1/7/2024 Isabel v. sawhill, generation unbound: drifting into sex and parenthood without marriageRead Now![]() One report calls it “the great crossover”-the point at which, for the first time, the average age at marriage exceeded the average age at first birth among American women. This reversal of the normal sequence first occurred in the late 1980s. ![]() Indeed, the average woman now has her first baby before she marries. The arrangement is likely to involve poverty both for the mother and for her child or children. The common pattern that Sawhill describes is a woman at the lower end of the income scale who becomes pregnant unintentionally, gives birth, and raises the child as a single mother. Sawhill’s latest book, Generation Unbound, describes a significant social challenge in the United States: the increasing incidence of children born into adverse circumstances. It is now primarily women and men in their twenties who are having children outside of marriage, many of them unplanned… Once a young single woman has had an unplanned pregnancy, followed by a baby out of wedlock, she is less likely to marry and more likely to have additional children outside of marriage… Perhaps the solution is not to bring back early marriage but instead to encourage young adults to delay childbearing until they are ready to marry. In the meantime, the problem has moved up the age scale. … by 2012, the teen birth rate had reached the lowest level reported in over six decades.
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