These parents are hurting their children

For all of the obvious biological, historical, social, developmental and plainly human reasons, a child’s best bet for a good life is to have two parents around all the time.

But here’s the problem: today, more than 40 percent of American kids are born to unmarried mothers.

Now, I am not simply trying to make a doctrinaire case for marriage. Manifestly, a man and a woman don’t have to be married to have a baby.

The point is: too many unmarried new parents either pay no attention to the new baby (as in, the single mom phenomenon) or the new moms and dads don’t have staying power—roughly half of new moms and dads have gone their separate ways by the time the unfortunate kid reaches the age of 5.

And here’s another devastating fact: 60 percent of kids born out of wedlock are “surprises”—the parents didn’t intend to have these unfortunate babies. That’s about 1,000,000 children, every year, brought into this largely unforgiving world with a couple strikes against them before they take their first breath.

This is a problem for all of us. These kids don’t get started on the right foot, and too many of them end up taking too many wrong steps during their lives, and too many of them never get enough traction to live a happy life.

We need to have a stronger private and public will to avoid making babies until both parents are ready make an enduring commitment to change all the diapers and read the bedtime stories and run behind the bikes with training wheels and….

  

America is empty, more or less

Lexington, we hardly knew ye

America is Fat City

"No, mama, like this. With your hands"