Designer No Strings Babies
By CHICKMELIONfreelance
You have on your Alexander Wang T-shirt , Jimmy Choo boots, and prada purse tucked under the arm. Yes you are ready to step out. Oh, no wait! You forgot your designer baby....
There seems to be a new attitude surfacing among the ranks of aspiring- professional- self- made ladies. It’s all about “no strings attached babies.” Hollywood as usual glorifies the issue as it loves to do. We turn to trend setters like Camryn Manheim and reportedly Minnie Driver who allegedly have no strings attached babies. That is when the mothers ask their single guy friends to father them a child, minus financial and other responsibilities. Avalanche, LLC even went as far as to poll the issue at it’s leading online dating web sights, (Date.com, Matchmaker.com and Amor.com) to see who would even consider the prospect. And the results are quite surprising. 80 % of female online daters have considered getting pregnant in “no strings attached” relationships and nearly 50% of all the males interviewed would be more than happy to help out. An additional 30% of these would like that down in writing, ... “please and thank you!”
Whoa! Ladies let’s slow down for a moment here and take a little closer look at this new and reformed attitude on child rearing. Let’s extract the glitz of Hollywood from the picture and see what is happening in the average American streets. Has single aspiring mothers become the catch phrase of the day here too?
Yes in deed, in fact according to the census bureau more than 33% of all babies today are born to single women. The majority of these ladies are involved with the biological dad, and many even live with them. Some have even adopted the attitude that becoming “husband and wife” would detract from the roles of “mommy and daddy.” A whopping 81% of these ladies though agree that a child needs two parents to he healthy happy and secure. And secretly 64 percent of all the unwed moms polled wished their partners would commit to them on a more serious note.
And that seems to be the underlying unspoken general gist. It surfaces in two aspects of this issue; how they ended up in the situation of going-it-alone , as well as why they made the choices they did.
69 percent of married moms planned their most recent pregnancies, while 77% of the unweds did not- meaning they ( both parents) may have not been ready for the baby. The ladies, now alone in the rearing find themselves weighed down by extra financial burdens and unshared child care duties. 87 percent of them agree that it is tougher going the single rout, and that it is not as glamorous as Hollywood and those polled on the dating sites make it out to be. Even Married moms, 87% of them to be exact express sympathy and support for their counterparts.
So what is really going on here and why? Married or not, the attitude was quite common, having a partner to raise children with is no bed of roses. They both agreed that the husbands often represented just another child to deal with. Along with him came the burden of the in-laws and their views of child rearing. Not to mention having to work on a marriage over and above all else, and being married does not guarantee that loneliness is eliminated from the picture, because their husbands work so much or they are deployed military men on lengthy assignments.
It leaves me to wonder if we as women are loosing faith in the paternal skills of our counterparts? Or are we letting them off of the hook in regards to their responsibilities too quickly? It will be interesting though what the future holds for the “fathers” of our species. If statistics keep moving in the direction they are, our male children will be raised at the hands of the very women who thought to go it alone because it was easier than holding “him the father,” to his end of the responsibility. Could fatherhood become a byword in the future? I wonder.
