Family Breakdown and America’s Welfare System - "family breakdown fuels poverty. On average, even high school dropouts who are married have a far lower poverty rate than do single parents with several years of college. But family structure has the biggest impact on children. According to Raj Chetty—the preeminent researcher on the topic of social mobility—having fathers in the neighborhood is a primary factor in predicting upward income mobility for the children in that neighborhood later in life, even when controlling for other variables such as the available schools, race, or ethnicity. In part, that’s because family structure influences the choices that children will make: controlling for race and parental income, boys raised without their father are much more likely to use drugs, engage in violent or criminal behavior, go to jail, and drop out of school; girls, meanwhile, are more likely to engage in early sexual activity or have a child out of wedlock. Children without a father in the home are even more likely to suffer from mental health problems as adults. Roy Baumeister and John Tierney’s book, Willpower, details a psychology test, where children can either receive a small prize right away, or receive a larger, more valuable prize 10 days later—if they forgo the smaller prize. En mass, children without a father in the home settled for the initial prize, while children with a father in the home were more willing to wait for the larger prize. Research by David Autor and David Figlio studied and rejected the idea that these effects are mainly due to dangerous neighborhoods or poor schools. They concluded that “neighborhoods and schools are less important than the ‘direct effect of family structure itself.’” Family breakdown is extremely important if we care about a child’s social mobility—the average child does best with married parents, and, more specifically, with their biological father residing in their home. Yet America’s poor children have relatively few involved or present fathers. That’s because the vast majority of America’s overall marriage decline is concentrated among poor and working-class Americans, leading to a “marriage divide” based on class... As marriage rates fractured among America’s poor and working class, the institution has remained resilient among America’s better-off, who still marry at rates similar to those 50 years ago. And the collapse of marriage among the working class has coincided with a sharp increase in out-of-wedlock births, often to cohabiting parents—because people see marriage as ideal but unattainable, yet still desire children. It is important to realize that things weren’t always so. The black American family provides a stark example. From 1890 to 1950, black women had a higher marriage rate than white women. And in 1950, just 9% of black children lived without their father. By 1960, the black marriage rate had declined but remained close to the white marriage rate. In other words, despite open racism and widespread poverty, strong black families used to be the norm. But by the mid-1980s, black fatherlessness skyrocketed. Today, only 44% of black children have a father in the home... One contributor to family breakdown, which soon spread to the poor and working-class white family, may have been welfare expansion... “some programs actively discouraged marriage,” because “welfare assistance went to mothers so long as no male was boarding in the household… Marriage to an employed male, even one earning the minimum wage, placed at risk a mother’s economic well-being.” Infamous “man in the house” rules meant that welfare workers would randomly appear in homes to check and see if the mother was accurately reporting her family-status. The benefits available were extremely generous. According to Peterson, it was “estimated that in 1975 a household head would have to earn $20,000 a year to have more resources than what could be obtained from Great Society programs.” In today’s dollars, that’s over $90,000 per year in earnings. That may be a reason why, in 1964, only 7% of American children were born out of wedlock, compared to 40% today. As Jason Riley has noted, “the government paid mothers to keep fathers out of the home—and paid them well.”... In today’s America, four-in-10 families with children receive support from at least one means-tested transfer program. One study found that almost a third of Americans said they personally know someone who chose not to marry due to the fear of losing a benefit."
Fatherless Single Mother Home Statistics | Fix Family Courts - "Many School Shooters are the Product of Broken Homes...
Broken Homes are Leading to Adolescent Epidemics...
37.8% of single mothers are divorced, 41% never married, and only 6.5% widows. Brookings Institute, “Assessing the Impact of Welfare Reform on Single Mothers”, Part 2, 3/22/04...
The proportion of single-parent households in a community predicts its rate of violent crime and burglary, but the community’s poverty level does not. Source: D.A. Smith and G.R. Jarjoura, “Social Structure and Criminal Victimization,” Journal of Research in Crime and Delinquency 25. 1988.”...
“After controlling for single motherhood, the difference between black and white crime rates disappeared.” Progressive Policy Institute, 1990, quoted by David Blankenhorn, “Fatherless America: Confronting Our Most Urgent Social Problem,” New York, Harper Perennial, 1996, p.31
Growing up without a father could permanently alter the structure of the brain, and produce more children who are more aggressive and angry. Children brought up only by a single mother have a higher risk of developing deviant behavior, including drug abuse, new research suggest. Dr. Gabriella Gobbi, McGill Univ. and Francis Bamlico, Center for Addiction and Mental Health, publishing in the journal, “CEREBRAL CORTEX.”...
