It’s well known that the traditional family unit in Western and westernized countries is changing, with marriage becoming less important and couples opting to have children before tying the knot. A lot of people are concerned about this trend rightfully as it been shown that children that grow up in unstable or single parent households are more vulnerable to abuse, poorer, and have worse life outcomes. But I think I can offer an interesting insight on this trend, in my home country(Colombia) we have the highest rate of children born out of wedlock in the world. About 84% of children are born to unwed mothers, furthermore we also have the lowest marriage rates with only 20% of the adult population being married. For comparison, in the United States 39% of children are born out of wedlock and in Europe around 40% ranging from a low of 9% in Greece and a high of 60% in France. Furthermore, out of wedlock births aren’t new, even in the 1970s a third of children in Colombia where born to unmarried mothers, the trend has just accelerated in recent years.

Now the assumption a lot of people make is that all women who have children out of wedlock are single, but the majority are still in relationships with the father. In Colombia a lot couples will forgo marriage in favor of cohabitation because you basically get the same right as married couples after living together for two years. The majority (60%) of Colombian children still live with both their biological parents while 27% live with one parent only which isn’t good but more concerning is 11% live with neither. However, children in Colombia and in Latin America are more likely to live with both extended relatives such as an aunt, grandma, grandpa, uncle, cousin etc in multigenerational housing which has been shown to have a positive effect on children and ease a lot of the burden of being a low income parent raising your child a lone. In essence we have more of a it takes a village mentality in regards to raising children where everyone is expected to do their part. That’s partly why we are more flexible and nonchalant about marriage because we weren’t taught that the nuclear family was the only way to raise children.

This is quite different in the USA where I see more people freak out of wedlock births and single mothers, which I don’t think is ideal either exactly but I don’t think many of you have complete picture of the situation. In the USA I noticed that people are less likely to have close contact with their extended family and single parents are more likely to be totally alone in the process of raising a child which makes the burden even harder than what it already is, leading to issues like kids getting in trouble because they have no adult supervision to look out for them since the sole parent has to work all the time to make a living.

Of course things aren’t perfect, there is a problem in my home country with poor sex education, violence and corruption but I just wanted to offer a perspective on the issue of out of wedlock births and lowering marriage rates and how western countries can adopt to those changes in order to still raise children since this trend has already captured my country long ago.

I am very curious to hear other people thoughts on this issue and how you think family dynamics could change in the future given these trends and what would you do to address it.