Why Aren't We Talking More About Deadbeat Dads?
LatestApparently, it’s awful to be a single mother in America. They’re are more likely to have lower levels of education, lower income, and if they’re uneducated they’re much less likely to get married than their more educated counterparts, which shuts them out of the added income a husband can provide for a family. To make matters worse, single mothers are much more likely to be solely in charge of children than single men. Why, oh why can’t women get it right? Why are they so bad at making decisions? Why the fuck aren’t we talking more about men?
In yesterday’s New York Times, Jason DeParle explores a growing economic gap between married couples with children and unmarried women taking care of children on their own. Married couples are more likely to be more highly educated, higher earning, and have children who are more likely to go on to complete college and not grow into adult screw ups who show up to their old high school cafeteria during lunch hour and stand around like some kind of big shot. Single women, on the other hand, are getting shat on. They’re often less highly educated, less “marriageable,” and stuck taking care of the kids.
College-educated Americans like the Faulkners are increasingly likely to marry one another, compounding their growing advantages in pay. Less-educated women like Ms. Schairer, who left college without finishing her degree, are growing less likely to marry at all, raising children on pinched paychecks that come in ones, not twos.
But lost in the discussion of who is getting shat on is identification of who is doing the shitting — it seems that single women stuck with children must, at some point, have had interactions with men who helped them get into the mess they’re currently in, and it stands to reason that every one of those interactions wasn’t the result of a baby-crazy semen stealing spree. Pregnancy isn’t just a magical happening that befalls a woman like a pimple; in order for a woman to be left alone with children, at some point, there must have been a man around to do the leaving. But that point gets glossed over in the Times piece; in six pages of web text, there are only passing mentions of the male partners who leave the mothers of their children slipped in with little finger pointing or blame,