ISSUE

Is the Two-Parent Family Best?

YES: Barbara Dafoe Whitehead, from "Dan Quayle Was Right," The Atlantic Monthly (April 1993)

NO: June Stephenson, from The Two-Parent Family Is Not the Best (Diemer, Smith, 1991)

ISSUE SUMMARY

YES: Freelance writer Barbara Dafoe Whitehead reviews a wide range of literature and concludes that, in contemporary American culture, former vice president Dan Quayle was correct in advocating the two-parent family as best for children.

NO: Psychologist June Stephenson argues that the case for two parents being "the best" is grossly overstated. She concludes, based on her research, that a variety of family forms, including single-parent families, can produce children who are as well-adjusted as or better adjusted than those who are reared by two parents.

Why is the two-parent family considered best? Can we say that one family form is superior to all others, and if so, how do we define the superior family? For that matter, how do we consider all others? Are some politicians blinded by a nostalgic view of the American family?

This set of readings addresses one debate on family values that has continued for some time among politicians, theologians, scholars, and the general population. Americans seem preoccupied with the question of which family form is best and other related questions, for which there often is no one, uncomplicated answer.

As recently as the late 1950s and early 1960s, terms such as "atomistic family" and "nuclear family" were used to describe the state or form of the family that was purported to be dominant in the culture of the time. Television portrayals of the American family tended to depict families that were white, middle-class, and intact. Divorced, widowed, African American, Asian American, interracial, or single-parent families, for example, rarely received much, if any, positive attention. People knew what "real families" were supposed to be like, and television writers and producers reinforced those stereotypes. But those stereotypical formulas did not necessarily apply to reality: today, social scientists estimate that less than 15 percent of U.S. families fit the two-parent, two-child mold.

Family sociologist and historian Stephanie Coontz, in her book The Way We Never Were: American Families and the Nostalgia Trap (Basic Books, 1992), challenges many notions cited about what families were like in days gone by. For example, traditional families never asked for handouts, a man's home was his castle, and the television series Leave It to Beaver was a documentary on American family life. Coontz concludes that, on the contrary, throughout its history the United States has been home to many forms of families that have been part of the country's melting pot evolution. Coontz also maintains that today, in some retrospective analyses, we have a greater appreciation of this fact. The chapter titled "Toxic Parents, Supermoms, and Absent Fathers: Putting Parenting in Perspective" provides insight into the notion of "normal families" and "normal childhood" while looking at issues such as maternal employment, child-rearing practices, day care, latchkey children, divorce, single parenthood, and the myth of parental omnipotence.

Considerable debate continues to exist at the national, state, and local levels about what kind of family is best for the procreation and rearing of children. The debate occurs in the courtroom during custody hearings, from the pulpit during religious services, on the soapbox during elections, and even among families themselves as they come to grips with the ever-changing world. The selections that follow by Barbara Dafoe Whitehead and June Stephenson add fuel to the fires regarding what is the best parenting family form.

YES

Barbara Dafoe Whitehead

Dan Quayle Was Right

Divorce and out-of-wedlock childbirth are transforming the lives of American children. In the postwar generation more than 80 percent of children grew up in a family with two biological parents who were married to each other. By 1980 only 50 percent could expect to spend their entire childhood in an intact family. If current trends continue, less than half of all children born today will live continuously with their own mother and father throughout childhood. Most American children will spend several years in a single-mother family. Some will eventually live in stepparent families, but because stepfamilies are more likely to break up than intact (by which I mean two-biological-parent) families, an increasing number of children will experience family breakup two or even three times during childhood.

According to a growing body of social-scientific evidence, children in families disrupted by divorce and out-of-wedlock birth do worse than children in intact families on several measures of well-being. Children in single-parent families are six times as likely to be poor. They are also likely to stay poor longer. Twenty-two percent of children in one-parent families will experience poverty during childhood for seven years or more, as compared with only two percent of children in two-parent families. A 1988 survey by the National Center for Health Statistics found that children in single-parent families are two to three times as likely as children in two-parent families to have emotional and behavioral problems. They are also more likely to drop out of high school, to get pregnant as teenagers, to abuse drugs, and to be in trouble with the law. Compared with children in intact families, children from disrupted families are at a much higher risk for physical or sexual abuse.

