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Growing up is hard to do

December 21, 2011 By

Growing up is hard to do: Young people are extending their school years and delaying work and marriage, according to America’s Youth Transitions to Adulthood (pdf), an analysis of Americans 14 to 24 from the 1980s to 2010 by the National Center for Education Statistics.

In 1980, 16 percent of young adults ages 22 to 24 were enrolled in college compared to 30 percent in 2010, NCES found.

Fewer teen-agers hold jobs, notes Inside School Research.

From 1980 to 1999, 30 percent or more of 16- and 17-year-olds were employed at least part-time, but that percentage has been plummeting since 2000, and by 2009, only about 15 percent of teenagers in that age group had a job.

Only 49 percent of high school dropouts held a job in the year they left school, compared to 64 percent in 1980.

Educational expectations are higher:  “Among the poorest 25 percent of young people, only 11 percent of high school seniors in 2004 said they did not expect to complete high school, compared with more than a third of the poorest students in 1972.”

 

Filed Under: Careers, College Tagged With: , , , , , ,

Closing the parenting gap

November 7, 2011 By

We’ll never narrow the achievement gap significantly unless we narrow the “good parenting gap” separating affluent and low-income families, writes Mike Petrilli on Flypaper.

(I think the gap is about parental education, not income.) But back to Petrilli.

Let’s admit it: The Broader/Bolder types are right when they say that a LOT of what influences student achievement happens outside of schools, and before kids ever set foot in Kindergarten. Where they are wrong, I believe, is in thinking that turbo-charged government programs can compensate for the real challenge: what’s happening (or not) inside the home..

Parents can increase their children’s chances of doing well in school by not having children till the papers have graduated from high school and married. (I once saw a study saying that 90 percent of children born to an unmarried, teen-age high school drop-out live in poverty compared to 9 percent of children born to married, high school graduates who waited till 20 to have their first child.) Petrilli adds: talking and singing to the baby, firm but loving discipline, limits on TV, trips to parks, museums and nature centers and “ready, baby, read.”

. . . out-of-wedlock pregnancy rates and divorce rates have reached catastrophic levels for the poor and the working class–but not for the most affluent and well-educated among us.

. . . You don’t have to be Richy Rich to nurse your baby, or sing to her, or learn how to be loving but firm. Sure, a few of these items are easier with money. (I imagine that low income families use TV as a babysitter more because they can’t afford alternative childcare.) But mostly these take commitment, discipline, and practice.

Petrilli doesn’t know how to promote marriage before babies, but he’d like to try.

Single parenting can be a rational choice in some neighborhoods, responds Dana Goldstein. She lives in New York City, where only one of every four young black men has a job.

. . .  as sociologists Kathryn Edin and Maria Kefalas demonstrate in one of my favorite books, Promises I Can Keep, low-income women often prefer to remain unmarried because the men in their lives–men facing chronic unemployment in the legitimate economy, or who may be addicted or engaged in criminal behaivior–simply do not make stable husbands or fathers.

If I worked for a foundation, I’d hire smart people to design a TV show to model good parenting — and marriage — to viewers who haven’t grown up with that. It would have to be entertaining, so people would watch it voluntarily.

Filed Under: Education, Parenting Tagged With: , , , , ,

“Nobody gets married any more, Mister”

February 6, 2011 By

Gerry Garibaldi’s four favorite students are pregnant this year, he writes in “Nobody Gets Married Any More, Mister” in City Journal.

His urban school gets lots of federal money under Title I.

At my school, we pay five teachers to tutor kids after school and on Saturdays. They sit in classrooms waiting for kids who never show up. We don’t want for books—or for any of the cutting-edge gizmos that non–Title I schools can’t afford: computerized whiteboards, Elmo projectors, the works. Our facility is state-of-the-art, thanks to a recent $40 million face-lift, with gleaming new hallways and bathrooms and a fully computerized library.

It won’t help without “personal moral accountability,” he writes.

Within my lifetime, single parenthood has been transformed from shame to saintliness. In our society, perversely, we celebrate the unwed mother as a heroic figure, like a fireman or a police officer. During the last presidential election, much was made of Obama’s mother, who was a single parent. Movie stars and pop singers flaunt their daddy-less babies like fishing trophies.

None of this is lost on my students. In today’s urban high school, there is no shame or social ostracism when girls become pregnant. Other girls in school want to pat their stomachs. Their friends throw baby showers at which meager little gifts are given. After delivery, the girls return to school with baby pictures on their cell phones or slipped into their binders, which they eagerly share with me.

Connecticut, where he teaches, offers medical coverage, child care,housing subsidies, food and cash to out-of-wedlock mothers.

If you need to get to an appointment, state-sponsored dial-a-ride is available. If that appointment is college-related, no sweat: education grants for single mothers are available, too. Nicole didn’t have to worry about finishing the school year; the state sent a $35-an-hour tutor directly to her home halfway into her final trimester and for six weeks after the baby arrived.

In theory, this provision of services is humane and defensible, an essential safety net for the most vulnerable—children who have children. What it amounts to in practice is a monolithic public endorsement of single motherhood—one that has turned our urban high schools into puppy mills. The safety net has become a hammock.

Young fathers, who usually grew up without a father, see getting a girl pregnant as “a he-man thing,” but quickly lose interest in the baby.

