VICKSBURG — It's official.
Numbers for 2006 show when married couples have a baby in Mississippi, they are in the minority.
For several years it has been close to a 50-50 thing. Some counties passed the halfway point in single motherhood a long time ago. Now the whole state has. The state Department of Health annual report shows 24,323 of 46,046 babies born in Mississippi went home with a mom only, or at least not with a wedded mom and dad, in 2006. That ciphers to 52.8 percent - a jump of more than 3 percentage points from 2005. Too, more than one in four of the single moms was also a teenager, another increase from the previous year. A handy number to remember is 18 babies are born to unwed teens every day in this state.
What needs to be said about the stats?
First, the rapidity of change. It has always been biologically possible to make a baby absent the presence of wedding rings, but for hundreds of years it was considered shameful. There was even a special word for children born out of wedlock, and such children, who had no inheritance rights from their fathers, often carried a stigma all their lives, even though they had no say about their parents' marital status.
Some celebrate and some mourn that the shame, which still prevails in most world cultures, is gone from ours. No winners in that discussion. So we'll skip it and note that, beyond question, what's phenomenal is the speed at which thinking shifted. In a mere 50 years or so, a bond considered a mandatory preliminary to babymaking for centuries has become a matter of personal choice.
Statistics about people necessarily blend a variety of individual situations. For example, a man and woman totally committed to each other may raise a whole family without having purchased a marriage license or recited vows. Such a woman, then, would show up in the tally as a single parent. In contrast, a married man and woman in a destructive relationship would show up in the stats as “traditional parents.”
Another factor to ponder is that many single women have ample maturity, security and all the wherewithal anyone could need to be a great parent. They are exemplars of the Gloria Steinem phrase, “A woman needs a man like a fish needs a bicycle.”
Overall, though, increasing numbers of others are creating for themselves a hard row to hoe by being single parents. In the simplest terms, they are at a competitive disadvantage because their choice is to do alone what others do in teams.
Through social programs, communities often support these single parents with food, housing, money and health care. And while single parents don't merit stigmatization anymore, the places where they live do. It's reflected in something called aggregate human capital (AHC).
For a couple of generations, demographers have been toying with formulas to measure regional potential. Numbers are gathered — average age, wages, educational attainment, savings rates, rents or mortgages, household sizes and incomes. AHC rankings work like an individual's credit rating. It's a predictor. And it doesn't shock the conscience to learn that despite any array of local tax inducements or government gifts, aggressive growth companies offering the high-skill, high-paying jobs politicians are always talking about are going to avoid low-AHC venues.
Overlay single parenthood rates with AHC numbers, as Educational Testing Service has done, and as the former rises, the latter falls.
Pete Walley works in the Bureau of Long-Range Economic Development Planning for Mississippi Institutions of Higher Learning. He spends his days tracking numbers to see what trends they both reveal and forecast.
“From my readings and research I have formed the opinion that the low outcomes of our state's public educational system, public health system, social services system are closely linked to the high out-of-wedlock birth rate,” Wally wrote. “We cannot build a society, let alone an economy, when half the children do not have the benefit of being raised in two-parent families.”
It's hard to be more clear than that.
Solutions? The hardest reality is that none are apparent or immediate. Lawmakers can continue to provide additional funds to programs. Parents can counsel, preachers can preach. But even if the trend reversed even twice as fast as it grew, we're still looking at 25 years or more before nearly as many children live in two-parent households as in the days of our parents and their parents.
It's a grim topic for a brand new year, but now that most new Mississippi moms are single, the corresponding economic effect looms larger than ever.
