<p>I’m very sympathetic to the argument that home life plays a far greater factor in children’s futures than any school program. I’m further sympathetic to the idea that babies were not designed to be raised by one person, and that every child deserves a MINIMUM of two people who’d throw themselves under a bus for him, preferably more. But it doesn’t make sense to lump every child from a “broken home” into one category.</p>
<p>There’s a gigantic difference between a single teen mom struggling to get by without help vs. a pair of thirtysomething professional parents who get an amicable divorce and both stay heavily involved in the child’s life or a middle-class mom who remarries while the child is a toddler. It’s possible to grow up in a secure, loving family with two parents even if your bio mom isn’t married to your bio dad. The problems arise when the family isn’t secure or isn’t loving.</p>
<p>Well, just to expand. I have another friend in a similar financial/single-parent situation, and he’s going to be a sophomore at Duke. We’re both white kids from an area where most are fairly wealthy too, so, if anything, the process was already working against us.</p>
<p>studies show that poverty is more of a factor, than the legal status of the parents.
The two most damaging circumstances for children seem to be, to either have their parents in a low conflict marriage divorce or in a high conflict marriage to stay together, after controlling for poverty</p>
<p>Good information about birth control, programs that encourage & prepare students to graduate high school and prepare for post high school education/employment & that provide a network of support are important to help families.</p>
<p>The most stable families I know are those who waited to marry/have children till they were in their 30s. Many were on their 2nd ( or 3rd) marriages by that point, but apparently had used birth control because most did not have a child.</p>
<p>Buy the book? You don’t really expect to change jonri’s mind with studies and statistics do you?</p>
<p>“McLanahan and Sandefur found that, other
things being equal, teenagers who spent part of their childhood apart from
their biological father were twice as likely to drop out of high school, twice
as likely to become parents themselves before age twenty, and one and a half times as likely to be idle in their late teens and early twenties.”</p>
<p>Yes monet matters, but not only money. Holding steady for other factors they found that children in single parent homes still had way more problems, lower graduation rates, less likely to go to college etc.</p>
<p>Now throw in the fact that a missing parent also makes you poor or at least poorer and you have the economic factors as well dragging on the kid. Poverty and single-parenthood are intimately intertwined and you don’t have to be below the poverty line or even close to it in order to see the effects economics has on outcomes.</p>
<p>so now that we know what some of the pitfalls are- what can we do to support kids and families?</p>
<p>I would suggest accurate infomation about birth control and improved access to health care including birth control- improved targeting & support of communities with high risk of dropouts/teenage pregnancy, with adult mentors to increase awareness of possibilities after high school graduation & continued programs to train and educate adults to improve job skills/education</p>
<p>Higherlead, moreso than single-parenthood is how well the family gets along and communicates. I’ve seen really messed up kids from abusive/tyrannical families and perfectly happy and nice ones from divorced ones. Generally it’s the disposition and family dynamic as opposed to whether one has only a mom. Take for example one of my best friends. His parents are divorced, yet he’s one of the nicest people I know and he’s at an ivy. Another friend has incredibly conservative and sexist parents and she’s going to a city school (nothing wrong with that) but is also constantly depressed and goes through daily fights with her parents (something really wrong with that).</p>
<p>At the risk of you accusing me of following in Jonri’s footsteps, out of my 4 friends with divorced parents one is headed to Dartmouth, one to Wash U in SL, one to Swarthmore, and one to Carnegie Mellon. All of their custodial parents are very nice and caring people and get along very well with their kids. Clearly it’s not the divorced state that matters because my friends with complete families did not necessarily do better in life or in school.</p>
<p>Yes and clearly Global Warming must be true because it was hot everyday last August where I was at or alternatively bogus because it was cold every day last February in my backyard.</p>
<p>The studies have been done. Go read them. Ask the librarian for help if you cannot find them and then write the social science journals they were published in and explain to them how they should never have gone to press without getting them peer reviewed by you. Oh wait that is right you are not a peer and neither is jonri. Sorry you’ll have to wait a couple of years until you learn how science works.</p>
<p>lebedev - I think that people who pay more taxes do it so the government will shoot anybody else who tries to rob them. Now you want better schools too? Stop while you are ahead. </p>
<p>I am an anarchist. I hate the rich and the poor equally. A pox on both those social classes:-)</p>
<p>higherlead, you are a bona-fide moron. Those studies have been done and are accurate because divorced families have a much higher chance of familial strife. But that does not make the two exclusively tied together. There are families that are whole and create plenty of troubled kids and families that are not and create plenty of perfectly fine ones.</p>
<p>Clearly jonri was right earlier in the thread; talking to you is akin to banging my head against a concrete wall. You’re so thick there’s no point to it.</p>
<p>CollectivSyn–statistics are what they are. Children from single parent homes and especially those from poor single parent homes are much less likely to go to college and beyond, period. It is not a 100% certainty so there are many exceptions but we set policy based on the most likely events. It is not a matter of feelings or debate.</p>
<p>No one has responded to my argument that it’s inappropriate to lump all “single parent families” into one group. We haven’t heard about any studies looking solely at families where the parents divorce (or were never married), but where both parents are present and actively involved on a daily basis throughout the child’s entire life, or where a stepparent joins the family early in the child’s life and fills a parental role. That’s a completely different ball of wax than a single mom abandoned by a deadbeat dad, even though both are technically “single parent families” at some point in their evolution.</p>
<p>I know a family where the parents decided they couldn’t live together any more, but they both were devoted to the kids, so the dad bought the house next door. The kids still saw him every single day, and could even wake him up in the middle of the night if they needed him. Those kids had two parents, two real parents, by any meaningful definition.</p>
<p>It just doesn’t make any sense to put these kids’ experiences in the same category as the child of a teen mom who never met his dad. In fact, my guess is that the studies are UNDERestimating the negative impact to children when a parent abandons the family and the other parent has to manage alone, because the studies are lumping abandoned families together with “single parent families” that in fact have two or more hands-on parents raising the kids.</p>
<p>Keep telling yourself that mommusic. I know it has been working for me. Everyday I get on the scale and say that can’t be right. I must be in a gravity hotspot and now I really believe it because it says I only weigh 10lbs.</p>
<p>When you have to write laws and policies that govern large groups of people you have to be concerned with the larger patterns you find not the pariculars of exceptional cases. For instance we set the drinking age at 21 even though many individuals might be able to drink responsibly at a younger age and other individuals unable to drink responsibly at any age. So with family law we have to concern ourselves with the more likely outcomes rather than the exceptional ones.</p>
<p>It’s not that your distinctions aren’t right, it’s that for all practical purposes they’re “not even wrong”. Everyone understands that there is an endless regress of more precise explanations not in terms of the number of parents per se, but the number of caretakers, or rather the number of caretaker-minutes per child per day, or rather the amount of caretaker-minutes of “quality time” per day (reading aloud not TV). Or that it’s not the education level of the parents but the number of words in their vocabulary and the number of books in the house, or actually the number of books with challenging vocabulary, or more precisely the number of such books and magazines placed in the child’s room, etc etc.</p>
<p>These extra complications are hard to use and hard to observe, especially across the population when implementing policy or performing studies. So it ends up not mattering except for conversational purposes.</p>