According to the latest study one in five American mothers has children who have different birth fathers. When the researchers look only at moms with two or more kids, that figure is even higher: 28 percent have kids with at least two different men.
Study’s author, Cassandra Dorius, a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Michigan Institute for Social Research said, “To put it in perspective, this is similar to the number of American adults with a college degree. It’s pervasive.” Dorius’ study, which was presented Friday at the annual meeting of the Population Association of America, examined data from nearly 4,000 U.S. women who had been interviewed more than 20 times between 1979 and 2009. They were all between the age of 14 and 22 when the series of interviews began for the purpose of this study.
Dorius calls this phenomenon important for study because there are consequences to both the mom and her children. Women with children from multiple fathers tend to be disadvantaged compared to other moms. “They are more likely to be under-employed, to have lower incomes, and to be less educated,” Dorius said. Further, this type of family structure can lead to a lot more stress for everyone involved, in part because the women need to juggle the demands and needs of more than one dad. She added, “Everyday decisions are more complex and family rules are more ambiguous. Families need to figure out who lives with whom and when, who pays for things like clothing, who is responsible for child support.”
Researchers have previously studied women with children from different dads only among the young or inner-city mothers. This new study comes from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth. This shows that this type of family structure is found at all levels of income and education. And it’s frequently tied to divorce and remarriage, not just to single motherhood explained Dorius. Forty-three percent of the women with kids with multiple dads were married when their first babies were born. She added that multiple-father type of family structure was more common among minority women, with 59 percent of African-American mothers, 35 percent of Hispanic mothers and 22 percent of white mothers reporting children with more than one father. Women with low income and little education were also more likely to have children with different birth fathers.
Researchers stress on the importance of the fact that it is hard to raise a child as a single parent. “While these women tended to be poorer than others to begin with, their whole lifetimes continue to be disadvantaged,” she said.
Katherine Stamps Mitchell, an assistant professor of human ecology and sociology at Louisiana State University in Baton Rouge said studies have shown that increasingly young women are choosing to become moms before they are committing to marriage. She added that it is not known what the long-term impact of that choice on the kids and the moms is. “This area of research is pretty new,” she adds. “It’s possible that some of these kids will be multiply disadvantaged.” Mitchell suspects that women would be less likely to choose early and single motherhood if they thought they would have more options in the future. “Certainly we know that women with higher education are delaying both marriage and childbearing for their careers,” she says. “Women with lower expectations for education and career don’t see that they will be in a significantly different place in 10 years. So there’s no reason to wait to have kids.”
The study was presented at the annual meeting of the Population Association of America in Washington.
Maternal grandmothers play crucial role in buffering grandchildren's adversity