These are some of the arguments that Ingraham deploys to illustrate the gender, race, and ethnic nuances of wedding advertisement and the wedding industry.
According to Furstenberg (2003), the problem regarding teenage childbearing is misplaced. Instead of seeking ways to limit it, one should ask why it is problematic. Shattering many of the myths of teen childbearing -- showing, for instance, that many of the mothers do go on to become productive members of society (sometimes on a footing with 'regular mother), and that these mothers ultimately acted better for themselves than had they married the person who would have, likely, ruined their lives, as well as that there is little statistical numerical difference between the numbers of white and black premarital birth, and that teenage birth was always common but only became problematic when it occurred outside marriage (starting off first with the Blacks and then progressing to Whites) - Furstenberg shows that disapproval is relegated solely to America's evangelical Christian minority views. In this way, the entire issue of pre-martial teen motherhood it serves as social construction fueled by a nation's ideology, and that in basis there should be...
The problem, Furstenberg asserts, is not that teens are having children -- teens always did -- but that this is happening outside wedlock and this contravenes with the Evangelical (not Puritan (as popularly thought) mindset of contemporary America.
Research limitations with Furstenberg's study are that no comparative research was conducted on other cultures, and that, as he himself notes in regards to his Baltimore study, many other differences between the subjects and their former classmates should have been taken into effect. Also noticeable is the fact that whilst significant and remarkable longitudinal attention was dedicated to the cohort of Black pre-marital teenage mothers, no corresponding attention was accorded their former classmates. Interesting, too, would have been research on the contrast between children born in a non-marital nurturing marriage to those born in a conventional (stable) and unhappy marital structure.
Furstenberg's main point is that concern of pre-marital teen childbearing is misplaced; that much of the findings are erroneous; that concern of problem is a social construction, and that research should be better placed on other aspects.
