Poverty leads to pregnancy, but not marriage according to sociologist
by Megan Graves, posted May 6, 2009
Poor women are putting motherhood before marriage, said Maria Kefalas, associate professor of sociology and director of the Institute for Violence Research and Prevention at Saint Joseph’s University in Philadelphia. Kefalas was on campus in April as part of the Chancellor's Diversity Initiative lecture series.
There is a stready rise in single-parent households, said Kefalas. In 1950, one in 20 children were born to unwed mothers. Today, that statistic has drastically changed to one in three. Kefalas’ lecture centered around a study conducted on 162 single mothers between the ages of 14 and 50 residing in Philadephia.
The average age of the mothers at the birth of their first child was 18, and 72.2 percent of mothers studied became pregnant as teenagers, 68 percent of those had a high school diploma, GED or less. These poor and uneducated mothers are raising their children in some of the most dangerous neighborhoods in Philadelphia.
“What we know is that every bad thing that could happen more likely happens to kids in families with single mothers,” said Kefalas. It has been known for a long time that single motherhood is connected with poverty.
Why were these mothers choosing to have children in these conditions?
“My boyfriend wanted to get me pregnant … so that I won’t leave him, so that I’ll stay with him forever,” Lena, a 15-year-old Caucasian with a 15-month-old child told Kefalas. “Then he said to me, ‘when you have kids by somebody, they’ll always go back to you.’”
Many of these couples conceived in less than one year of knowing one another, and 65 percent neither planned nor avoided their pregnancy. Contraception was used consistently in the beginning of the relationship, but then stopped when the relationship reached another level, said Kefalas.
‘I want to have a baby with you’ is considered high social praise in communities such as the one in the study. It shows that the fathers want to have a blood tie with the mothers. The women studied adamantly insisted that they were totally ready for the responsibility of having a child, said Kefalas.
Although the fathers want to become pregnant with their significant others, once pregnancy actually occurs, many of the fathers’ responses are less than stellar. According to the women’s recollections, the responses varied from denial to pressure to terminate the pregnancy. The three most common behaviors that increased significantly during pregnancies were violence, cheating and ‘ripping and running’, a term that refers to young men hanging with their friends and partying, leaving the mother to deal with the stress herself.
After the birth of the child, many of the fathers come back around and try to behave responsibly. Even so, many couples will move in together rather than get married. Many couples in these situations want to get married, but see marriage happening four to five years in the future, said Kefalas. Marriage is tied together with being financially and economically stable, which many of these couples aren’t.
Many of the couples will break up rather than get married, due to things such as incarceration, substance abuse, cheating and domestic violence. Some men have many children with multiple partners and will ultimately pick one child over the others.
“One child get a Barbie beach house, and another gets nothing, it’s heartbreaking,” said Kefalas. This causes many conflicts with children in households with multiple fathers. It’s impossible to keep balls of different families juggling in the air, said Kefalas.
Kefalas said that marriage is disappearing in today’s society. Increasing poverty and the number of kids raised with only one parent will damage their lives later on. “We need to do something about it,” said Kefalas.
