Single-Income
The 2004 American Idol winner Fantasia Barrino's song "Baby Mama" offers a tribute to young single mothers - a subject she knows about. Barrino was 17 when she became pregnant with her daughter. Though critics charged that the song sends the wrong message to teenage girls, Barrino says it is not about encouraging teens to have sex. Rather, she sees the song as an anthem for young mothers courageously trying to raise their children alone.
In recent decades, the stigma attached to unwed mothers and other single parents has significantly diminished. Single-parent families, in which only one parent is present to care for the children, can hardly be viewed as a rarity in the United States. In 2007, a single parent headed about 29% of White families with children under 18, 31% of Hispanic families with children, and 58% of African-American families with children.
Interestingly, since 1995 the greatest increase in unwed motherhood has occurred among women in their 20s and 30s. This age group still constitutes a smaller proportion of unwed mothers than teens. In 2007, however, 45% of births to women in their 20s were to unmarried women. The lives of single parents and their children are not inevitably more difficult than life in a traditional nuclear family.
It is as inaccurate to assume that a single-parent family is necessarily deprived just as it is to assume that a two-parent family is always secure and happy. Nevertheless, life in a single-parent family can be extremely stressful, in both economic and emotional terms. A family headed by a single mother faces especially difficult problems when the mother is a teenager.
Why might low-income teenage women wish to have children and face the obvious financial difficulties of motherhood? Viewed from an interactionist perspective, teenage mothers tend to have low self-esteem and limited options; a child may provide a sense of motivation and purpose for a teenager whose economic worth in our society is limited at best. Given the barriers that many young women face because of their gender, race, ethnicity, and class, many teenagers may believe they have little to lose and much to gain by having a child.
A widely held stereotype is the U.S. is that "unwed mothers" and "babies having babies" are predominantly African-American. However, this view is not entirely accurate. African-Americans account for a disproportionate share of births to unmarried women and teenagers, but the majority of all babies born to unmarried teenage mothers are born to white adolescents. Moreover, since 1980, birthrates among black teenagers have generally declined.
Although 88% of single parents in the United States are mothers, the number of households headed by single fathers more than quadrupled from 1987 to 2007. Though single mothers often develop social networks, single fathers are typically more isolated. In addition, they must deal with schools and social service agencies that are more accustomed to women as custodial parents (Bureau of the Census, 1994).
