MYTH: MOTHERS IN TWO PARENT-FAMILIES ARE BETTER PARENTS THAN SINGLE MOTHERS

Fact: "Single mothers spend similar amounts of time engaged in primary child care as married mothers."

Sarah M. Kendig and Suzanne M. Bianchi, Single, Cohabitating, and Married Mothers' Time With Children, Journal of Marriage and Family Volume 70 Issue 5, Pages 1228 - 1240 (2008)

Fact: "[T]here does not appear to be a significant difference in quality of parenting between divorced mothers and mothers in intact homes, when controlling for income.

Rosenthal, D., Leigh, G. K., & Elardo, R. (1985). Home environment of three to six year old children from father-absent and two-parent families. Journal of Divorce, 9 (2), 41-48.

Colletta, N. D. (1979). The impact of divorce: Father absence or poverty? Journal of Divorce, 3(1), 27-35.

Fact: "[D]espite their greater dating experiences, [adolescents] from single-mother families were less likely to choose their romantic partners over mothers as primary confidants than those from two-biological-parent families... [and] unlike the popular notion that it is normative for adolescents to turn away from their parents, the adolescents who nominated peers -- romantic partners or friends -- were more likely than those who nominated mothers to have increased involvement in delinquency or substance use."

Kei M. Nomaguchi, Gender, Family Structure, and Adolescents' Primary Confidants, Journal of Marriage and Family Volume 70 Issue 5, Pages 1213 - 1227 (2008)

Fact: "[S]ingle mothers have higher poverty rates than other families and ...a substantial portion of their poverty is a consequence of marital disruption."

McLanahan, S., & Booth, K. (1989). Mother-only families: Problems, prospects, and politics. Journal of Marriage and the Family, 51 (3), 557-580.

Fact: "A new multiethnic study at Cornell University has found that being a single parent does not appear to have a negative effect on the behavior or educational performance of a mother's 12- and 13-year-old children What mattered most in this study, Cornell researcher Henry Ricciuti says, is a mother's education and ability level and, to a lesser extent, family income and quality of the home environment. He found consistent links between these maternal attributes and a child's school performance and behavior... The study is a follow-up of children who were assessed when they were 6 and 7 years old. The first study, published in 1999, found that single parenthood did not affect young children's school readiness or social or behavioral problems..." Adverse affects of "single parenthood" did not emerge over a period of 6 to 7 years in which children's mothers did not have a spouse or partner living in the home.

Cornell News, May 6, 2004. Ricciuti, Henry. Journal of Educational Research (Vol. 97, No. 4) http://www.news.cornell.edu/releases/May04/single.parents.ssl.html.

Fact: Stress negatively impacts parenting, as well as other kinds of functioning. Stress factors that are more likely to be present and to affect single mothers than happily married mothers include: financial problems, living in a bad neighborhood, juggling increased outside employment and childcare demands, post-break-up domestic violence and harassment, divorce and custody litigation, and interference with family and household routines by nonresident parents and other third parties (i.e. responsibility without decision-making authority).

See, e.g., Tama Leventhal, Ph.D. (Center for Children and Families, Columbia University) Does Neighborhood Disadvantage Affect Family Well-being? Evidence From a Randomized Mobility Experiment; Jennifer Jenkins, Ph.D. (Institute of Child Study, University of Toronto), Thomas O'Connor, Ph.D. (Institute of Psychiatry), and John Rasbash (University of London) Understanding the Sources of Differential Parenting: The Role of Family and Child Level Effects; Xiaojia Ge, Ph.D. (University of California-Davis), Gene Brody, Ph.D. (University of Georgia) and Ronald Simons (Iowa State University) Contextual Amplification of Pubertal Transition Effects on Deviant Peer Affiliation and Externalizing Behavior, all cited at http://www.srcd.org/pp12.html.

Fact: "The most stressed of all mothers are those who are married, employed, have young children, and encounter difficulty in locating and affording child care and handle child rearing mostly alone (Benin & Keith, 1995; Hughes & Galinsky, 1994; Marshall, Barnett, et al., 1998; Neal, Chapman, Ingersol-Dayton, & Emlen, 1993; Sears & Galambos, 1993)... When economic conditions are constant, single and married women experience similar levels of maternal distress (Ross & Van Willigen, 1996)."

Terry Arendell (2000) Conceiving and Investigating Motherhood: The Decade's Scholarship Journal of Marriage and Family 62 (4), 1192-1207.

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