Fatherless families are “the calamity in our midst,” writes Washington Post columnist Colbert King.

When Black History Month was celebrated in 1950, according to State University of New York research, 77.7 percent of black families had two parents. As of January 2010, according to the Census Bureau, the share of two-parent families among African Americans had fallen to 38 percent.

The social safety net keeps growing, making it ever easier for young parents to avoid their responsibilities, King laments.

Robert Pondiscio is trying to help a former South Bronx student, very bright, emotionally volatile, who just gave birth to her second child. She’s 17.

Filed Under: Children, Parenting Tagged With: , , , , , ,

Is marriage obsolete?

June 19, 2009 By

Sandra Tsing Loh is getting divorced after 20 years of marriage and two children, she writes in The Atlantic. In Let’s Call the Whole Thing Off, she suggests that most of us should give up on lifelong marriage too.  Keeping romance alive is too much work for the modern woman.

Given my staggering working mother’s to-do list, I cannot take on yet another arduous home- and self-improvement project, that of rekindling our romance. Sobered by this failure as a mother—which is to say, my failure as a wife—I’ve since begun a journey of reading, thinking, and listening to what’s going on in other 21st-century American families. And along the way, I’ve begun to wonder, what with all the abject and swallowed misery: Why do we still insist on marriage? Sure, it made sense to agrarian families before 1900, when to farm the land, one needed two spouses, grandparents, and a raft of children. But now that we have white-collar work and washing machines, and our life expectancy has shot from 47 to 77, isn’t the idea of lifelong marriage obsolete?

Tsing Loh, who wrote two years ago that women prefer food to sex, also shares the details of her friends’ sexless marriages. The hubbies cook, remodel the kitchen and chauffeur the kids but prefer internet porn or cooking magazines to sex with their wives. The wives are inspired by Tsing Loh’s divorce to consider dumping their “male kitchen bitches.”

The kids will do almost as well raised by a single parent as in a two-parent family, Tsing Loh argues, as long as there’s “domestic stability,” i.e., no new boyfriends and girlfriends moving in and out. Divorce is OK if you stay single?

Laura at 11D says Loh lacks credibility on the subject of marriage.

She breaks up her marriage and then writes a magazine article about why people weren’t really meant to be married. Hello! Credibility problems here!

Loh explains that she had an affair, which ended their marriage. However, people weren’t really meant to be married for so long. Her kids wouldn’t really miss having both parents at home anyway. . . . Her husband and her friends’ husbands weren’t so great in the sack. And the husbands are kind of girlie in the way they help out around the house. Why should a marriage be work? She fishes around for any explanation that will save her.

Those of us who enjoy being married never seem to get space in The Atlantic. Perhaps it’s because we don’t wish to share the details with a national audience. Too little information.

Once a performance artist, Tsing Loh has no such scruples. Nonetheless, in a few years, her children will be able to read about her boredom with their father in The Atlantic archives. However disguised, her friends will guess the identities of the pathetic Rachel and Ian and Ellen and Ron. Who may now be her ex-friends.

Filed Under: Family Tagged With: , , , ,

Marriage 'isn't a priority' for parents

May 15, 2009 By

Unwed motherhood is way up, primarily because women in their 20s and 30s don’t see marriage as essential or because single women nearing 40 prefer a sperm donor to a marriage of convenience. Nearly four of 10 babies are born out of wedlock, up from one third in 2002 and double the 1980 rate.

“It’s been a huge increase — a dramatic increase,” said Stephanie J. Ventura of the National Center for Health Statistics, which documented the shift in detail.

. . . “I think this is the tipping point,” said Rosanna Hertz, a professor of sociology and women’s studies at Wellesley College. “This is becoming increasingly the norm. The old adage that ‘first comes love, then comes marriage, then comes baby in the baby carriage’ just no longer holds true.”

The unwed birth rate is highest for Hispanics at 106 births to per 1,000 unmarried women; the rate is 72 per 1,000 blacks, 32 per 1,000 whites and 26 per 1,000 Asians.

European rates are even higher: 66 percent in Iceland, 55 percent in Sweden, 50 percent in France and 44 percent in Britain.

About 40 percent of unwed mothers live with the baby daddy, at least at first, earlier research shows.

(Heidy) Gonzalez, the mother who lives with her children’s father in Mount Rainier, said marriage has not loomed as a necessity for them. “Time goes by and we think about other stuff — and we think about rent,” she said. This holds true, she said, for most of her friends. “Most of the people I know just live with their baby’s father or boyfriend and don’t get married,” she said.

When the going gets tough, unwed fathers often find it easy to leave the relationship — and the kids. Divorced dads have a much better record of involvement with their kids than never-married dads.

There’s little or no stigma in unwed motherhood. But it remains a bad deal for the mothers and a very bad deal for their children, who are much more likely to grow up in poverty and without a father’s love and care.

In New Carrollton, Natrice McKenzie, 25, a teller supervisor at a bank, said she did not set out to become a single mother but has no regrets.

“Getting married was something I had in mind, but that basically was not what happened,” said McKenzie, pregnant with her third child.

Something else didn’t happen either: birth control. I can understand one unplanned pregnancy. But three by the age of 25?

Filed Under: Family Tagged With: , ,