Contrary to popular belief, many children do not "bounce back" after divorce or remarriage. Difficulties that are associated with family breakup often persist into adulthood. Children who grow up in single-parent or stepparent families are less successful as adults, particularly in the two domains of life—love and work—that are most essential to happiness. Needless to say, not all children experience such negative effects. However, research shows that many children from disrupted families have a harder time achieving intimacy in a relationship, forming a stable marriage, or even holding a steady job….

[I]t is…risky to ignore the issue of changing family structure. In recent years the problems associated with family disruption have grown. Overall child well-being has declined, despite a decrease in the number of children per family, an increase in the educational level of parents, and historically high levels of public spending. After dropping in the 1960s and 1970s, the proportion of children in poverty has increased dramatically, from 15 percent in 1970 to 20 percent in 1990, while the percentage of adult Americans in poverty has remained roughly constant. The teen suicide rate has more than tripled. Juvenile crime has increased and become more violent. School performance has continued to decline. There are no signs that these trends are about to reverse themselves.

If we fail to come to terms with the relationship between family structure and declining child well-being, then it will be increasingly difficult to improve children's life prospects, no matter how many new programs the federal government funds. Nor will we be able to make progress in bettering school performance or reducing crime or improving the quality of the nation's future work force—all domestic problems closely connected to family breakup. Worse, we may contribute to the problem by pursuing policies that actually increase family instability and breakup….

In the 1960s the rate of family disruption suddenly began to rise. After inching up over the course of a century, the divorce rate soared. Throughout the 1950s and early 1960s the divorce rate held steady at fewer than ten divorces a year per 1,000 married couples. Then, beginning in about 1965, the rate increased sharply, peaking at twenty-three divorces per 1,000 marriages by 1979. (In 1974 divorce passed death as the leading cause of family breakup.) The rate has leveled off at about twenty-one divorces per 1,000 marriages—the figure for 1991. The out-of-wedlock birth rate also jumped. It went from five percent in 1960 to 27 percent in 1990. In 1990 close to 57 percent of births among black mothers were nonmarital, and about 17 percent among white mothers. Altogether, about one out of every four women who had a child in 1990 was not married. With rates of divorce and nonmarital birth so high, family disruption is at its peak. Never before have so many children experienced family breakup caused by events other than death. Each year a million children go through divorce or separation and almost as many more are born out of wedlock.

Half of all marriages now end in divorce. Following divorce, many people enter new relationships. Some begin living together. Nearly half of all cohabiting couples have children in the household. Fifteen percent have new children together. Many cohabiting couples eventually get married. However, both cohabiting and remarried couples are more likely to break up than couples in first marriages. Even social scientists find it hard to keep pace with the complexity and velocity of such patterns. In the revised edition (1992) of his book Marriage, Divorce, Remarriage, the sociologist Andrew Cherlin ruefully comments: "If there were a truth-in-labeling law for books, the title of this edition should be something long and unwieldy like Cohabitation, Marriage, Divorce, More Cohabitation, and Probably Remarriage."…

Given its dramatic impact on children's lives, one might reasonably expect that this historic level of family disruption would be viewed with alarm, even regarded as a national crisis. Yet this has not been the case. In recent years some people have argued that these trends pose a serious threat to children and to the nation as a whole, but they are dismissed as declinists, pessimists, or nostalgists, unwilling or unable to accept the new facts of life. The dominant view is that the changes in family structure are, on balance, positive.

