Guest blogging at Double X (7/2/09), Linda Hirshman takes on a Time magazine “cover story by working mother-scourge Caitlin Flanagan” that uses “the occasion of South Carolina Governor Mark Sanford’s staggeringly banal adultery to tell America that ‘Marriage Matters.'” Specifically, Hirshman writes of Flanagan’s contention that
Marriage matters, because single-parent families are bad for children, the only people who count. “Drastically” bad: “On every single significant outcome … children from intact, two-parent families outperform those from single-parent households…. If you can measure it, a sociologist has; and in all cases, the kids living with both parents drastically outperform the others.”
OK, maybe poor people, more often single than their critics from the elite Flanagan class, have worse outcomes, but aren’t those problems more about, say, poverty than single-parent families? And, in fact, sociologists have been looking for reliable data that sorts that out since the invention of sociology in the 19th century and as recently as 2005.
But instead of looking at the recent work, Flanagan gives us her usual brew of autobiography (my parents’ 50-year marriage, my husbandâ┚¬Ã¢”ž¢s caretaking), outmoded studies and interviews with experts from right-wing foundations such as David Blankenhorn, president of the Institute for American Values (and a loud spokesman against marriage for same-sex people), and Heritage’s Robert Rector.
Hirshman points to a 2005 report from “the centrist Brookings Institution” that apparently is “unbeknownst to Flanagan”: “Looking at a decade’s work, [Penn State Professor of Family Sociology and Demography Paul R.] Amato reported ‘the results of individual studies vary considerably: Some suggest serious negative effects of divorce, others suggest modest effects, and yet others suggest no effects.'”
One of Amato’s conclusions is that “if the share of adolescents living in two-parent families returned to its 1970 level, it would have … a relatively small effect on the share of children experiencing these problems.” His educated guess that “in general, these findings… are likely to disappoint some readers” appears true enough, except when corporate media pundits like Flanagan choose not to read them at all. See the FAIR magazine Extra!: “Career Women, Go Home: Media Return to a Favorite Obsession” (11â┚¬“12/06) by Keely Savoie.
I realize this is several months after the original post, but I wanted to provide an updated link to the Amato study in case anyone else discovers this post and attempts to find the study (like I did):
http://www.eric.ed.gov/ERICDocs/data/ericdocs2sql/content_storage_01/0000019b/80/3d/cd/a4.pdf
I also thought it would be worth mentioning that after having read the brief summary of the Amato study posted here, I was surprised by what it found when I actually read it.
First of all, I expected to read that Amato found that the data are inconclusive as to whether there is any negative effect of divorce on children. But his conclusion is actually very nearly the opposite:
“In a more recent meta-analysis, based on sixty-seven studies conducted during the 1990s, I again found that children with divorced parents, on average, scored significantly lower on various measures of well-being than did children with continuously married parents. As before, the differences between the two groups were modest rather than large. Nevertheless, the more recent meta-analyses revealed that children with divorced parents continued to have lower average levels of cognitive, social, and emotional well-being, even in a decade in which divorce had become common and widely accepted.”
It is true that he does not claim that divorce (or single parenthood) is the *sole* cause of childhood problems, and he does state that the effects are statistically “modest.” And it is also true that he states that that returning the number of adolescents living in two-parent households back to 1970 levels would have a “relatively small effect.”
However, to highlight these and only these conclusions leaves the reader with, at best, an incomplete understanding of the study. I was surprised to find that, despite the conclusions quoted in this post, he additionally concludes the following:
“The importance of increasing the number of children growing up with two happily and continuously married parents and of improving the well-being of children now living in other family structures is self-evident.”
How does he explain the apparent disconnect? He states that the effects of single parenthood on the well-being of children is statistically similar to the effect of high-cholesterol on heart attack risk:
“The increase in the risk of cardiovascular disease associated with high blood cholesterol is comparable in many respects to the increase in risk of behavioral, emotional, and academic problems associated with growing up in a single-parent household.”
“…interventions that increase the share of children growing up with two continuously married biological parents will have modest effects on the percentage of U.S. children experiencing various problems, but could have substantial effects on the number of children experiencing them. From a public health perspective, even a modest decline in the percentages, when multiplied by the large number of children in the population, represents a substantial social benefit.”
Perhaps Professor Amato would disagree with Caitlin Flanagan to the extent that she exaggerates the negative effects of single parenthood on children or to the extent that she treats marriage as a panacea for childhood problems. But based on the findings of this study – and despite the impression I got from reading this blog post – it appears that he would agree with her 100% that being raised by a single parent is a significant negative risk factor for children.