Yo baby daddy

How did “baby mama” and “baby daddy” become acceptable expressions of relationships? I’m not a pro-marriage fundamentalist, but I do believe that if you make a family, you have an obligation to participate and nurture that family. Creating human life is a contract of commitment and responsibility raising the person you brought into being.

We even have other discouragingly common terminology to describe familial failure: “dead-beat dad.” Social commentators consider the phenomenon of dead-beat dads to be a source of dysfunction in child development. It may be one factor, but I don’t whole-heartedly blame dead-beat dads for the totality of family breakdown. I see many social and cultural variables tugging on the strings of the relationship fabric.

And what about the negative connotation, the social stigma, of “single mother,” or, more judgmentally, “un-wed mother”? Are all single parents necessarily flawed at parenting? In my personal experience, I know that not to be the case. I’ve known many successful families created from non-traditional households. My best friend was even raised by a single father and was rarely visited by her “dead-beat mom.”

Maybe these expressions are evolutions in U.S. speech to describe complex relationships that previously had no terminology to quantify the variables of modern families. Maybe these relationships are nothing new to U.S. society, but are getting their own parlance for the first time. Personally, I’d prefer that there be no dead-beats and no negative implication to single parent child-rearing. “Baby mama” and “baby daddy” might be handy expressions, but the implication is the absence of a missing parent. Mommies and daddies should own-up to the complicated family they created and un-complicate their children’s lives.