This might come as a shock to you, but my parents were never married. Yes, I'm one of those 'out of wedlock' children.

Of course, they had been toghether for nine years when they had me and it lasted another four, but no marriage ever happened.

This did not stop me from being a happy, well adjusted child for the most part. Nor did it mean at any point that I didn't have two loving, caring parents, two sets of grandparents and an assortment of aunts, uncles and family friends, that all looked out for me and took care of me growing up.

It is almost as if marriage is a societal contruct, that is loosing importance or something.
Then again I'm not american.

It has to do with the breaking down of the middle class. Poor people marry less.

pretty statistic but of no significance.

You don't have to be married to live and raise a child together.
The child's parents could be divorced one year after childbirth, which leads to the child being raised by one parent.

Broken families and violence are highly linked, maybe even the strongest predictor of violence in life.

Harvard sociologist Robert Sampson has written that “Family structure is one of the strongest, if not the strongest, predictor of variations in urban violence across cities in the United States.” His views are echoed by the eminent criminologists Michael Gottfredson and Travis Hirschi, who have written that “such family measures as the percentage of the population divorced, the percentage of households headed by women, and the percentage of unattached individuals in the community are among the most powerful predictors of crime rates.”

https://ifstudies.org/blog/school-shootings-fathers-divorce-family-structure

Are you just going to continually ignore what we post?

So what? My nephew was born out of out wedlock and my sister and her husband are still together after 15 years.

I teach my girls to respect themselves. They don't need a guy to make them happy. Be happy with who you are. And I teach my son to respect women.

Marriage is becoming an outmoded institution in the west. The nuclear family just isn't a necessary factor in development anymore. People don't want to be trapped in contractual unions that leave them miserable and can affect them the rest of their lives. What works for some, doesn't work for everyone.

Marriage ≠ family.

I am not sure it has anything to do poverty. Romania and Bulgaria are both equally poor, but the rate of children born out of wedlock is among the highest in Bulgaria, but among the lowest in Romania.