Two thirds of all children murdered, are murdered by their mother. Source: U.S. Dept of H&HS website ‘Child Abuse Statistics by Relationship’ March 2013
“Girls raised without fathers are more sexually promiscuous, and more likely to end up divorced.” Wade Horn, “Why There Is No Substitute For Parents”, IMPRIMIS 26, No.6, June, 1997
70% of teen births occur to girls in single mother homes. David T. Lykken, “Reconstructing Fathers”, American Psychologist 55, 681,681, 2000...
“America has more than twice as many teenage births as other developed nations.” Isabel V.Sawhill, to House Committee on Ways and Means, Subcommittee on Human Resources, June 29, 1999
There are more than 400,000 teen births annually in the US, most of them to unmarried mothers on welfare.
National Campaign to Prevent Teen Pregnancy.
The public cost of births to teens 17 and younger is estimated at $7.6 BILLION per year. The children are more likely to be in foster care, less likely to graduate from high school, daughters are more likely to have teen births themselves, and sons are more likely to be incarcerated. Saul Hoffman, Univ. of Delaware...
The long-term health effects of broken families were often devastating. Parental divorce during childhood emerged as the single strongest predictor of early death in adulthood. The grown children of divorced parents died almost five years earlier, on average, than children from intact families. The causes of death ranged from accidents and violence to cancer, heart attack and stroke. Parental break-ups remain, the authors say, among the most traumatic and harmful events for children.
The Longevity Project ,By Howard S. Friedman and Leslie R. Martin"
Of course, liberals claim that no one chooses to be a single parent. Presumably 41% of single mothers were abandoned by the fathers
Does Single Parenthood Increase the Probability of Teenage Promiscuity, Drug Use, and Crime? Evidence from Divorce Law Changes - "It has long since been established that children raised by single parents are more likely to become sexually active, commit illegal acts, and use illegal drugs at young ages. What has not been determined is whether or not there is a causal effect associated with the disintegration of the family. Would these children have been more likely to participate in ‘deviant’ behavior even if their family structure had remained intact? This study provides evidence in favor of a negative causal impact of single-parent status. Using state-level divorce law changes to instrument for years that the biological father lives in the household, we find that youth who spend part of their childhood/youth living in a household that does not include their biological father are more likely to smoke regularly, become sexually active, and be convicted of a crime."
Since feminists love divorce...
Father Absence and Youth Incarceration - "a sizable portion of the risk for incarceration apparently related to the father's absence from the home could be attributed to other factors, such as teen motherhood, low parent education, racial inequalities, and poverty. Still, adolescents in father-absent households faced elevated incarceration risks. The adolescents who faced the highest incarceration risks, however, were those in stepparent families, including father-stepmother families"
The Real, Complex Connection Between Single-Parent Families and Crime - The Atlantic - "Some academics and advocates, including Cohen here, counter that mass incarceration is actually creating more single-parent families. That argument rests on the questionable assumption that men who are in prison would become reliable presences in their children's lives if freed. Worse, it implies that children—or their mothers—would be better off with a violent father in the house than on their own. There are valid concerns about our harsh drug policies, but the truth is the percentage of prisoners behind bars for drugs is relatively modest... there is a large body of literature showing that children of single mothers are more likely to commit crimes than children who grow up with their married parents. This is true not just in the United States, but wherever the issue has been researched. Few experts, including Cohen, dispute this... To say this is not to "scapegoat" or "blame" women; for one thing, fathers also play a role in the making of single-mother families. For another, blame personalizes what is a huge, global, and multi-causal demographic shift; it's like saying economists are blaming laid-off employees for noting the decline in manufacturing jobs"
The effects of single-mother and single-father families on youth crime: Examining five gender-related hypotheses - "This study examined the effects of the concentrations of single-mother families (SMFs) and single-father families (SFFs) on youth crime. Five hypotheses, including the maternal, same-sex, equality, prevalence and economic disadvantage hypotheses were formulated at the aggregate level and tested using data from 433 Canadian municipalities. Consistent with the prevalence hypothesis, it was found that the concentration of SMFs had a much stronger conducive effect on youth crime than did the SFFs. Also, at high prevalence level, the effect of SMFs was much stronger than its effect at low prevalence level. However, the significant but relatively weak effects of low income in SMFs and SFFs on youth crime offered only limited support to the economic disadvantage hypothesis. The findings suggest that one may need to consider factors and measures that are beyond the economic or financial aspect of the single-parent families."
