My mother and father never had a happy marriage. They shared little in common. My father was a blue-collar, working-class man from Brooklyn. My mother came from a blue-collar, working-class family, but she was raised in Queens. My parents frequently fought, sometimes viciously. Over time, my father grew detached, drank, and became abusive. At the same time, my mother grew spiteful, resentful, and bitter. They eventually divorced.
One day, I asked my mother when she and my father married. It turns out that my mother gave birth to my elder sister four months after marrying my father. I assumed she got pregnant and was forced to marry. What I didn't know was my mother kept a secret.
My elder sister has a different father. Growing up in a dysfunctional family, I never understood the disparity of treatment, resentment, and tension in the household. My mother disliked me for being my father's daughter and took her anger and frustration out on me. My father also took his anger and frustration out on me because, unlike my sister, I was his daughter.
The situation above is even more common today. Trends in childbirth rates show a significant increase in births outside of marriage over the last three decades. These patterns are consistent across all racial groups, with delivery occurring to nonmarried White women rising 13 percent and Hispanic women by 18 percent.
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| Birth occurring outside of marriage increasing across all groups |
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| Nonmarried Women Births by Education |
Much has been written about the impact of illegitimacy on a child; they tend to act out and are socially and emotionally unstable. However, these studies focus on single-parent households, usually unwed mothers and children. Such homes are less affluent, less educated, and more likely to be below poverty.
Yet the effect of an illegitimate child on other family members, especially other children in the home, is rarely recognized. An unappreciated phenomenon takes place, what I call the Legitimacy Paradox.
The legitimacy paradox occurs when the child born outside the marriage is preferred to those born to the married couple (the legitimate children). The non-biological parent recognizes the disinvestment in their child in favor of someone else's child and begins to resent their partner. If the imbalance persists, the syndrome ultimately leads to tension and alienation.
In the end, the impact on the children is the opposite of what would be expected. The legitimate children are neglected and deprived of investment and resources, while the household over-invests in the illegitimate child. This perverse outcome or paradox is most acute in households where the mother brings the illegitimate child into the home, and the father is uninvolved in child-raising.
More research needs to be done on the Legitimacy Paradox. The impact of illegitimacy is not just a macro-social phenomenon driving poverty and inequality. Illegitimacy also affects family dynamics at the micro household level. The increased complexity of domestic structures and the growing number of births to nonmarried women at all socio-economic levels highlights the need to quantify the impact of children born to nonmarried women accounting for the Legitimacy Paradox.
