Roanoke Times
                 Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: THURSDAY, July 15, 1993                   TAG: 9309030401
SECTION: EDITORIAL                    PAGE: A14   EDITION: METRO 
SOURCE: 
DATELINE:                                 LENGTH: Medium

WHEN IT'S JUST MOM AND THE KIDS

To be sure, it is a trend that crosses racial and socioeconomic boundaries, with out-of-wedlock birth rates on the rise among educated women as well as the uneducated, among women in good-paying, professional and managerial jobs as well as women who are poor.

This, the writer of the Census Bureau report says, reflects a change in social attitudes. Unwed mothers are no longer pariahs.

An unmarried woman who gets pregnant no longer has to make a desperate choice between aborting a baby when she does not want to, or bearing it knowing she either will have to give it up or accept life as a social outcast. That was a choice that in decades past typically stigmatized mother and child and condemned both to psychological and material hardships.

OK. Yet look, if you dare, where we are now.

Not just Murphy-Brown types, professional career women, have babies out of wedlock. A greater number of teens and poor women do.

In Virginia, 55 teen-age girls get pregnant each day, and 80 percent of their babies are born out of wedlock. Roanoke's rate is more than double the state's, a frightening fact.

Among black Americans, the birth rates for unmarried women are particularly high. President Johnson called the breakdown of the family the chief threat to the well-being of blacks in 1965, when 28 percent of all black children were born out of wedlock. Today, some 65 percent of black children are born to unwed mothers.

Whatever one's moral perspective on out-of-wedlock births, the evidence is overwhelming that most children are better off when raised by both parents.

And not just economically. A 1991 report by the National Commission on Children found in a telephone survey of 900 children nationwide that those in households with both parents present were more satisfied than children in single-parent or stepfamily households with the amount of time they spent with their parents and with the level of parental involvement in their activities.

Fewer of their parents missed the important events in their lives. They got more of their parents' attention and guidance.

It's simple common sense that two committed, participative parents, available to give each other emotional support and to share responsibilities, will on average have more time to devote to the needs of their children than one who is struggling to be everything and do everything for her children.

Responses from the 1,700 parents who participated in the telephone survey, plus 1,300 adults in a companion, face-to-face survey, reflected the toll this takes on adults, too.

Among the factors the survey identified as making a parent's job harder were: raising a child ``without the consistent support and involvement of the child's other parent,'' too little time to spend with the children because of work and other demands, and worry about financial matters. The latter two, of course, often result from or are made worse by the first.

For despite the rise in single-motherhood among financially secure women, these single moms are the minority. The correlation between single-parent households and poverty is well-established.

Nearly 75 percent of children in this country who grow up in single-parent families are poor at some time during their first 10 years, compared to only 20 percent of children in two-parent households. And, the Commission on Children study concludes, poverty is less likely to be long-term and severe in families with two parents.

None of this is to say that single parents are to be scorned or cast out. They need more support. And they will be relieved to know that, despite the emotional and financial strain, both parents and children in these households reported close parent-child relationships in the survey.

It's just that single parents face much harder a struggle succeeding at what already is the toughest job most people will ever have - raising their children well.

Add to this the sad fact that many unwed mothers are teen-agers, and you've got a national crisis. Parenting, especially single-parenting, is hard enough as it is. It's no job for children.