Single Parent Families and Social Policy

The equality debate's gone to hell and I'm not keen to continue dead horse flogging in the face of persistent intransigence (I must be getting old), but YR on single mothers still has some life left in it:


Cock: Apparently single mothers are now eligible for maternity leave so long as they marry within 3 months. Should government policy continue to discriminate against single mothers?


A: Isn't there empirical evidence that dual parent households are better for the children? (Before you guys jump on me, notice I said "dual," not "one parent of each gender")


B: Surely you don't mean "dual regardless of how the dual status comes about, including marriage for reasons largely unrelated to a good human relationship between the persons marrying but instead related entirely to societal sexual priggishness"? Anyway I'm curious as to how there can be "empirical evidence" on the relative quality of the experience of a child -- explain "better", please, for one.


C: How about on almost every single criterion that one may think of ranging from family income, educational opportunities to educational achievement to likely criminal activity to level of occupation etc.?

http://www.contemporaryfamilies.org/subtemplate.php?t=briefingPapers&ext=marriagepovertypublicpoli

But I should stress that this partially appears to be a proxy for poverty (or simply low income) such that single parents in countries with strong social support from the state do somewhat better as do well educated single parents.


B: I wasn't aware parents had as their primary function the breeding of academic-economic digits. Empirical evidence for "every single criterion"? Love? Trust? Happiness? Values? Emotional security? Is there any particular reason why marriage changes the ability of a person to provide these to a child? Why would 2 people be any better necessarily than 1? And if you had to have 2 people, what does marriage have to do with it? Why do the two people have to even be having a sexual relationship? Or living together? And given children born to single mothers, children who like it or not already exist, why should they be deprived (through the maternity leave policy) of more access to the one parent they do have? Boggle.


C: And I wasn’t aware that these were not important characteristics at all. Unless you believe oh say poverty is a better state to be in as compared to being relatively well-off? Sure I don’t like the policy anymore than presumably you do but don’t conflate the issues here.

I personally think this has more to do with economics more than anything else e.g. ability to afford daycare or to work from home or to afford tuition or simply not having to have to work multiple shifts in order to afford the above. But here’s your original question to Jon in full:

Surely you don't mean "dual regardless of how the dual status comes about, including marriage for reasons largely unrelated to a good human relationship between the persons marrying but instead related entirely to societal sexual priggishness"? Anyway I'm curious as to how there can be "empirical evidence" on the relative quality of the experience of a child -- explain "better", please, for one.

So we could spend all this time and electronic letters nitpicking at every single criterion in the determination of any one single law and not get to the heart of the issue i.e. is it a reasonable presumption that dual parent families are likelier than not to be able to provide better for their child or children ceteris peribus. Of course we can throw around confounding characteristics such as the number of children, educational level, income level but if we accept that a single parent can provide x level of whatever criterion you want to think of, is that any plausible reason on YOUR SIDE why this is not necessarily the case in the case of a married couple?


B: Ok, 2 questions here. (1) Relative merits of dual parent households as they exist (regardless of whether the merit arises from the existence of 2 people or other correlative factors); and (2) Policy in question. One can concede (1) to the nth power while still thinking (2) sucks donkey balls. Re (1) my initial response was scepticism about the coherence of the suggestion Jon made (with its implicit suggestion of causality); my subsequent response was mostly disbelief at your reference to "every single criterion" and then listing primarily material criteria without so much as a nod to anything else.


C: Sure, I don’t think we’re in disagreement here. I accept (1) but think (2) is fundamentally flawed not least because such encourage/coercion of “marriage” is more likely to do harm than good. And also because I hate the judicial methodology our court uses for equal protection analysis.

Well, to rephrase my second question, is there any empirical or logical reason why a dual parent household would love (or cherish or whatever non physical factors you might choose to use) their children less than a single parent would on the basis of a reasonable assumption that whatever one parent may do, two would probably be better in general and assuming all things are equal. Conversely, without substantial economic support from either the state or some third party, it just simply isn’t as easy raising a child alone and there will be trade-offs in those circumstances.