A Shift in The Social Metric

There are several reasons why this is so, but the fundamental reason is that at some point in the 1970s Americans changed their minds about the meaning of these disruptive behaviors. What had once been regarded as hostile to children's best interests was now considered essential to adults' happiness. In the 1950s most Americans believed that parents should stay in an unhappy marriage for the sake of the children. The assumption was that a divorce would damage the children, and the prospect of such damage gave divorce its meaning. By the mid-1970s a majority of Americans rejected that view. Popular advice literature reflected the shift. A book on divorce published in the mid-1940s tersely asserted: "Children are entitled to the affection and association of two parents, not one." Thirty years later another popular divorce book proclaimed just the opposite: "A two-parent home is not the only emotional structure within which a child can be happy and healthy…. The parents who take care of themselves will be best able to take care of their children." At about the same time, the long-standing taboo against out-of-wedlock childbirth also collapsed. By the mid-1970s three fourths of Americans said that it was not morally wrong for a woman to have a child outside marriage.

Once the social metric shifts from child well-being to adult well-being, it is hard to see divorce and nonmarital birth in anything but a positive light. However distressing and difficult they may be, both of these behaviors can hold out the promise of greater adult choice, freedom, and happiness. For unhappy spouses, divorce offers a way to escape a troubled or even abusive relationship and make a fresh start. For single parents, remarriage is a second try at marital happiness as well as a chance for relief from the stress, loneliness, and economic hardship of raising a child alone. For some unmarried women, non-marital birth is a way to beat the biological clock, avoid marrying the wrong man, and experience the pleasures of motherhood. Moreover, divorce and out-of-wedlock birth involve a measure of agency and choice; they are man- and woman-made events. To be sure, not everyone exercises choice in divorce or nonmarital birth. Men leave wives for younger women, teenage girls get pregnant accidentally—yet even these unhappy events reflect the expansion of the boundaries of freedom and choice.

This cultural shift helps explain what otherwise would be inexplicable: the failure to see the rise in family disruption as a severe and troubling national problem. It explains why there is virtually no widespread public sentiment for restigmatizing either of these classically disruptive behaviors and no sense—no public consensus—that they can or should be avoided in the future. On the contrary, the prevailing opinion is that we should accept the changes in family structure as inevitable and devise new forms of public and private support for single-parent families….

No one would claim that two-parent families are free from conflict, violence, or abuse. However, the attempt to discredit the two-parent family can be understood as part of what Daniel Patrick Moynihan has described as a larger effort to accommodate higher levels of social deviance. "The amount of deviant behavior in American society has increased beyond the levels the community can ‘afford to recognize,’" Moynihan argues. One response has been to normalize what was once considered deviant behavior, such as out-of-wedlock birth. An accompanying response has been to detect deviance in what once stood as a social norm, such as the married-couple family. Together these responses reduce the acknowledged levels of deviance by eroding earlier distinctions between the normal and the deviant….

[T]he popular portrait of family life does not simply reflect the views of a cultural elite, as some have argued. There is strong support at the grass roots for much of this view of family change. Survey after survey shows that Americans are less inclined than they were a generation ago to value sexual fidelity, lifelong marriage, and parenthood as worthwhile personal goals. Motherhood no longer defines adult womanhood, as everyone knows; equally important is the fact that fatherhood has declined as a norm for men. In 1976 less than half as many fathers as in 1957 said that providing for children was a life goal. The proportion of working men who found marriage and children burdensome and restrictive more than doubled in the same period. Fewer than half of all adult Americans today regard the idea of sacrifice for others as a positive moral virtue.

Dinosaurs Divorce

It is true that many adults benefit from divorce or remarriage. According to one study, nearly 80 percent of divorced women and 50 percent of divorced men say they are better off out of the marriage. Half of divorced adults in the same study report greater happiness. A competent self-help book called Divorce and New Beginnings notes the advantages of single parenthood: single parents can "develop their own interests, fulfill their own needs, choose their own friends and engage in social activities of their choice. Money, even if limited, can be spent as they see fit." Apparently, some women appreciate the opportunity to have children out of wedlock. "The real world, however, does not always allow women who are dedicated to their careers to devote the time and energy it takes to find—or be found by—the perfect husband and father wannabe," one woman said in a letter to The Washington Post….

