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7. Destinies of the Disadvantaged
- Russell Sage Foundation
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160 Chapter 7 Destinies of the Disadvantaged THE EARLY CHAPTERS of this book describe the experiences of the teenage mothers in Baltimore and their families, whose lives I followed for more than three decades. Their experiences reveal a surprising fact: early childbearing, which most policymakers believe to be a powerful source of disadvantage to young mothers, had only modest effects on their prospects in later life, after taking into account their circumstances prior to becoming pregnant. This finding is widely supported by a growing body of research reviewed in this book. Although for obvious reasons we can never measure the “true” causal effects of early childbearing with the precision of a random assignment experiment, we can now approximate what such an experiment might show. If poor minority women such as those in this study (and the majority of teenage mothers, both then and now, are poor and minority) were to delay childbearing, their lives would be altered slightly for the better, but only modestly so. Most mothers in this population would still not attend—and surely not complete—college in higher numbers if they became parents later rather than in their teens. If parenthood were delayed, most would eventually wed, as did the women in the Baltimore Study, but they would probably not remain married, judging from the experiences of low-income minority women who begin childbearing in their twenties instead of their teens. Most would find employment, but except for the most talented and persistent, they would not find their way into middle-class jobs. There would be some positive effects: family size would be slightly smaller on average, and fewer would spend time receiving public assistance. This is not to suggest that the decline in early childbearing during the past fifteen years has not been a positive development. It is undoubtedly positive, because most teens do not want to become parents and are not ready to take on the responsibilities of raising children. Many of the burdens of early parenthood are shared by their families, who usually can ill afford another dependent. Nonetheless, teenage parenthood is simply not the disastrous and life-compromising event that it has been portrayed to be. And as such, our policies, which have focused inordinately on reducing teen pregnancy as a strategy for reducing poverty, increasing social mobility, and enhancing marriage, are likely to have been mistaken or, at least, unable to meet expectations. Diminishing teen pregnancy is not, as claimed by many social scientists and policymakers, the silver bullet that, if properly aimed at the right target population, could make a huge dent in the level of poverty and disadvantage in our nation. Curbing early childbearing, it is believed, would put younger women in a far stronger position to complete their education , gain work experience, and find more desirable marriage partners. It would reduce the number of female-headed households and cut the proportion of children growing up in poverty. Now, after a decade and a half of witnessing a steep decline in early childbearing, especially among low-income black women, it is difficult to sustain those claims. Although the age of first births has risen dramatically among African Americans and, to a lesser extent, among Latinos and whites, marriage has not increased (Fields 2003). Marriage rates have continued to fall for younger black women ages twenty to twenty-nine, despite a larger proportion entering their twenties without children (U.S. Bureau of the Census 2006a). Younger African American women, for whom the rates of childbearing have dropped most steeply, were no more likely in 2005 than in 1995 to graduate from high school. Similarly, for black females between ages twenty-five and twenty-nine, the rate of college completion has remained stable, although it did increase modestly from 2003 to 2005 (U.S. Bureau of the Census 2006b). Poverty rates in family households plummeted during the 1990s as the economy boomed, the Earned Income Tax Credit was expanded, and women on welfare were helped to transition into the labor force, but these favorable trends have not continued into the current decade, even as early childbearing has fallen to historic lows. The poverty rate for children (under age eighteen) fell from 22 percent to 16 percent Destinies of the Disadvantaged 161 [54.227.104.229] Project MUSE (2024-03-29 01:15 GMT) between 1990 and 1999, but it increased by 12 percent from 2000 to 2005, just when we might have expected an even greater dividend from the drop in early...