Tag Archives: Single-Mother

New study examines effect of family structure and church attendance on women

Story here from Family Research Council.

Excerpt:

Women (aged 14-44) who have not had a homsexual sexual partner in the past year are more likely to worship at least weekly and to have grown up in intact families than those who have had a homosexual sexual partner in the past year. According to the National Survey of Family Growth (NSFG), 2.1 percent of women who grew up in intact married families and attend religious services at least weekly have had a homosexual sexual partner in the year prior to being asked, followed by women who grew up in other family structures and worship at least weekly (4.6 percent), those who grew up in intact married families and never worship (7.3 percent), and those who grew up in other family structures and never worship (9.5 percent).

Examining structure of family of origin only, four percent of women who grew up in intact married families have had a homosexual sexual partner in the year prior to being asked, followed by women who grew up in intact cohabiting families (4.3 percent), those from married stepfamilies (6 percent), single divorced parent families (6.6 percent), always single parent families (6.6 percent), and cohabiting stepparent families (9.6 percent).

Examining current religious attendance only, 2.8 percent of women who worship at least weekly have had a homosexual sexual partner in the year prior to being asked, followed by women who worship between one and three times a month (2.9 percent), those who worship less than once a month (6.9 percent), and those who never attend religious services (8.7 percent).

The original post has graphs.

MUST-READ: How feminism’s war against men ends up hurting women

From the The Wall Street Journal.

Excerpt:

There’s been a 145% rise in unmarried births among college-educated women since 1980, more than twice the increase in such births among women without college educations. That’s just births; adoptions are another outlet for women seeking families on their own. But there’s a largely unexplored part to this story: Why is this happening?

Part of the answer is found in a Pew Research Center report released this week: A sea change in relationships is taking place as everyone adjusts to the new reality of women being better educated and in some cases more preferred than men in the workforce. Especially unsettling to some men is their role as second-best earner in the family. As the Pew report documents, 22% of men with “some college” are now outearned by their wives, up from 4% in 1970.

[…]Women are feeling the pinch from years of gender imbalances on college campuses, where today nearly 58% of all bachelor’s degrees and 62% of associate’s degrees are earned by women. Given that women prefer to find a well-educated, reliable earner as a husband, this creates a simple math problem. Well-educated women can’t find enough equally or better-educated men to marry.

Couple the education gap with the current economic “man-cession”—as many as 80% of the jobs lost in the recession were held by men—and the dilemma for single women becomes even worse. Today, more and more well-educated women have to ask themselves: Am I willing to “marry down”?

As I’ve written about before, the reason why men are not able to do well in school is because they are discriminated against by the teachers, legislators and educrats. There are almost no male teachers. Men do better with male teachers. But there is a fear among educrats of male teachers getting near children, so boys end up suffering. Affirmative action keeps many men from attending college. And then of course in the workplace, companies have quotas to fill, which shuts even more men out of jobs.

Children need to have a mother and father, and the father typically gets his authority and his role by being the primary earner. What women have done is that they have decided that it is a better idea to compete with the man for money. But this undermines the man’s authority in the home. Why would a man get married only to have his influence diluted? The threat of false charges of domestic violence or of a unilateral divorce can also easily be used to control and silence him. Why try to lead a family if you are going to be silenced and coerced?

More importantly, the more that a woman focuses on vocational skills, the less time she has for reading about marriage, education, economics and parenting, e.g. – Jennifer Roback Morse, Laura Schlessinger, Maggie Gallagher, Stephen Baskerville, etc. If a man is a software engineer, the last thing he wants in the home is another software engineer. A mother needs to teach the children everything they need to know to succeed and to have a relationship with God that will stay with them as they grow. And she must also be able to talk to her husband about his interests, like science, economics, politics, theology and apologetics.

And it’s not just a question of having the right knowledge. It’s a question of character. She has to make choices and have experiences all along the way to build up the capacity to care, nurture and communicate. That means actually doing things that cause her to become comfortable caring for others even when it goes against her own selfish interests. Being selfish disqualifies a women from being marriage material. Instead of being focused on making money, women should be studying how husbands and children work.

And I think this is why women are so anxious to throw themselves at men sexually. They are trying to get men to love them without actually having to care about men, marriage or children. They don’t want to have to take on the traditional role of mother and wife, which is what causes a man to love and need a woman in the first place. But a woman cannot make a man love her by tricking him with sex. Women can only make men love them by being willing to encourage and support him in his plan to serve God and to raise children who also know God and serve God. It’s a relationship, not a slot machine.

NOTE: When I say that women should be more focused on children, I mean while the children are not yet all in school. Once they are all in school, then women can go back to work full-time, or part-time, or work out of the home, whatever they want to do.

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MUST-READ: Jennifer Roback Morse explains why two-parent families matter

Article here in Policy Review, a publication of the Hoover Institute at Stanford University.

Excerpt:

A free society needs people with consciences. The vast majority of people must obey the law voluntarily. If people don’t conform themselves to the law, someone will either have to compel them to do so or protect the public when they do not. It costs a great deal of money to catch, convict, and incarcerate lawbreakers — not to mention that the surveillance and monitoring of potential criminals tax everybody’s freedom if habitual lawbreakers comprise too large a percentage of the population.

The basic self-control and reciprocity that a free society takes for granted do not develop automatically. Conscience development takes place in childhood. Children need to develop empathy so they will care whether they hurt someone or whether they treat others fairly. They need to develop self-control so they can follow through on these impulses and do the right thing even if it might benefit them to do otherwise.

All this development takes place inside the family. Children attach to the rest of the human race through their first relationships with their parents. They learn reciprocity, trust, and empathy from these primal relationships. Disrupting those foundational relations has a major negative impact on children as well as on the people around them. In particular, children of single parents — or completely absent parents — are more likely to commit crimes.

Without two parents, working together as a team, the child has more difficulty learning the combination of empathy, reciprocity, fairness, and self-command that people ordinarily take for granted. If the child does not learn this at home, society will have to manage his behavior in some other way. He may have to be rehabilitated, incarcerated, or otherwise restrained. In this case, prisons will substitute for parents.

I am reading her book Love and Economics right now, and this argument is in the first couple of chapters, which is how I found this article.

Dr. J’s blog is here.