Unmarried Because They Value Marriage

By Kathryn Edin and Maria Kefalas

Post
Sunday, May 1, 2005; B04

When we first met Lisa, a white, 10th-grade dropout, she was on welfare and struggling to complete a GED while living with her stepmother, her sister and her 16-month-old son in a cramped rowhouse in one of Philadelphia's roughest neighborhoods. She was also pregnant again by the father of her first child, a sporadically employed construction worker. But, she told us, she was not planning on getting married anytime soon. In 1950, when only one in 20 American children was born to an unmarried mother, Lisa and her boyfriend would probably have been living together already as man and wife. Today, though, one in three children is born to unmarried parents.

To understand this rise in unmarried childbearing, we tried to offer women like Lisa an opportunity to answer the question that many middle-class Americans ask about them: Why don't they marry before having children? To find out, we spent five years getting to know 162 white, African American and Puerto Rican single mothers who live in the poorest sections of Philadelphia and its sister city, Camden, N.J., talking with them over kitchen tables and on front stoops.