Tag Archives: Cohabitate

News

38-year-old single mother of seven, pregnant with twins, demands better government housing

10 Comments
38-year-old single mother with 7 kids, 2 more on the way
38-year-old single mother with 7 kids, 2 more on the way

I saw this article about an unmarried woman, pregnant with twins, who already has 7 children from a variety of men. She is currently living in a 4-bedroom house paid for by taxpayers. She is angry because the government isn’t giving her enough money to pay for her lifestyle choices.

This article comes from the UK Daily Mail:

A 38-year-old mother-of-seven who is pregnant with twins is begging to be rehoused from her ‘hellish’ four-bedroom council flat which she says isn’t good enough for her.

[…]The single mother said: ‘My relationship with some of my children is at breaking point, we can’t keep living like this.

[…]’I just want to get out of this hell. I’d rather live anywhere else, as long as it is not in here. It has been really tough.

‘I’m feeling down every night and sometimes you just feel like giving up. But I just have to keep going for the sake of the kids.’

She can fix everything that’s gone wrong with a little more taxpayer money. That will make it unnecessary for her to choose men who commit before sex, and let her have the freedom to choose the “best” men for relationships.

More:

After spending a month in various hotels, West Lothian Council found them the flat in Bathgate and they moved in on September 20.

But after moving into her new Bathgate property, Ms Burns complained that the flat did not come with a television…

She wasn’t even provided with a taxpayer-funded telly! How else to people get televisions except from welfare programs?

Anyway, how did this happen? Well, it happens because young women today are increasingly choosing men who are not willing to marry first, and using premarital sex and cohabitation to try to land them. Something that the previous generation of married women from 50 years ago would never have done.

The Daily Caller explains:

Unmarried couples are having roughly 40 percent of all births in the U.S., marking a trend that may be detrimental to the upbringing of those children.

For the first time in U.S. history, out-of-wedlock births in America are largely a result of cohabitation, according to the United Nations Population Fund 2018 State of World report released Wednesday. Single mothers had nearly 90 percent of out-of-wedlock births in 1968, but that number decreased to 53 percent in 2017, according to the Pew Research Center.

“Compared to children of married parents, those with cohabiting parents are more likely to experience the breakup of their families, be exposed to ‘complex’ family forms, live in poverty, suffer abuse, and have negative psychological and educational outcomes,” according to the Institute for Family Studies (IFS).

[…]Children with single parents have the highest rates of poverty followed by children living with unmarried, cohabiting parents, the IFS reported.

Between 2006 and 2010, 23 percent of births to married women were unintended while 51 percent of births to unmarried cohabiting women were unintended. That number rose to 67 percent for unmarried women not cohabiting.

Two-thirds of cohabiting parents split up before their child reaches age 12, while only a quarter of married parents divorce, according to an April 2017 Brookings Institution report.

The problem of fatherless children is getting worse. And taxpayers will be on the hook to pay for it – that’s what the story of the 38-year-old woman shows. Productive people have to pay when women are not persuaded to make better decisions about which men to have relationships with, and when to have sex.

My experience

I know three young women who are cohabitating right now. I have had a few conversations with them about what they are studying, what jobs they want to get, and what their plans for the future are.

All three of these women have never married, and are in their early 20s and attractive. Two of them have children. The live-in boyfriends are getting sex without having to commit first. The boyfriends (judging from photos) seem to have been chosen purely for looks. Tall, muscles, beards, tattoos, piercings, etc. Obviously, none of them is a Christian. And none of the men has a STEM degree, a career or savings -they’re too young to have those things to prove their ability to provide. But they’re still co-habitating, and get all the benefits of a wife without having to have proven themselves capable of the responsibilities, expectations and obligations of a husband. I do not like these men. I do not think women should choose them.

Each of these women is spending the young and attractive period of her life in unstable relationships with men who think of sex as recreational, rather than something that is saved for inside the marriage covenant. If their past relationships fail, they will have a much harder time finding a good man. They will have sexual baggage. They will probably have children from another man. They will have bitterness and mistrust towards men in general. They will be less likely to give generously to a future husband. This is not what marriage-minded men are looking for.

News

38-year-old single mother of seven, pregnant with twins, demands better government housing

11 Comments
38-year-old single mother with 7 kids, 2 more on the way
38-year-old single mother with 7 kids, 2 more on the way

I saw this article about an unmarried woman, pregnant with twins, who already has 7 children from a variety of men. She is currently living in a 4-bedroom house paid for by taxpayers. She is angry because the government isn’t giving her enough money to pay for her lifestyle choices.

