A report from The New York Times on Sunday has brought an alarming statistic to light.  It found that in 2009, more than half of new mothers gave birth to their children outside of marriage.

The reasoning for this — the normalization of “contemporary” families and government social safety nets.  According to the American Family Association, a contemporary family is any family that does not fall under the category of a mother, father and children.  According to its studies, this is a dangerous trend, as children of contemporary families tend to have higher instances of falling into poverty, failing in schools and suffering emotional and behavioral problems.

The AFA also has a higher instance of continuing the cycle of children being born outside of marriages or being born into marriages that end in divorce.  It has also been argued by sociologists and psychologists that a lack of family, meaning both parents living and raising children together, lends to the loss of conservative values that this country was founded upon.

When the Times went to Lorain, Ohio, which had the highest instance of unmarried mothers under 30 at 63 percent, it reported the main reason they could remain single was because of government social programs.  One mother, who remained unnamed, said that because she could rely on the government to provide free daycare, food stamps and healthcare, she didn’t need to marry the man she conceived three children with.  The reason she gave for not marrying him? He couldn’t be trusted.

So to clarify, she wanted to have children with a man she had no intentions of marrying, so the government had to step in and use tax money, almost none of which she contributed because she fell into the 49.8 percent of Americans who don’t pay income tax.  That is insane.

We need to get back to having children in stable marriages, if not for the sake of our debt, which is being rung up by outrageous amounts of social programs, but for our future children.  Children need to be brought up in homes with two parents, preferably a mother and a father, because that is what nature intended to happen.  Children who are brought up in a classic nuclear family model are three times more likely to not only graduate college and become successful, but they are also more likely to have children in a marriage when they can afford to take care of them.

Having children is not a right, it is a privilege and a responsibility, but most people in our generation don’t know the meaning of those two words.