More than half of all children born in Scotland are now born to unmarried parents

[expatinscotland]

here

And among mothers under the age of 30, that figure rises to 2/3.

Wow!

Had no idea it was so high.

But come to think of it, everytime I was in hospital having a baby, I was the only married woman in a room of 4 mothers.

And the eldest (was 32 when DD1 born, 34 with DD2 and 37 with DS).

Makes me wonder about the future for my children.

I'd always hoped they would marry, for some reason, before having kids.

Maybe it's because my parents are married, too, as are DH's.

'Errr they're not actually in yet though are they. '

That's odd, in last year's bi-elections, Labour lost quite a few seats in Parliament to the Tory party.

In the last few opinion polls, results published in the news, Cameron was ahead of Brown.

But no, they're just some grassroots lunatic fringe.

Pay them no mind.

I can't see anything in that news story that differentiates between 'parents who are not living in the same house or having any couple relatinship' and 'parents who have a shared mortgage etc but just don't happen to have made a declaration in front of a registrar'. So I am not sure what use the statistic is.

expat works for the tories

Oh, yeah, south. You know how much I love Cameron. Almost as much as Gordon Clown .

Still not actually in Downing Street though or have I missed something

Just because Tories are talking about it doesn't mean it's something the whole country worries about. I think the majority of us are focusing a little more on what they could do for the country financially or not as the case may be.

I don't feel judged at all, And I'm the lowest of the low I guess - an unmarried (never was) single working mother! For the type of person who gets upset by these things of course.

Maybe in some sense it is a good thing as it indicates that fewer women feel the need to be married as they are able to manage on their own?

Also, many of the children born to unmarried parents - the parents may well be in a committed relationship but 'just' not married.

i once worked with a single woman who was 65 odd

she used to moan her head off about married persons tax relief, it made me look on life differently.

Some of those parents are also probably in longer relationships than those who are married.

I'm not coming from an anti marriage stance at all btw (my DSis is married to a lovely man and they are very happy together) but I do think it's a good thing if people don't feel that they 'have' to get married.

Stats are important because they not only serve as the basis for people to get funding for further study but also because they often drive policy proposals and legislation, especially in this Administration's target-driven government.

For example, stats on alcohol use and abuse in Scotland are the basis for new proposals in front of Holyrood to institute a minimum price/unit of alcohol. Not all alcohol users are irresponsible or abusers, but everyone's going to pay for those who are.

Not all teen drivers or drivers under the age of 25 are bad or reckless, but statistically they have a higher rate of accident, so insurance companies use this as a basis to charge all drivers under 25 more money for auto insurance.

This stat pertains to children born to unmarried mothers. Cue further studies into possible correlation between being born to an unmarried person and childhood poverty and perhaps further down the line legislation targeted at this.

Again, the stat itself is not a value judgement. It's just a number.

But its important lies in that policymakers and legislators use it to make qualitive judgements that may have big impact on peoples' lifestyle choices.

..and?

33.3% of our children were born to unmarried parents. We got married two months after he was born though.

(responding to OP only- it's late and can't be bothered to read whole thread)

And anyone who thinks the Tories won't at the very least be doing some major power-sharing come 2010 had better start selecting their opposing candidate now and volunteering to campaign for them. Or at least Google the term 'swing voter'.

Never mind. I give up!

Stats are only useful if they are contexualised though.

If you take the raw data : children of lone parents are less likely to get degrees for example, you might conclude that that is because a) they are not clever b) they don't want to go to university c) they didn't get educated academically d) they wanted to get a job instead blah di blah di blah, without examining the reason for the raw figure, the number in itself doesn't tell you very much. If you look at children who live in poverty, you will find that they are less likely to go to university than those children who don't, there is no difference between whether they have one parent or two. So that statistic starts to look a little more complex than it did on first sight, when you realise that children of lone parents are statistically far more likely to live in poverty than the average child.

Here's a good statistic: crime levels in my local area have fallen. When I rang the police to report the theft of my purse, on learning that I hadn't actually watched the thief take it (my back being turned at the time) the operator said "oh that's a loss then, not a theft". Given that if I'd seen the woman take it I would have stopped her so there would have been no crime, this struck me as a very good way of ensuring that crime figures went down. Lies, damned lies and statistics eh?

marriage is up

divorce is too

Exactly, LB, but dismissming them outright because of assuming they're only value is in a moral judgement of one's own life isn't very useful, either.

i know about 2 never marrieds

everyone gets married dont they they just split up

'marriage is up

divorce is too '

Apparently, not up here!

I used to be a climber. I know many never marrieds. Many childfree by choice as well.

i am the only one of my large circle of friends not to be married

get sick of the 'oh i forgot he's not your dh' comments

' come back to me when you have been together 20 years'

I don't take it a slight on my life- I was just trying to point out that the stats hide a multitude of situations, and that non-marriage does not necessarily equal unstable relationship and precarious lifestyle.

As Bella says, statistics are complex things. At the moment, it seems clear that married couples are far more likely on average to stay together. But might not that be because atm it is statistically more likely that more of the most committed couples choose to get married. In other words, the group of unmarried couples contains a larger proportion of less committed couples than the married group(doesn't mean they are all, or even most of them, less committed).

Surely if more people out of the less committed group are forced/enticed to get married, that won't suddenly make them more committed; all it will mean is that some of the less committed couples are now in the married couples group so (other things being equal) the married group will now contain more couples likely to split up.

It's certainly worthy of further study and discussion, as many stats are (stats show obesity is rising, too, for example, particularly among children. It's important to try to find out why because of health and lifestyle ramifications).

In the 1800s when stats were the same, the factors behind why people weren't married were of course different. It was actually quite hard for some couples, particularly in rural locations to actually legally marry. And again, the practice of irregular marriage was seen as valid and credible in many areas, as well as the practice of the woman being pregnant or even having hard children by the partner before marriage as proof of fertility (Robert Burns' only wife, Jean, for example, had 4 children by him before he married her).

I think it depended on where you were in the 1880s. The area we were studying was an industrial town and major seaport, so probably a fair few of those relationships genuinely were irregular.