Single people live in the village too...

Someone asked me what National Foster Care Month has to do with being single and other people’s kids, other than the fact that foster kids are obviously OPKs. I guess I can see why that would be confusing since most people don’t think about singledom and kids in the same train of thought. But as I mentioned in a previous post, the fact that I don’t want kids of my own doesn’t mean I don’t like kids. I’ll admit I’m not all that great with little kids (for that matter, I’m not great with anyone, of any age, that isn’t capable of being particularly rational), but one of the reasons I love my job as a professor is that I get to constantly interact with young people. Given that I don’t want kids of my own but I do like being around young people, I have often thought that doing some sort of volunteer work with kids would be a good way to achieve that. So my train of thought was something like, “I don’t want kids of my own but I like being around young people sometimes. All my friends have kids and I’m looking forward to being a part of those kids’ lives but aren’t there other kids out there that would benefit from having someone like me around once in a while? Hey, there’s an ad about it being National Foster Care Month – I should look into that…”

I’m apparently not particularly unusual in this thinking. Kay Trimberger points out that many happily single women have strong relationships with younger people; indeed, single people tend to enjoy larger and stronger communities in general than coupled people. That certainly makes intuitive sense to me though the economist in me starts wondering how much causation there is, and which direction it really goes. That is, is it being happily single that leads women to build strong communities (i.e., women who have no intention of settling may go out and build strong communities to ensure they still have a support system they can rely upon)? Or is that have a strong community makes women happier about being single (i.e., women who happen to have strong communities are less likely to feel the void of being alone)? Or is it that happy women with strong communities are less likely to settle for a less-than-stellar partner and so remain single? The explanation is probably some mix of all of the above, and different for every woman who fits this particular mold…