Of course, liberals will continue to blame poverty for crime and claim that "stigma" is why kids from single parent families commit more crime (if they even admit that kids from single parent families commit more crime)
Single moms spend less time on chores than married moms. I’m not surprised! - "Single mothers have more free time, spend fewer hours on housework, and sleep more than married mothers... There is no need to be seen as constantly cooking, bathing, doing laundry, and cleaning up when no one is watching.There’s also less need to spend a bunch of time nagging—not the kids, but their dad... How many women feel that rather than pester their spouse and end up, at best, with a task half-done or done badly, they should just go ahead and arrange the play date/schedule the doctor’s appointment/make the lasagna themselves?... Could it actually be that single mothers are living more fulfilling lives than they would if they were married? In my experience, yes... the findings in the study held true regardless of income and race"
So, doesn't this mean we don't need to provide single mums with (more) support, since they are happier and sleep less than married mothers?
Somehow the possibility that they just don't care isn't considered - given that men also do housework nowadays this is likely
Given that men have lower standards for housework than women, the claim that married mothers are performing should not be accepted automatically; presumably nagging is considered "housework"
Single Moms: Less Housework, More Leisure Than Married Moms - "The divorced mothers also spent less time on housework and more time sleeping than the married mothers, but the differences were a bit smaller... The cohabiting mothers did the same amount of childcare and housework as married mothers, and they got the same amount of sleep. But they spent lots more time on leisure... Mothers who had extended family members around also spent less time on childcare. (The presence of extended family members made no difference in the amount of time mothers spent on leisure or sleeping.).. I have cautioned many times that when currently married people are compared to unmarried people at one point in time, we need to be careful about interpreting the results. When there are differences between married and unmarried people, we cannot conclude that the differences occur because of marital status. That’s true when the results favor the single people, just as it is when the married people look like they are doing better. In the study, the married mothers differed from the other mothers in important ways. For example, on average, they tended to be more highly educated, older, white and working part-time instead of full-time. Taking those differences into account did shrink the gap between married and unmarried mothers in the time they spent on leisure activities. But the single mothers still maintained their advantage. That suggests that marital status was important, but it is not definitive evidence for causality."
On Feminist News the feminists were bashing men as usual. But they always like to claim that single mothers have worse outcomes because they have no time, and that they are very stressed so they need more help. So much for that. Plus they only looked at the headline, rather than the article (much less the journal article), so they missed the inconvenient caveats and facts mentioned. And of course this doesn't consider economic specialisation (hours worked was not in there) or preferences in partnerships
Divorced/separated mothers seemed to have less sleep than never married mothers and cohabitating mothers seemed to have even more leisure than never married mothers too, so clearly the presence of a male partner is not the only factor affecting things
Black mothers also spent more time sleeping and in leisure and less time on housework and childcare than white mothers, but good luck to whoever points that out
Five Facts About Today’s Single Fathers - "Most single fathers are divorced
Single fathers are more likely to be white, older, and somewhat better educated, compared to single mothers
Single fathers are more likely to be cohabiting
Single father-families are better off financially than single-mother families
While the research on single fathers is limited, studies show that children in single-father families fare about as well as children in single-mother families on many outcomes, although there are differences"
As single motherhood takes off, American children's chance of success diminishes - "The economist Melissa Kearney has been both vilified and praised for her new book, The Two-Parent Privilege: How Americans Stopped Getting Married and Started Falling Behind. In the book, released last month, Kearney points out a rather obvious fact: Children raised by two parents have a much higher chance of success than those raised by one. Yet she goes even further to argue that whether parents are married or not impacts their children's success. Her argument goes against the trend in the U.S.; American children are increasingly being born and raised by single mothers. The U.S. has the world's highest rate of children living in single-parent households, according to a 2019 Pew Research Center study. Almost a quarter, or 23% of U.S. children under age 18, live with one parent and no other adults. Kearney finds that this arrangement hurts children, widens inequality and ultimately damages society... Kearney's argument that children who grow up in unmarried households are fighting the odds has progressives miffed and accusing Kearney of stigmatizing single mothers. Conservatives are celebrating her findings as validating their support of marriage. "There are a lot of folks who are uncomfortable with the idea of prioritizing one family type over another," says Kearney, whose research and work as an economist at the University of Maryland focuses on issues that most would consider progressive: poverty, inequality, family and children. "I'm not prioritizing one. I'm just recognizing the data and the evidence and the reality."... Kearney says it's easy to assume that Americans are adopting a European lifestyle of raising children in partnerships, living together, free of labels. "You get a knee jerk reaction from a lot of people like, 'Oh, well, it doesn't matter if they're married as long as they stay together,'" says Kearney. "The problem is, unmarried parents very rarely stay together." In the U.S., she says, unmarried adults who decide to live together do it for a much shorter duration than in Europe. Children in many of these households are more likely to experience two or three parental partnerships by age 15... Research shows that in parts of the country where men's earnings have fallen, so too have marriage rates. Kearney cites sociologists Kathryn Edin and Maria Kefalas, who interviewed 162 single mothers for Promises I Can Keep: Why Poor Women Put Motherhood Before Marriage. Their book suggests that many women don't marry the father of their child not because they reject the concept of marriage, but because they do not see him as a reliable source of economic security or stability... the link between single parenting, inequality and mobility in America is too strong to deny."
