child as adding a metaphysical dimension to sexual intercourse which rendered the act profound.

    He actually attended would-be debates about all this with Germaine Greer and other hot feminists of the 1970s — debates in which he was laughed at and generally thought to have ended up looking like a retrograde fool.

    I became good friends, ten years ago or so, with a 23 year old “alt dyke” who was not even really seeking connection with other females, but with “cute emo boys” whom she fucked with her strap-on. I thought this was an interesting trend. (There’s a story about this, “Stabs At Happiness,” published at Annalemma online.)

    Becoming a parent often means becoming an adult, and most young males and females seek to remain childlike, or childish, or out-and-out children, as long as possible — or forever….

  12. Haven’t you noticed how many people in their 50s, both male and female, whether effectively neutered or still hanging on to some identity ostensibly straight or gay, instead of human offspring, children, now cling desperately to sentimental relationships with dogs or cats?

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