On a separate criticism, I might also make the argument that generally, formal marriages (as opposed to cohabitation etc.) tend to stabilize family relations and tends to be good for the long term longevity of the relationship. I don’t think this effect can entirely be attributed to the social significance marriage has in terms of a formal binding commitment and I think it might well be because of the various property interest that one has in marriage (tax breaks, medical benefits and decisions, wills, joint ownership of real property and personal property). If so my further critique of this policy is that it is misguided because it doesn’t take into account various marriage-type relationships with children (small in numbers as they might well be) and extending these benefits to them would have the effect of strengthening those relationships while extending equal protection to one and all.


Me:

>I wasn't aware parents had as their primary function the breeding of
>academic-economic digits. Empirical evidence for "every single
>criterion"? Love? Trust? Happiness? Values? Emotional security? Is
>there any particular reason why marriage changes the ability of a
>person to provide these to a child? Why would 2 people be any better
>necessarily than 1? And if you had to have 2 people, what does
>marriage have to do with it? Why do the two people have to even be
>having a sexual relationship? Or living together?

Just because a particular single parent may bring a child up better than a particular couple with respect to love, trust, happiness etc
does not mean that in the aggregate, a single parent will do as good a job as two. Just because you can find women stronger than me does not mean that in general men are not stronger than women.

Let me turn the question on its head. Is there any particular reason why a single parent is more able to provide for a child than two?
Assuming single parents are equally capable of providing the non-academic-economic bit for a child as couples, does not the added
income benefit the child? Money may not buy happiness, but neither does poverty (unless you've some ascetic philosophy, but starving people do not have such luxuries and anyhow you shouldn't impose your ideals on others).

Just to give some examples, single parents have only one source of income, so they will be less able to devote time, care, attention and love to their children; single parents have no one to share the burden of childcare with; single parents are less able to take leave when their children are sick so either their work or the child suffers; financial pressures result in greater stress which are passed on to children - the list of reasons are endless.

I'm not sure if you read the paper, but some reasons listed there why two parents would be better able to provide love, trust, happiness, values (wth?! whose values?!) and emotional security than one:

- Two parents are usually better than one... because they can share responsibilities for child care
- Marriage often leads to higher levels of paternal involvement than divorce, non-marriage, or cohabitation
- Marriage facilitates the income pooling and task sharing that allows parents to accommodate family needs
- Many low-income families consider marriage the ideal arrangement for child rearing
- Teens in two-parent families are, on average, much less likely to abuse drugs or alcohol than teens in one-parent ones

Just because you can measure something does not mean that you know everything, but it is even more preposterous to throw what you can measure out of the window and conjure up vague notions like psychic income as an ad hoc argument to support your point.


>And given children born to single mothers, children who like it or
>not already exist, why should they be deprived (through the maternity
>leave policy) of more access to the one parent they do have? Boggle.

Policy is another matter, and in this case I do agree with you, especially since the paper shows that children brought up in shotgun
marriages do worse than those in normal single parent households


B: Your claims are all centered around a kind of 'ceteris paribus' analysis. Given one parent of this kind, why not two etc. I suppose I am deeply sceptical about the application of such claims to issues like whether someone is a better or worse parent. Yes, I personally would prefer to have some money than to be poor, ceteris paribus. But I am woolly enough to believe that there are personal experiences that go all the way down, that transform everything about an experience for the people concerned so that what I would theoretically want has nothing to do with it -- that many children with good relationships with their parent(s) would never think for an instant that they would trade any of it for more money, because it goes to the heart of their conceptions of who they are and what their goals and values are. And if you cannot make that trade-off to any extent, what use is the ceteris paribus analysis? (Since other things are almost never actually equal.) You have to at least envisage the possibility of a trade-off for it to make sense in any given child's case. I'm not imposing anything or any ideals on anyone, Gabriel; I'm suggesting precisely that given such possibilities (of transformative human relationships) we should not be quick to introduce the kind of analysis that takes little or no account of it, and is based largely on our own values.


A: Isn't the entire point about practical policy? Its utilitarian of me, I know, but shouldn't policy be a balance of what is true (more attention and honest caring for the child = good) and what can be readily assessed (marital status)? It's impractical for the law to be a morass of special cases. Look at the law and ask first if, in general, it will be helpful rather than pointing out the cases where it won't.