[A] telling glimpse into the meaning of family disruption can be found in the growing children's literature on family dissolution. Take, for example, the popular children's book Dinosaurs Divorce: A Guide for Changing Families (1986), by Laurene Krasny Brown and Marc Brown. This is a picture book, written for very young children. The book begins with a short glossary of "divorce words" and encourages children to "see if you can find them" in the story. The words include "family counselor," "separation agreement," "alimony," and "child custody." The book is illustrated with cartoonish drawings of green dinosaur parents who fight, drink too much, and break up. One panel shows the father dinosaur, suitcase in hand, getting into a yellow car.

The dinosaur children are offered simple, straightforward advice on what to do about the divorce. On custody decisions: "When parents can't agree, lawyers and judges decide. Try to be honest if they ask you questions; it will help them make better decisions." On selling the house: "If you move, you may have to say good-bye to friends and familiar places. But soon your new home will feel like the place you really belong." On the economic impact of divorce: "Living with one parent almost always means there will be less money. Be prepared to give up some things." On holidays: "Divorce may mean twice as much celebrating at holiday times, but you may feel pulled apart." On parents' new lovers: "You may sometimes feel jealous and want your parent to yourself. Be polite to your parents' new friends, even if you don't like them at first." On parents' remarriage: "Not everyone loves his or her stepparents, but showing them respect is important."

These… books point to an uncomfortable and generally unacknowledged fact: what contributes to a parent's happiness may detract from a child's happiness. All too often the adult quest for freedom, independence, and choice in family relationships conflicts with a child's developmental needs for stability, constancy, harmony, and permanence in family life. In short, family disruption creates a deep division between parents' interests and the interests of children.

One of the worse consequences of these divided interests is a withdrawal of parental investment in children's well-being. As the Stanford economist Victor Fuchs has pointed out, the main source of social investment in children is private. The investment comes from the children's parents. But parents in disrupted families have less time, attention, and money to devote to their children. The single most important source of disinvestment has been the widespread withdrawal of financial support and involvement by fathers. Maternal investment, too, has declined, as women try to raise families on their own and work outside the home. Moreover, both mothers and fathers commonly respond to family breakup by investing more heavily in themselves and in their own personal and romantic lives.

Sometimes the tables are completely turned. Children are called upon to invest in the emotional well-being of their parents. Indeed, this seems to be the larger message of many of the children's books on divorce and remarriage. Dinosaurs Divorce asks children to be sympathetic, understanding, respectful, and polite to confused, unhappy parents. The sacrifice comes from the children: "Be prepared to give up some things." In the world of divorcing dinosaurs, the children rather than the grown-ups are the exemplars of patience, restraint, and good sense.

Three Seventies Assumptions

As it first took shape in the 1970s, the optimistic view of family change rested on three bold new assumptions. At that time, because the emergence of the changes in family life was so recent, there was little hard evidence to confirm or dispute these assumptions. But this was an expansive moment in American life.

The first assumption was an economic one: that a woman could now afford to be a mother without also being a wife. There were ample grounds for believing this. Women's work-force participation had been gradually increasing in the postwar period, and by the beginning of the 1970s women were a strong presence in the workplace. What's more, even though there was still a substantial wage gap between men and women, women had made considerable progress in a relatively short time toward better-paying jobs and greater employment opportunities. More women than ever before could aspire to serious careers as business executives, doctors, lawyers, airline pilots, and politicians. This circumstance, combined with the increased availability of child care, meant that women could take on the responsibilities of a breadwinner, perhaps even a sole breadwinner. This was particularly true for middle-class women….

