isabel v. sawhill, generation unbound: drifting into sex and parenthood without marriage

I think that many single parents are doing a heroic job of raising children on their own. Sawhill: The children born under those circumstances are going to have constrained life chances, and it's going to be stressful for their parents as well, and it's often going to produce a single-parent family that is going to struggle both economically and in other ways. Sixty percent of all births to young unmarried adults, I'm talking about people under the age of 30, are unplanned, unintended.ĪP: On the one hand you support all the personal choices and freedoms we now have in terms of sex, contraception and forming families, but you then argue that drifting into parenthood is a bad idea.

We may have always known that to be true but we have not been practicing it.

Their life prospects are being undermined by too many young adults drifting into relationships, pregnancy, childbearing, rather than waiting until they're ready to be parents.

Sawhill: I'm arguing more centrally that it's not good for children. The book, from Brookings Institution Press, is out Thursday.ĪP: The premise of your book seems to be that unplanned pregnancies and births are bad for the economy, bad for our culture? Is that what you're arguing? The senior fellow at the Brookings Institution argues in a new book, 'Generation Unbound: Drifting into Sex and Parenthood without Marriage,' that the act of not becoming pregnant until one is ready would save billions of dollars and help ensure that children are born into families with the means and motivation to care for them. Sawhill sees a cultural divide between the planners and the drifters. NEW YORK - When it comes to pregnancy and childrearing, behavioral economist Isabel V.

Isabel v. sawhill, generation unbound: drifting into sex and parenthood without marriage