This article comes from the UK Daily Mail:

A 38-year-old mother-of-seven who is pregnant with twins is begging to be rehoused from her ‘hellish’ four-bedroom council flat which she says isn’t good enough for her.

[…]The single mother said: ‘My relationship with some of my children is at breaking point, we can’t keep living like this.

[…]’I just want to get out of this hell. I’d rather live anywhere else, as long as it is not in here. It has been really tough.

‘I’m feeling down every night and sometimes you just feel like giving up. But I just have to keep going for the sake of the kids.’

She can fix everything that’s gone wrong with a little more taxpayer money. That will make it unnecessary for her to choose men who commit before sex, and let her have the freedom to choose the “best” men for relationships.

More:

After spending a month in various hotels, West Lothian Council found them the flat in Bathgate and they moved in on September 20.

But after moving into her new Bathgate property, Ms Burns complained that the flat did not come with a television…

She wasn’t even provided with a taxpayer-funded telly! How else to people get televisions except from welfare programs?

Anyway, how did this happen? Well, it happens because women are increasingly choosing men who are not willing to marry first, and using premarital sex and cohabitation to land them. Something that the previous generation of married women from 50 years ago would never have done.

The Daily Caller explains:

Unmarried couples are having roughly 40 percent of all births in the U.S., marking a trend that may be detrimental to the upbringing of those children.

For the first time in U.S. history, out-of-wedlock births in America are largely a result of cohabitation, according to the United Nations Population Fund 2018 State of World report released Wednesday. Single mothers had nearly 90 percent of out-of-wedlock births in 1968, but that number decreased to 53 percent in 2017, according to the Pew Research Center.

“Compared to children of married parents, those with cohabiting parents are more likely to experience the breakup of their families, be exposed to ‘complex’ family forms, live in poverty, suffer abuse, and have negative psychological and educational outcomes,” according to the Institute for Family Studies (IFS).

[…]Children with single parents have the highest rates of poverty followed by children living with unmarried, cohabiting parents, the IFS reported.

Between 2006 and 2010, 23 percent of births to married women were unintended while 51 percent of births to unmarried cohabiting women were unintended. That number rose to 67 percent for unmarried women not cohabiting.

Two-thirds of cohabiting parents split up before their child reaches age 12, while only a quarter of married parents divorce, according to an April 2017 Brookings Institution report.

The problem of fatherless children is getting worse. And taxpayers will be on the hook to pay for it – that’s what the story of the 38-year-old woman shows. Productive people have to pay when women are not persuaded to make better decisions about which men to have relationships with, and when to have sex.

My experience

I know three young women who are cohabitating right now. I have had a few conversations with them about what they are studying, what jobs they want to get, and what their plans for the future are.

All three of these women have never married, and are in their early 20s and attractive. Two of them have children. The live-in boyfriends are getting sex without having to commit first. The boyfriends (judging from photos) seem to have been chosen purely for looks. Tall, muscles, beards, tattoos, piercings, etc. Obviously, none of them is a Christian. There just isn’t anything in society telling young women that a Christian worldview matters in a relationship. And none of the men has a STEM degree, a career or savings -they’re too young to have those things to prove their ability to provide. But they’re still co-habitating, and get all the benefits of a wife without having to have proven themselves capable of the responsibilities, expectations and obligations of a husband.

Each of these women is spending the young and attractive period of her life in unstable relationships with men who think of sex as recreational, rather than something that is saved for inside the marriage covenant. If their past relationships fail, they will have a much harder time finding a good man. They will have sexual baggage. They will probably have children from another man. They will have bitterness and mistrust towards men. They will be selfish and unwilling to give to a future husband. The same women who will complain that no one will marry them at age 35 are the ones who could easily have had a marriage-ready man at age 25.

News

Bradford Wilcox: Is cohabitation a bigger problem for society than divorce?

5 Comments

Bradford Wilcox answers questions about cohabitation and divorce in the Washington Post.

The intro:

A new report says cohabitation has replaced divorce as the biggest source of instability for American families. Brad Wilcox, the report’s author, chatted about why this is.

Here are some of the questions:

Can you talk a little about the reasons behind the shift toward cohabitation, rather than marriage?

What is the definition of “cohabitation”? Is there a difference in the study between a child living with biological parents who are unmarried or when one adult in the house is a non-biological parent (boyfriend or girlfriend). I can see the disadvantage for kids living in a household where mom or dad is living with a girlfriend or boyfriend. From my personal experience the whole situation rests on the mother. I know women who have not made the best choices in life and invite boyfriends to live with them and this causes instability in home for the kids. I guess I’m wondering if it is really the type of cohabitation or the reasons behind the couple living together unmarried that causes bad outcomes for the children involved?

