Promises I Can Keep
Millie Acevedo bore her first child before the age of 16 and dropped out of high school to care for her newborn. Now 27, she is the unmarried mother of three and is raising her kids in one of Philadelphia's poorest neighborhoods. Would she and her children be better off if she had waited to have them and had married their father first? Why do so many poor American youth like Millie continue to have children before they can afford to take care of them? Over a span of five years, sociologists Kathryn Edin and Maria Kefalas talked in-depth with 162 low-income single moms like Millie to learn how they think about marriage and family. Promises I Can Keep offers an intimate look at what marriage and motherhood mean to these women and provides the most extensive on-the-ground study to date of why they put children before marriage despite the daunting challenges they know lie ahead.
Stats for nerds
3recommend
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2014–2020years
100% recommend
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What Hacker News says
- Who's gonna want to marry (let alone have kids with) a man who is unemployed and isn't even looking for work?
This betrays your unfamiliarity with the segment of population under question. As it turns out, lots of women will readily have kids with those men. Along with the growth of single-man household, we observe growth of single never married women with children.
See for example "Promises I Can Keep" (https://www.amazon.com/Promises-Can-Keep-Motherhood-Marriage...) and "Doing the Best I Can" (https://www.amazon.com/Doing-Best-Can-Fatherhood-Inner/dp/05...) for some sociological view of realities about the lives of people this discussion revolves around.
- They're serially monogamous, not life long exclusive pair bonds. Not that those don't exist but they're mostly a minority pursuit.
The below quotation gives a flavour of what it's like for the Irish non working class, living in or applying for social housing. From what I've read of the book Promises I Can Keep and Charles Murray's Coming Apart it's pretty close to the situation in the US non working class, with the no college working class trending that way.
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I don’t care if you break up with your significant other, spouse, or what it was, or who was at fault, but if I get one more file like the soap opera I have just been handed this week (you may wish to take notes)…
…wherein Household A comprised of B, C and child D and Household Q comprised of R, S and children T and U have both had applications in for a couple of years for social housing.
(i) Household A’s application failed because the parties B and C were not in communication with us as to whether they wanted to proceed. B did not answer our letter, C did; they’ve since split up and are at different addresses. More letters on our part to the new addresses. B doesn’t answer but C does, he still wants to apply for a house because now he’s with a new partner and they have a new baby. Fine, that’s what we’re here for.
(ii) Household Q’s application has been approved. Except that R and S have also since split up, but they never bothered to tell us, and I only discovered this because
(iii) C and S are now cohabiting. And have a new (third) application in for social housing. All of which means:
(iv) We don’t know where B is; we presume she took child D with her wherever she is now. Maybe she will or maybe she won’t apply for social housing on her own behalf. R’s application which has been approved now has to be nullified or something of the like because the circumstances have changed. R may be cohabiting with a new partner and with a new baby of their own; we don’t know and will have to find out.
Meanwhile, C and S and her children T and U and their new baby W are all in a fourth new address, have a new application in as Household Y, and will have to be processed as soon as we disentangle Household A’s application, deal with terminating Household Q’s application, and enter Household Y’s application with the two persons from A and Q that the computer system – which was not designed to deal with the game of “musical chairs” when it comes to swapping your partners – won’t let us assign C and S to a new application because they’re already on the system with their prior applications.
And that means delay, which means C and S (and possibly R and/or B) will be on the phone yelling at us about being on the housing list with years and why the delay when they’re qualified they’re going to the local paper, their local councillor, their local representative about this!
You can see why I’m all NO CANOODLING UNTIL YOU SORT YOURSELVES OUT AND GIVE US ALL AND I DO MEAN ALL THE PERTINENT DETAILS IN A TIMELY MANNER, I trust?
- > From what I understood motherhood is a status symbol, also a right of passage.
_Promises I Can Keep_ is a good book on this topic.