Damn "discrimination" and "stigma"!
So much for reality having a well known liberal bias
To feminists, as always, even more feminism is the "solution"
Ian Rowe on X - "“The most highly correlated factor with upward mobility at a neighborhood level was the share of two-parent households in that neighborhood.” That is a quote from @kearney_melissa describing key findings from Raj Chetty’s extensive @OppInsights research that unfortunately has consistently been downplayed and ignored. Factors like the presence of active fathers at the neighborhood level have also been repeatedly identified as highly predictive of future earnings of black boys - yet is rarely cited as a focus for policy prescriptions or cultural renewal. On our Are You Kidding Me podcast, @NaomiSRiley and I discuss with Melissa why the burying of the lede of these factors led her to write Two Parent Privilege AND why she is now convinced that family structure has to be at the top of our policy agenda on helping kids and families address economic inequality in our country. An important discussion. https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/are-you-kidding-me/id1511049533?i=1000634893081 @AEI"
Wilfred Reilly on X - "The obvious is found, again. Per at least a dozen studies: with everything adjusted for, usually including IQ proxies, having two parents instead of one has a giant positive effect on later-life income, social mobility, criminal behavior, etc."
They're Dragging Out the 'Absent Black Fathers' Myth Again. Can We Give it a Rest? | Opinion
Wilfred Reilly on X - "Myth? The Black out-of-wedlock birth rate is 72%. 53% of Black dads don't live with their children. Most Black and white - the CAUCASIAN OOW rate is ~40% - unmarried dads don't totally ignore their kids, but let's not pretend this isn't a huge problem..."
As usual, a myth is a fact a left winger doesn't like. Of course, the standard for things they hate is different" way fewer than 53% of police officers shoot innocent black people, but they're always propagating the myth of the racist cop
Single Father Households Do Vastly Better Than Single Mother — Here’s the Real Reason Why | by Elicia Jane | The Knowledge of Freedom | Medium
This is a crappy article. The link about children of single mothers being 5 times more likely to commit suicide than those in unbroken households and single father households does not support any of the claims in the paragraph. The link doesn't even look at single fathers vs single mothers, except for the poverty bit. Many of the lines about how bad single mother households are don't say anything about how single father households compare. The claim about stepparents not being more likely to kill children only refers to one study, and the Daily Mail summarised it wrongly (stepfathers are still more likely to kill children than biological ones). The rest of the article is mostly anecdotal reports of how single father children do better than single mother ones, but it does make a good point: many single father households have a woman living in them, so they are not true single fathers
The bit that got a lot of men mocking the logic: "the consensus is mothers make better parents on average than fathers, yet the data seemingly says otherwise" is silly, because even if we take it that she has provided proper evidence that single mothers are worse parents than single fathers, comparing mothers and fathers is different from comparing single mothers and single fathers - single mothers are not representative of all mothers, nor are single fathers of all fathers (similarly, black NBA players earn more than white ones, though black people earn less than white ones - but quite a few of them got upset and claimed it was a false equivalence, since they realised the problem with their logic)
Child homicides by stepfathers: A replication and reassessment of the British evidence. - "Daly and Wilson (1994, 2008) reported that rates of fatal assaults of young children by stepfathers are over 100 times those by genetic fathers, and they explain the difference in evolutionary terms. Their study was replicated by comparing updated homicide data and population data from 3 surveys. This indicated that the risk to young stepchildren was approximately 16 times that to genetic children, and stepfathers were twice as likely to kill by beating. However, when we controlled for father’s age, the risk from cohabiting stepfathers was approximately 6 times greater. Above the age of 4 years, stepchildren were at no greater risk than genetic children. Children are at risk from fathers primarily when both are young and they do not live together; stepfathers’ apparent overrepresentation results largely from their relative youth and from many nonresidential perpetrators being labeled stepfathers. Other factors are also influential, but if these include stepparenthood, its impact is considerably less than previous researchers have claimed"
Facts On Unmarried Parents in the U.S. | Pew Research Center - "Cohabiting mothers and fathers are about equally likely to have never married. Among solo parents, however, mothers are more likely than fathers to have never been married (51% of solo mothers vs. 36% of solo fathers), suggesting that solo mothers and solo fathers may take somewhat different paths to unmarried parenthood."