B: You both assume the cases where the quality of someone's relationship with their child may go "all the way down" regardless of wealth, or their socioeconomic status when they leave home, to be in the minority. But that is an assumption which is not actually borne out by any of the kind of evidence to which you refer (nor do I think it even can be), but rather a product of your expectations of how people perceive their familial relationships. Many people would agree in theory that all things being equal they would rather be a little richer. But do most people begrudge their parents for a lack of wealth, or feel attachment to their parents because they were well-off? The morass of statistics surely says nothing about that or certainly very little once you move past the point where an absolute level of poverty that is deeply disruptive to any semblance of stability required for any kind of meaningful family life is concerned. For the vast majority of history, the vast majority of people have struggled with subsistence farming or hard labour while raising their children -- were they all necessarily, or even in general more likely, to have had worse relationships with their children than many of today's developed world working class parents, who unlike so many of their historical forbears have meat on the table almost every day, take regular baths, don't wear rags, and own televisions? I find it inconceivable; I think you have to have virtually no appreciation of historicity to accept that proposition.

A,

To the extent that you seem to think the policy is not stupid (and this extent, I grant you, is murky): if you assume single mothers are already going to bring up children poorly by comparison to married ones, why make the upbringing any worse by also reducing their access to maternity leave? Or are you of the opinion that the resulting incentive to marry will be so great that this is purely prophylactic? Do you really think there are especial benefits to trying to steamroll unwilling adults into an intense, one would hope typically personal, bond, which they would not enter but for the additional maternity leave? Sounds like the creation of a pretty piss-poor environment for raising children to me.

I confess, I concede some scepticism that people who do not hold down stable interpersonal adult relationships will be especially good at raising children. However, it is very mild scepticism due to my ignorance of the circumstances of many such adult people, having moved all my life in a very staid middle class millieu; and in any case even granting my scepticism some solid foundation, that would be a case of the same factors that make them bad at adult relationships causing them also to be bad at relationships with their children, not causality from the lack of a good adult relationship (and specifically a good adult sexual relationship, since a reasonable number of single people live in close association with a sibling or friends who could replicate any "dual parent" effect without the need for marriage). That being so, even granting the further (and to my mind highly doubtful) assumption that a marriage causes a sexual relationship to be better than it otherwise would be, the policy is not beneficial.

And it's quite a leap, Gabriel, even if one accepts your view of what the majority of child-parent relationships are like, to go from minorities to phantoms. A leap that even if made is completely irrelevant if one is sufficiently sceptical about the mechanism being employed to ostensibly improve the welfare of anyone (see the above paragraph).


A:

> You both assume the cases where the quality of someone's relationship
> with their child may go "all the way down"... I think you have to have
> virtually no appreciation of historicity to accept that proposition.

Err... I haven't a clue what you're getting at.or, more specifically, what it has to do with what I said.


Me:

>You both assume the cases where the quality of someone's relationship
>with their child may go "all the way down"... a product of your expectations of how
>people perceive their familial relationships.

It's not borne out by the evidence? Did you even read what I wrote?

"single parents have only one source of income... Teens in two-parent families are, on average, much less likely to abuse drugs or alcohol than teens in one-parent ones"

Are you honestly telling me that those who abuse drugs or alcohol are not necessarily less happy than those who do?


>Many people would agree in theory that all things being equal
>they would rather be a little richer. But do most people begrudge
>their parents for a lack of wealth, or feel attachment to their
>parents because they were well-off?

No, but they begrudge their parents for working 3 jobs to earn enough money to take care of them. They feel a lack of attachment to their parent because they never see him/her. Their parent gets irritated because he/she has no one to share parenting responsibilities with.

Your assumption that any one single parent family is not necessarily worse off than any one dual parent family is not actually borne out either by evidence or even simple common sense, but rather a product of your fear of essentialising.

Someone with AIDS may be happier than someone without AIDS, but this does not mean that getting AIDS is not an un-good thing.



>For the vast majority of history... I think you have to have virtually no
>appreciation of historicity to accept that proposition.

For the vast majority of history, children were treated as inferiors, chattel, miniature adults without special needs, kitchen/farm hands, seen and not heard etc. I find it inconceivable; I think you have to have virtually no knowledge of historicity to accept your proposition.