Feminists, who had long argued that the path to greater equality for women lay in the world of work outside the home, endorsed this assumption. In fact, for many, economic independence was a stepping-stone toward freedom from both men and marriage. As women began to earn their own money, they were less dependent on men or marriage, and marriage diminished in importance. In Gloria Steinem's memorable words, "A woman without a man is like a fish with out a bicycle."…

The second assumption was that family disruption would not cause lasting harm to children and could actually enrich their lives. Creative Divorce: A New Opportunity for Personal Growth, a popular book of the seventies, spoke confidently to this point: "Children can survive any family crisis without permanent damage—and grow as human beings in the process…." Moreover, single-parent and stepparent families created a more extensive kinship network than the nuclear family. This network would envelop children in a web of warm and supportive relationships. "Belonging to a stepfamily means there are more people in your life," a children's book published in 1982 notes. "More sisters and brothers, including the step ones. More people you think of as grandparents and aunts and uncles. More cousins. More neighbors and friends…. Getting to know and like so many people (and having them like you) is one of the best parts of what being in a stepfamily… is all about."

The third assumption was that the new diversity in family structure would make America a better place. Just as the nation has been strengthened by the diversity of its ethnic and racial groups, so it would be strengthened by diverse family forms. The emergence of these brave new families was but the latest chapter in the saga of American pluralism.

Another version of the diversity argument stated that the real problem was not family disruption itself but the stigma still attached to these emergent family forms. This lingering stigma placed children at psychological risk, making them feel ashamed or different; as the ranks of single-parent and stepparent families grew, children would feel normal and good about themselves.

These assumptions continue to be appealing, because they accord with strongly held American beliefs in social progress. Americans see progress in the expansion of individual opportunities for choice, freedom, and self-expression. Moreover, Americans identify progress with growing tolerance of diversity. Over the past half century, the pollster Daniel Yankelovich writes, the United States has steadily grown more open-minded and accepting of groups that were previously perceived as alien, untrustworthy, or unsuitable for public leadership or social esteem. One such group is the burgeoning number of single-parent and stepparent families.

The Education of Sara McLanahan

In 1981 Sara McLanahan, now a sociologist at Princeton University's Woodrow Wilson School, read a three-part series by Ken Auletta in The New Yorker. Later published as a book titled The Underclass, the series presented a vivid portrait of the drug addicts, welfare mothers, and school dropouts who took part in an education-and-training program in New York City. Many were the children of single mothers, and it was Auletta's clear implication that single-mother families were contributing to the growth of an underclass. McLanahan was taken aback by this notion. "It struck me as strange that he would be viewing single mothers at that level of pathology."…

One of the leading assumptions of the time was that single motherhood was economically viable. Even if single mothers did face economic trials, they wouldn't face them for long, it was argued, because they wouldn't remain single for long: single motherhood would be a brief phase of three to five years, followed by marriage. Single mothers would be economically resilient: if they experienced setbacks, they would recover quickly. It was also said that single mothers would be supported by informal networks of family, friends, neighbors, and other single mothers. As McLanahan shows in her study [on single motherhood, published in 1986], the evidence demolishes all these claims.

For the vast majority of single mothers, the economic spectrum turns out to be narrow, running between precarious and desperate. Half the single mothers in the United States live below the poverty line. (Currently, one out of ten married couples with children is poor.) Many others live on the edge of poverty. Even single mothers who are far from poor are likely to experience persistent economic insecurity. Divorce almost always brings a decline in the standard of living for the mother and children.

Moreover, the poverty experienced by single mothers is no more brief than it is mild. A significant number of all single mothers never marry or remarry. Those who do, do so only after spending roughly six years, on average, as single parents. For black mothers the duration is much longer. Only 33 percent of African-American mothers had remarried within ten years of separation. Consequently, single motherhood is hardly a fleeting event for the mother, and it is likely to occupy a third of the child's childhood. Even the notion that single mothers are knit together in economically supportive networks is not borne out by the evidence. On the contrary, single parenthood forces many women to be on the move, in search of cheaper housing and better jobs. This need-driven restless mobility makes it more difficult for them to sustain supportive ties to family and friends, let alone other single mothers….

