I’ve said it before, but it apparently needs to be said again: we shouldn’t spend our time wringing our hands about a rising trend of single parenthood, but rather spend it fixing the fact that this country fails its single parents.
New York City has recently launched a public ad campaign aimed at teen pregnancy, despite the fact that the city has seen a nearly 30 percent drop in rates. The ads are targeted at teens who might be at risk of getting pregnant. But rather than spreading useful information (cough cough sex ed and access to contraception cough cough), the ads try to shame teens out of pregnancy.
Take this ad, telling viewers that teen pregnancy will “cost you” to the tune of thousands of dollars each year:
Or this ad, warning that a child born to a teen is twice as likely not to graduate high school:
And this ad, that makes single parenthood sound like a death sentence:
These ads heap shame and stigma on teens, putting them in a real Catch-22, as Jasmine Burnett of NYC for Reproductive Justice told Colorlines. “It’s like you’re damned if you do and damned if you don’t. If you have your child, you’re shamed and seen as an irresponsible decision-maker. If you choose not to have your child and have an abortion instead, you’re shamed for that, too.” In response, the New York Coalition for Reproductive Justice launched a campaign this week against the ads, highlighting the need for poverty fighting programs, sex education, access to contraception, and a focus on the health disparities that affect communities of color.
This is the problem: the ads treat teen parenthood in general, and single parenthood in particular, as if it’s fated to be the worst life decision a person can make. But teens are not to blame for that. Single parenthood doesn’t have to be a heavy and unbearable burden. Our policies are to blame for making it harder than it has to be.
Single parenthood isn’t just on the rise in the U.S. A recent report from Legal Momentum compared rates among us and 16 other high-income countries. While we have the highest rate at 27 percent, it’s 10 percent or higher in all of the countries except Spain and exceeds 20 percent in four. The biggest difference? The policies in place – or, in our case, the lack thereof – that could make life easier for these parents.
In fact, the report bestows upon us the dubious distinction of being the worst place for single parents among all of these countries. That’s because parents here have the highest uninsured rates, lack guaranteed paid time off, experience the stingiest income support system, have to wait longest for early childhood education to begin, and have a low rate of receiving child support, all thanks to our inability to implement a better policy regime. Single parents are also far more likely to be employed in low-wage jobs and, even though they have above average employment rates, also have above average poverty rates. In fact, single mothers earn less than half of what households with a married couple make, bringing in about $32,500 compared to $71,800 for married couple families.
That thousand dollar price tag for having a child wouldn’t be so daunting if more than 60 percent of single mothers weren’t employed in the low-pay retail or service industries. It wouldn’t be so scary to be a parent without a partner if these jobs had predictable schedules and we offered real support for parents who need child care and time off to care for them.
As Kate Stewart of Advocates for Youth told Colorlines, “Some teens are going to become pregnant and decide to have the baby. That’s life. It’s happened for hundreds of years. But when that happens, we have to make sure that teen parents have support, respect and access to programs that can help them be successful.” That last part is where the blame really lies. Rather than shaming teens for potentially becoming pregnant, we should be spending our public dollars and collective energy figuring out how to better support them when they do. The children of teen parents don’t need to experience lower outcomes than others. They don’t need to live in poverty. Single mothers don’t need to struggle to provide for their kids. We just refuse to better help them.
