This NYT Motherlode article is all about class (though it doesn't admit it).

Out-of-wedlock births in the lower classes

A recent book I read provides an interesting portrait of what sociologists lately call 'the under class'–this is thought to be more PC than 'the lower class'. The book is Promises I Can Keep: Why Poor Women Put Motherhood Before Marriage, by Kathryn Edin and Maria Kefalas. It's an attempt to explain to middle-class readers (well, the authors only talk about the middle class, so I assume they mean middle and upper class) why poor women often have children out of wedlock, and at a very young age (a mean age of 21, including many women who gave birth at younger ages, even thirteen and fourteen).

The poor are different from us; they have less money. The personal touches in this book give us glimpses of a strange new world--one where a sixteen-year-old boy will tell his girlfriend, 'I want to have a baby by you'--and she takes it as a compliment! There are a few fascinating statistics–"the poor, the less-educated, those living in poor neighborhoods, and those raised in single-parent households tend to have far fewer friendships than their more advantaged counterparts." And, of white women who have never had a premarital birth, 89% will get married before they turn 40. We're all doooomed....

But, the authors say, poor women have many of the same beliefs about marriage as the rest of us. Most people today of whatever class believe that marriage is difficult and divorce is to be avoided, and that for that reason, people should wait to get married until they are older and until they know and trust their prospective partners very well. There is a perception that getting married means settling down--the end of travel, fun, career change and flexibility. With these beliefs, it makes sense that members of the lower classes don't marry early. So the question is not, 'Why don't they get married?', but rather, 'Why do they have babies?'

SImply put, because the perceived costs of having children are lower, and the perceived benefits higher. As for the benefits, what would you do if you had little or no higher education or career ambitions to look forward to? Having children might seem like the only really meaningful thing in your life–the only thing giving you hope for the future. When asked to imagine what their lives would be like without children, the women in the study typically said things like, 'I'd be dead.' 'I'd be in jail.' 'I'd be depressed.' 'I'd still be partying.' 'I'd be on drugs.' These seem to be the other options.

As for the costs, the out-of-pocket costs of having children are the same whether the mother is 30 or 13. But the opportunity costs of children are very different for different classes. Specifically, they're much lower for the lower classes.

The public often assumes that early childbearing is the main reason why so many girls from poor inner-city areas fail to complete high school, go on to college, gain valuable work skills, or earn decent wages, but there is virtually no evidence to support this idea. Any childbearing at all, and especially early childbearing, has huge opportunity costs for middle-class women. But disadvantaged girls who bear children have about the same long-term earnings trajectories as similarly disadvantaged youth who wait until their mid or late twenties to have a child...Early childbearing is highly selective of girls whose other characteristics–family background, cognitive ability, school performance, mental health status, and so on–have already diminished their life chances so much that an early birth does little to reduce them much further.

The authors focus on the agency of the women in their study, and it seems as though these women chose to become pregnant, rather than being coerced into it by their boyfriends or by a lack of access to birth control or abortion. This leads the authors to ignore some signs of lack of agency–a really amazing passivity, not just in some cases, but in most. For instance, only 17% of these women's pregnancies were planned. Some were 'accidents', but, bizarrely, the plurality were described as 'in between' an accident and a planned pregnancy. Typically, the woman will say that she didn't want to get pregnant, but that she wasn't using any birth control. It is almost impossible for me to understand how a person could leave such an important decision up to chance–but hey, it's the traditional way. The women studied say things like, 'The baby happened', 'God gave me this baby' and so forth.

I wonder if this lack of agency is related to their socioeconomic statuses. Making a decision is a skill like any other, and needs to be practiced. We read that children who have grown up under circumstances display 'learned helplessness'–they have learned that nothing they can do can make a positive difference in what happens to them, and that actively doing anything often brings punishment. So they take no action. They may express preferences, but they do not intervene in their own fate. Maybe for the lowest classes, something similar happens.

On teenagers

A Salon article on parents dealing with their ‘delinquent’ children. What happens if your child is not the kind of person you envisioned?

("She's a bad girl," writes Lara. "And I made her. If a factory is judged by its product, I'm a bad mother.")

Both mother and daughter love each other and hate each other in equal measure. Both are prone to fits of drama and exaggeration. As a reader, it is difficult, if not impossible, to sift out a true and accurate account of what actually happened during the teen years of these girls. But truth and accuracy, in these books, are nearly beside the point. It's more interesting to look at what these mothers think happened to their daughters than it is to concern oneself with whether they are correct.

As a teenager, Martha Tod Dudman had sex, smoked pot, dropped acid, was not allowed to graduate with her class at the prestigious Madeira School and ran away to live in a Tenderloin tenement in San Francisco at age 17.

Dudman's daughter, Augusta, wears her mother's hippie clothes from the '60s, smokes pot and does acid. To Dudman, Augusta's pot smoking is different from her own: "I know it's not the gentle grass of the sixties. They treat it with something now, don't they? It's powerful." When Dudman's ex-husband tells her that he believes their daughter when she says that she finds drinking disgusting and has only smoked pot once or twice, Dudman thinks, "With the drugs, she had to have lots of them. Had to have every kind. Had to take everything. If she could have, she would have smoked fifteen cigarettes at once. I know because I was like that, too."

Dudman eventually decides to ship Augusta off to a wilderness treatment program in Oregon. It's hard to say whether this makes the situation better or worse. Augusta is so miserable that she slashes her wrists in the first few weeks. And when she gets the chance, Augusta busts out of the treatment center and, like her mother before her, runs away to San Francisco. (This really sends Dudman over the edge: She and another parent send both the FBI and a hired thug to hunt down their daughters and bring them back into captivity.)

This is fairly typical parental behavior. No one ever pauses to think that her children might have human rights.


Just like Sherlock Holmes, observation follows from hypothesis rather than the other way around. If you’re convinced there’s something wrong with your child, then the slightest foibles (watching too much TV, swearing, staying out late) become serious problems. If you were a little less quick to condemn your child, these things would never lead you to kidnap and imprison her. I think it all stems ultimately from a parent’s lack of self-love...

Perhaps the biggest obstacle that teens face is the fact that every parent was once a teen. And the memories these parents have of their own adolescence make it virtually impossible for them to see the teenagers in front of them.