A lot of men keep claiming that since women initiate most divorces, most single mothers divorced their husbands. But a majority of single mothers have never been married, so even if women initiate 100% of all opposite-sex couple divorces, most single mothers are not single mothers because they divorced their husbands.
A single mother speaks out on how the ‘tradwife’ lifestyle led to her divorce - "Templeton, now 41, said she was raised as an evangelical Christian, believing that a husband had authority over his wife. But today, she is a divorced single mom by choice and advocates for women who wish to break free from a relationship dynamic that all too easily can create an extreme power imbalance."
We keep being told that no one chooses to become a single mother (pretending that single women don't get IVF). Of course, the cope is that these ones were forced to by bad husbands
Meme - i/o @eyeslasho: "A higher percentage of children live in single-parent homes in America than in any other country in the world."
"Almost a quarter of U.S. children live in single-parent homes, more than in any other country"
Christopher F. Rufo ⚔️ on X - "Harvard professor recently accused of plagiarism argues that the two-parent family is an expression of "White supremacy.""
Christina J. Cross on X - "New paper w/@p_fomby & @BethanyLetiecq Despite being largely overlooked, we argue that White supremacy is foundational to how children of all races have experienced family structure throughout American history 🧵1/"
Meme - "I ONLY DATE BLACK GIRLS. BECAUSE I HATE MEETING FATHERS"
The Causal Effects of Father Absence - "The literature on father absence is frequently criticized for its use of cross-sectional data and methods that fail to take account of possible omitted variable bias and reverse causality. We review studies that have responded to this critique by employing a variety of innovative research designs to identify the causal effect of father absence, including studies using lagged dependent variable models, growth curve models, individual fixed effects models, sibling fixed effects models, natural experiments, and propensity score matching models. Our assessment is that studies using more rigorous designs continue to find negative effects of father absence on offspring well-being, although the magnitude of these effects is smaller than what is found using traditional cross-sectional designs. The evidence is strongest and most consistent for outcomes such as high school graduation, children's social-emotional adjustment, and adult mental health."
This Academic Paper on Biracial Children with African-American Fathers is Likely a Fabrication - "Update: 11/17/2018: It appears that SSRN has removed the Calloway paper from their database.
In July of 2015, self-described “independent” researcher Tiffany Calloway published the paper “Ninety Two Percent: Examining the Birth Trends, Family Structure, Economic Standing, Paternal Relationships, and Emotional Stability of Biracial Children with African American Fathers” at SSRN (The Social Science Research Network). The paper was apparently never peer-reviewed, nor was it published in any journal that I am aware of. The paper has not been discussed in the social sciences literature, but it has received some attention on internet forums, especially those forums associated with hate groups and/or anti-black bias. A reading of the paper, however, indicates many problems, including inappropriate statistical methods, highly questionable results, and outright plagiarism. In my opinion, it is extremely likely that the survey detailed in the paper was not conducted as described or was never conducted at all."
I get a lot of weird copes when I point out this study is likely fake
Delano Squires on X - "It’s abundantly clear to me that the most powerful “privilege” in our society is not skin color, sex, or tax bracket. It’s growing up in a loving, low-conflict household with a married father & mother committed to one another & their children. We need to bang that drum 24/7/365."
Wilfred Reilly on X - "This is just easily, empirically measurable. Women in married households have 300% the income of single moms, and are far happier emotionally and sexually. Men, for our part, may gripe but live YEARS if not a decade longer. Kids are something like - I don't have this one in front of me - 1/6 as likely to go to prison. Chesterton respected that fence for a reason."