About eight in 10 black children in Indiana are born to unwed parents - a start to life that sets them up for problems during adolescence and beyond, according to an Indiana Black Expo report.
Indiana's black youths fare significantly worse than Hoosier youths in general across 18 indicators of well-being, such as graduation rates and poverty levels, and do worse than black youths in the U.S, according to the report being released Friday.
Tanasha Anders, acting president and chief executive of Indiana Black Expo, said the problem comes down to education - making sure young people finish school and understand the consequences of having a baby.
"Everything else is a domino effect," she said.
The explosion of births to unwed parents is driving many of the state's social problems, such as increases in poverty and child abuse and the growing cost of public aid, said Bill Stanczykiewicz, president and CEO of the Indiana Youth Institute. He added that the problem is not exclusive to any one race.
Indiana's out-of-wedlock birth rate is at an all-time high, with unwed mothers accounting for nearly 40 percent of all births, he said. Nationally, about 36 percent of all births are to unwed mothers.
Stanczykiewicz said the situation is among the toughest social issues to address.
"It is very difficult, even for well-meaning people, to get together and talk about how we talk to people about their sex lives and how to parent children," he said.
Another complicating factor is that a growing number of the single-parent births are to young adults, instead of teens, and that requires a new and different kind of message. But finding a way to address the situation is critical, he said.
Child Trends, a nonpartisan national children's research organization, reports children born to single mothers are more likely to:
n Live in poverty and experience social and emotional problems.
n Have low educational attainment, engage in sex at younger ages and have a premarital birth.
n Enter adulthood neither in school nor employed, or have lower occupational status and income, and more troubled marriages and divorces than those born to married parents.
The issues that spin out of struggling single-parent families show up throughout the new Black Expo report, including the teen birth rate of 81 per 1,000 for blacks. That is almost twice the state's overall teen birth rate of 43.5 per 1,000.
About 35 percent of black children live in families headed by married parents, compared with 69 percent of all Indiana children, according to the report.
And don't forget the disproportionate number of black prison inmates.