Furthermore, even in reference to your vaunted historicity, single parents have been at a huge disadvantage compared to dual parents. So I have no idea what you're talking about.


>Do you really think there are especial benefits to trying to
>steamroll unwilling adults into an intense, one would hope typically
>personal, bond, which they would not enter but for the additional
>maternity leave? Sounds like the creation of a pretty piss-poor
>environment for raising children to me.

As a matter of fact the paper C posted showed that single parents bring up children better than dual parents forced to marry because of illegitimacy concerns.


>a reasonable number of single people live in close association with a
>sibling or friends who could replicate any "dual parent" effect
>without the need for marriage).

I know it takes a village to raise a child, but saying a villager can replace a parent?!


>even granting the further (and to my mind highly doubtful) assumption
>that a marriage causes a sexual relationship to be better than it
> otherwise would be,

Eh? I thought marriage causes a sexual relationship to become worse than it otherwise would be =D


>And it's quite a leap, Gabriel, even if one accepts your view of what
>the majority of child-parent relationships are like, to go from
>minorities to phantoms. A leap that even if made is completely
>irrelevant if one is sufficiently sceptical about the mechanism being
>employed to ostensibly improve the welfare of anyone (see the above
>paragraph).

If one is sufficiently sceptical about anything, anything else is irrelevant.

And that, I suspect, is the problem here.



[Addendum: link updated since Civitas has changed their website paths]
Experiments in Living: The Fatherless Family

(Ed: extracts of my extract follow)

Children living without their biological fathers:

Are more likely to live in poverty and deprivation

* After controlling for other demographic factors, children in lone-parent households are still 2.8 times as likely to forego family outings.

Are more likely to have emotional or mental problems

* After controlling for other demographic factors, children in lone-parent households are 2.5 times as likely to be sometimes or often unhappy. They are 3.3 times as likely to score poorly on measures of self-esteem.

* Among children aged five to fifteen years in Great Britain, those from lone-parent families were twice as likely to have a mental health problem as those from intact two-parent families (16% versus 8%).

* A major longitudinal study of 1,400 American families found that 20%–25% of children of divorce showed lasting signs of depression, impulsivity (risk-taking), irresponsibility, or antisocial behaviour compared with 10% of children in intact two-parent families.

Tend to have more trouble getting along with others

* After controlling for other demographic factors, children from lone-parent households are three times as likely to report problems with friendships.

* Children from lone-parent households are more likely to have behaviour problems or engage in antisocial behaviour.

* Boys from lone-parent households are more likely to show hostility to adults and other children, and be destructive of belongings.

Teenagers living without their biological fathers

Are more likely to experience problems with sexual health

* Girls from lone-parent households were 1.6 times as likely to become mothers before the age of 18 (11% versus 6.8%). Controlling for other factors did not reduce the comparative odds.

Are more likely to smoke

* In a sample of teenagers living in the West of Scotland, 15-year-olds from lone-parent households were twice as likely to be smokers as those from two-birth-parent homes (29% compared to 15%). After controlling for poverty, they were still 50% more likely to smoke.

* In a sample of British 16-year-olds, those living in lone-parent households were 1.5 times as likely to smoke. Controlling for sex, household income, time spent with family, and relationship with parents actually increased the odds that a teenager from a lone-parent family would smoke (to 1.8 times as likely).

Are more likely to drink alcohol

* In the West of Scotland, 18-year-old girls from lone-parent households were twice as likely to drink heavily as those from intact two-birthparent homes (17.6% compared to 9.2%). This finding holds even after controlling for poverty.

* British 16-year-olds from lone-parent households are no more likely to drink than those from intact households. This is mainly because higher levels of teenage drinking actually are associated with higher family incomes. After controlling for household income and sex, teenagers from lone-parent families were 40% more likely to drink.

Are more likely to take drugs

* At age 15, boys from lone-parent households were twice as likely as those from intact two-birthparent households to have taken any drugs (22.4% compared with 10.8%). Girls from lone-parent homes were 25% more likely to have taken drugs by the age of 15 (8.2% compared with 6.5%) and 70% more likely to have taken drugs by age 18 (33.3% compared with 19.6%). After controlling for poverty, teenagers from lone-parent homes were still 50% more likely to take drugs.