Stable, healthy, two-parent families still appear to do the best job of raising kids. But when income and job status are taken into account, children raised by single mothers are nearly as likely to succeed in adulthood, and, interestingly enough, they are even more likely to succeed than children raised in homes headed by a stepfather or a single father.
“Kids from male-headed households, single dads, do worse socioeconomically than kids from mother-headed homes and also two-parent stepfamilies,” said USC sociologist Timothy Biblarz, the study’s lead author.
The study analyzed a survey of 22,761 men ranging in age from 25 to 64. They had been asked to report the occupation of the head of the household in which they grew up and to list their own occupations. All occupations were ranked on a 100-point scale, with 100 requiring the most education and returning the most income.
Men from traditional families averaged 42 on the scale, while men in mother-headed households averaged 40, no matter whether the mothers had been divorced, widowed or never married. Children from other types of nontraditional families ranked 35.
Previous studies from the mid-’60s on have presumed that children did poorly in single-mother homes because the structure itself was “pathological.” Even researchers skeptical about the effects of family structure on children’s development have pushed for policies to bring a man into a divorced home because of his paycheck.
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“They assume if there’s a divorce, you’ve got to have policies to encourage remarriage to get a man back into the household because of added income,” Biblarz said. “Our findings challenge that to some extent.”
Most negative effects were due to the greater likelihood that single mothers would be unemployed, Biblarz said. “When you compare two-parent households where fathers were managerial / professional with kids whose single mothers were managerial / professional, there’s not a lot of difference between the socioeconomic outcomes as they get into adulthood.”
The researchers suspected a stepparent’s extra income may be offset by other issues and problems that can arise, such as a greater emotional distance or uncertainty and more conflict. “Bringing a man into the home doesn’t mean kids will get a high level of investment from that stepparent,” Biblarz said.
The analysis suggests that, “if you want your kid to maintain the same status or class you’re in, having Mom around and plugged into the family is more important than Dad,” said Jeffery Evans, health science administrator for the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development. Until recently, however, much more was known about mothers than fathers and the evidence is far from clear yet about which gender parent is more important, and for what at which age, he said.
“The real question is, to what extent is father involvement good?”
It now appears that fathers contribute by helping kids develop street smarts and that they take on a more significant role in the later years of a child’s development, he said. It is also clear that after a divorce, joint custody makes a difference in promoting father involvement–and it is as beneficial to the fathers as it is to the children.
After a divorce, he said, “You’d hate to see moms cut out, and you’d hate to see dads cut out.
“The net effect of these studies indicate there’s a price to be paid for deleting one of the traditional pairs, and the old-fashioned notion that it’s good to have a mom and a dad is still a pretty good idea.”
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Lynn Smith’s column appears on Sundays. Readers may write to her at the Los Angeles Times, Life & Style, Times Mirror Square, Los Angeles, CA 90053 or via e-mail at [email protected]. Please include a telephone number.
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