[quote=FlyerInHi]I think in Northern Europe it’s like 60% of kids born out of wedlock. The kids seem to be doing quite well.[/quote]
Not based on what I’ve heard. My whole family on my mother’s side lives in Europe, and most of my young relatives are single mothers (none of the single males are the primary parents that I know of). I have one male cousin who’s married with three kids.
The single parents are struggling, and the only reason they’re able to make it is because of the rather generous social assistance, including ~18 months of maternity leave — some paid by the govt, and some mandated to be paid by employers. They are much more liberal there, and have low/no cost daycare, housing assistance, low/no cost healthcare, etc.
In other words, taxpayers are paying for these families, instead of the parents. Not sure how well that would fly over here, and don’t see how this could possibly be construed as better than married parents taking care of their own children.
“The single-mother revolution has been an economic catastrophe for women. Poverty remains relatively rare among married couples with children; the U.S. census puts only 8.8% of them in that category, up from 6.7% since the start of the Great Recession. But more than 40% of single-mother families are poor, up from 37% before the downturn. In the bottom quintile of earnings, most households are single people, many of them elderly. But of the two-fifths of bottom-quintile households that are families, 83% are headed by single mothers. The Brookings Institution’s Isabel Sawhill calculates that virtually all the increase in child poverty in the United States since the 1970s would vanish if parents still married at 1970 rates.”