How does the problem of cohabitation and its detrimental effects on children correlate with social class? It is my impression that cohabitation is less common in middle-class households with college-educated parents. Isn’t there something of a vicious cycle with parents not marrying because of low incomes, so their children aren’t exposed to marriage and the resulting improved incomes and other benefits? It seems that this may be contributing to the income inequality that is widely reported in the US.

Were you able to sift families based on the length of cohabitation? It seems unlikely to me that a family with parents cohabiting for 10 years with children would be less stable than a family with parents married for 10 years. I would buy that a family with a serial monogamist parent who lives with each partner for a short amount of time (under 5 years) would be quite unstable.

Mr. Wilcox, what does your research (or what is your opinion) regarding those families in which the married couple functions day-to-day essentially as a divorced couple whilst living under one roof? Does research favor parents remaining married and physically under one roof with irreconcilable differences for the sake of children, or is it healthier for the parents to divorce and live physically separately?

Dr. Wilcox, I’m curious what your research indicates about the stability of children in families with two moms or two dads who are not able to get married in their state. Do you find that this type of co-habitation is any stronger/weaker than not? Do civil unions (where applicable) make an adequate substitute for marriage in this instance? Regards

Is “worse” meant to suggest that cohabitation is simply more prevalent than divorce, or does it really mean there is evidence that cohabitation leads to worse outcomes (of some kind) for children than divorce does?

And here’s a sample:

Correlation vs. causation on cohabitation

Q. It seems to me that those negative consequences of cohabitation are derived not from the cohabitation itself but from social trends in communities that tend to cohabit. Is encouraging people to marry really the answer, or does the answer lie in fighting drug abuse, child abuse, and neglect within the communities that most experience it?

A. Good question.

It certainly is the case that cohabiting couples who have children tend to be less educated, poorer, and less committed to their relationship than couples who have children in marriage.

So one reason that children are less likely to thrive in cohabiting families than in intact, married families is that their parents, or the adults in their lives, have fewer of the resources that they need to be good parents.

But the best research on cohabitation and child well-being controls for factors like income, education, and race/ethnicity. And even after you control for these factors, you still find that children in cohabiting families are significantly more likely to suffer from depression, delinquency, drug use, and the like.

For instance, one study from the University of Texas at Austin found that teens living in a cohabiting stepfamily were more than twice as likely to use drugs, compared to teens living in an intact married family–even after controlling for differences in income, education, race, and family instability.

In fact, children in cohabiting stepfamilies did worse on this outcome than children in stable single-parent families.

Research like this suggests to me that cohabitation has an independent negative impact on children, above and beyond the factors that make some Americans more likely to cohabit with children in the first place.

So the answer, I think, is for the nation to improve our children’s home environments in a variety of ways–from improving our nation’s educational system to improving job opportunities to discouraging parents from cohabiting.

Cohabitation vs. single mothers

Q. How does cohabitation compare with children brought up by single mothers?

A. The Why Marriage Matters report focused in its first two editions on divorce and single parenthood.

But as I was reviewing the literature on families for this third edition with my colleagues, I was struck by this fact:

On many outcomes, children in bio- and step-cohabiting families look a lot like children in single-parent families, even after controlling for socioeconomic differences.

So even though kids in cohabiting families have access to two adults they don’t generally do better than kids in single-parent families except on economic outcomes.

I think this is probably because cohabiting relationships tend to be characterized by less commitment, less sexual fidelity, more domestic violence, more instability, and more insecurity, compared to married relationships. Needless to say, these kinds of relationship factors don’t foster an ideal home environment for children.

And it’s also very clear from the research that kids living in a stable, single-parent home are less likely to be abused than kids living in a cohabiting household with an unrelated adult male.

I think this is a great area for Christians to be doing quality research in, because it helps us to be able to speak with authority on marriage and family issues when we have evidence. I think people take the decision to have sex, move in together, and marry lightly because they aren’t aware of the consequences of having things not work. If they knew the consequences up front, then they might put more effort into reading about how to do things right. A friend of mine on the East coast has been chatting with me about how little effort people there put into preparing themselves for marriage, selecting a mate and studying marriage and parenting. It’s scary. Even in my office a lot of people are doing this thinking there is nothing wrong with it… how did we get so far away from chastity and courting?