On the robustness of research showing children in Single Parent Families have worse life outcomes

"Perpetual devotion to what a man calls his business, is only to be sustained by perpetual neglect of many other things." - Robert Louis Stevenson

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(On Experiments in Living: The Fatherless Family)

A: I'm mostly interested in the self-reporting studies you cited since that goes to the heart of my objection in the way the others don't (i.e. they address how the children themselves perceive their relationships with their families). I would like to know what the "other factors" for which the various studies claimed to control are, since on those counts at least, they don't really seem to be explained on the website based on my perusal of it (not very extensive to be honest as I don't want to spend my precious weekend time arguing fruitlessly on the Internet (when I could be watching my newly acquired DVD of Jane Austen's "Persuasion"!!!!!!!! JOY!!!!!!! I LOVE JANE AUSTEN LOVE LOVE LOVE!!!)) And on the website itself there's some suggestion of other factors e.g. lack of community ties which are problems contributing to bad experiences which again strike me as pointing to many single mothers having other problems to start with rather than the one-parent household being the source of the problem... Not sure all the divorce-related statistics are very helpful either, or at any rate they raise the suspicion that some of the effects found may be the result of divorce rather than living in a single-parent household to start.


Me: Erm. What makes you so sure I want to spend my precious time arguing fruitlessly either?

And I'm not going to read *79 PAPERS*!

Do you think there's some vast conspiracy by the writers of 79 papers to maliciously ruin the reputation of single parents? Peer reviewed and published statistical papers are statistically robust (or at least, you won't find 79 of them with major errors of the sort you are hinting at).

If you come into here with your mind already made up, no amount of evidence or logic is going to persuade you of something that is intuitively obvious to everyone else.


Some of the factors controlled for:

- financial hardship
- household income
- prior psychological distress
- socioeconomic circumstances
- level of communication with parents
- educational levels
- age at menarche for girls
- sex
- time spent with family
- relationship with parents
- level of parental supervision
- attachment to family
- whether peers and siblings were in trouble with the police
- standard of work at school
- behaviour problems
- the effects of childhood problems
- early childbearing
- marital status
- early age at first partnership
- employment status
- other demographic factors

In all, suffice to quote this bit:


"Why all these Effects?

Reduced parental and paternal attention

Many of the problems associated with fatherlessness seem to be related to reduced parental attention and social resources.104 Certainly, a child living without his or her father will receive less attention than a child living with both parents. This difference in amount of attention is key, but differences in the type of parental attention are also important.

Recent scholarship has emphasised the important role played by fathers.

Social psychologists have found that fathers influence their children’s short and long-term development through several routes:

- financial capital (using income to provide food, clothing, and shelter as well as resources that contribute to learning),

- human capital (sharing the benefits of and providing a model of their education, skills, and work ethic), and

- social capital (sharing the benefits of relationships). 105

More specifically,

- The co-parental relationship of mother and father provides children with a model of adults working together, communicating, negotiating, and compromising. This dyadic resource also helps parents present a united authority, which appears much less arbitrary to children than one authority figure.

- The parent/child relationship: Studies indicate that a father can contribute uniquely to the development of his children independently of the mother’s contribution. In other words, in areas such as emotional intelligence, self-esteem, competence, and confidence, the father’s influence cannot be duplicated or replaced easily by the mother, no matter how good a mother she is (note that mothers wield similar unique and independent influence in other areas, such as some behaviour problems).106 Other studies indicate that fathers can be especially important in cases where families are experiencing difficulties, such as poverty, frequent moving, or where children have learning disorders.107"


>And on the website itself there's some suggestion of other factors
>e.g. lack of community ties which are problems contributing to bad
>experiences which again strike me as pointing to many single mothers
>having other problems to start with rather than the one-parent
>household being the source of the problem.

You do realise that what I'm showing - that single-parent families have some negative effect on child raising - is much easier than what you are trying to show - that single-parent families have no negative effect AT ALL on child raising.

This is why PC people always look silly; in the rape sex/power controversy, normal people do not deny that power plays a role, but PC people insist that sex does not matter AT ALL. In nature/nurture controversies, normal people do not deny that nurture plays a role, but PC people insist that nature does not matter AT ALL. And in the discrimination/inherent ability controversies, normal people do not deny that discrimination plays a role, but PC people insist that inherent ability does not matter AT ALL.

"Contemporary Politically Correct feminists, like Marxists, feel obligated to postulate a purely environmental explanation for all sex-related differences in behavior, because as soon as biological differences are admitted as relevant factors, the presumption that women are "victims of discrimination" cannot be supported. Should any male/female differences in behavior and career choices be admitted as innate and real, then the "null hypothesis" - the assumption that in the absence of discrimination, no differences in the two groups would be observed - is no longer tenable"

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From basic statistics, we know that you can never find a case where one independent variable explains 100% of the variation in a dependent variable. This is why PC arguments totally based on nurture/socialization/discrimination (ie Absolving individuals of personal responsibility and blaming everyone/everything else) ring hollow.

Addendum: Related PC rant