Promises I Can Keep: Why Poor Women Put Motherhood before Marriage

"This book is captivating for some of the same reasons that Lareau’s book, Unequal Childhoods , really pulls you in. Reading this book you get to be a fly on the wall for really intimate conversations between the researchers and dozens of lower-income women who became mothers early in their lives, without husbands and without a lot of economic independence in many cases. These women who became teen mothers represent a puzzle to some people in America. They wonder why anyone would choose to become a teen mother. There’s this widespread idea that it reflects poor decision-making in the heat of the moment, when you don’t want to think about the consequences. You just want to have fun, or you just want to feel close to your partner. So you make a mistake. Through all these deep conversations with dozens of mothers, who the authors were able to get to trust them and share their stories, we learn that the explanation is more nuanced. It is not typically about crazy, heat-of-the-moment, passionate mistakes. It is really about these young women—older girls, really, some of them are 14, 15, 16—not having a sense of something better and more meaningful to do with their lives at that juncture, as they reach adulthood. “We need the public to build roads and armies, and we need the public to help build people, too” These women typically don’t have good potential husbands who they feel they can marry. They don’t feel like they can excel in school, they don’t feel like they can get a job that seems meaningful or lucrative. And so to them, motherhood is viewed in some conscious or semi-conscious way as their best career option. The implication is that there’s no point in just shaming these kinds of women or insisting that they should have more personal responsibility. If we want to see more stable, two-parent, married households having children, we have to make sure that more young women and men enter adulthood feeling like they’re on track to have strong educational and career options and feel motivated by those opportunities to postpone parenthood until later in life. If we give people better options, then lo and behold, they will make better choices. The best research on that is pretty interesting. It suggests that, yes, there is a strong correlation between lower-income single parenthood and bad child outcomes. However, that correlation is not so much due to the young single parenthood itself, but to the same factors that caused these people to become young single parents in the first place, which is a lack of early opportunity, and the same kinds of constraints that caused these parents to feel that they had no better options. Those constraints, rather than single parenthood itself, are also going to cause disadvantages for their children. In other words, poverty is the problem, and even more fundamental is the lack of earlier skill development opportunities that lead these people not to have any career options that can help them escape poverty. So it’s this cycle where people don’t get enough childhood opportunity and that sets them up to enter parenthood without the skills and resources required to set up their own children for success."