McLanahan cites three reasons why single-mother families are so vulnerable economically. For one thing, their earnings are low. Second, unless the mothers are widowed, they don't receive public subsidies large enough to lift them out of poverty. And finally, they do not get much support from family members—especially the fathers of their children. In 1982 single white mothers received an average of $1,246 in alimony and child support, black mothers an average of $322. Such payments accounted for about 10 percent of the income of single white mothers and for about 3.5 percent of the income of single black mothers. These amounts were dramatically smaller than the income of the father in a two-parent family and also smaller than the income from a second earner in a two-parent family. Roughly 60 percent of single white mothers and 80 percent of single black mothers received no support at all.

Until the mid-1980s, when stricter standards were put in place, child-support awards were only about half to two-thirds what the current guidelines require. Accordingly, there is often a big difference in the living standards of divorced fathers and of divorced mothers with children. After divorce the average annual income of mothers and children is $13,500 for whites and $9,000 for nonwhites, as compared with $25,000 for white nonresident fathers and $13,600 for nonwhite nonresident fathers. Moreover, since child-support awards account for a smaller portion of the income of a high-earning father, the drop in living standards can be especially sharp for mothers who were married to upper-level managers and professionals.

Unwed mothers are unlikely to be awarded any support at all, partly because the paternity of their children may not have been established. According to one recent study, only 20 percent of unmarried mothers receive child support.

Even if single mothers escape poverty, economic uncertainty remains a condition of life. Divorce brings a reduction in income and standard of living for the vast majority of single mothers. One study, for example, found that income for mothers and children declines on average about 30 percent, while fathers experience a 10 to 15 percent increase in income in the year following a separation. Things get even more difficult when fathers fail to meet their child-support obligations. As a result, many divorced mothers experience a wearing uncertainty about the family budget: whether the check will come in or not; whether new sneakers can be bought this month or not; whether the electric bill will be paid on time or not. Uncertainty about money triggers other kinds of uncertainty. Mothers and children often have to move to cheaper housing after a divorce. One study shows that about 38 percent of divorced mothers and their children move during the first year after a divorce. Even several years later the rate of moves for single mothers is about a third higher than the rate for two-parent families. It is also common for a mother to change her job or increase her working hours or both following a divorce. Even the composition of the household is likely to change, with other adults, such as boyfriends or babysitters, moving in and out.

Sara McLanahan's investigation and others like it have helped to establish a broad consensus on the economic impact of family disruption on children. Most social scientists now agree that single motherhood is an important and growing cause of poverty, and that children suffer as a result. (They continue to argue, however, about the relationship between family structure and such economic factors as income inequality, the loss of jobs in the inner city, and the growth of low-wage jobs.) By the mid-1980s, however, it was clear that the problem of family disruption was not confined to the urban underclass, nor was its sole impact economic. Divorce and out-of-wedlock childbirth were affecting middle- and upper-class children, and these more privileged children were suffering negative consequences as well. It appeared that the problems associated with family breakup were far deeper and far more widespread than anyone had previously imagined.

The Missing Father

Judith Wallerstein is one of the pioneers in research on the long-term psychological impact of family disruption on children. The California Children of Divorce Study, which she directs, remains the most enduring study of the long-term effects of divorce on children and their parents….

When, in 1971, Wallerstein and her colleagues set out to conduct clinical interviews with 131 children from the San Francisco area, they thought they were embarking on a short-term study. Most experts believed that divorce was like a bad cold. There was a phase of acute discomfort, and then a short recovery phase. According to the conventional wisdom, kids would be back on their feet in no time at all. Yet when Wallerstein met these children for a second interview more than a year later, she was amazed to discover that there had been no miraculous recovery. In fact, the children seemed to be doing worse.

The news that children did not "get over" divorce was not particularly welcome at the time. Wallerstein recalls, "We got angry letters from therapists, parents, and lawyers saying we were undoubtedly wrong. They said children are really much better off being released from an unhappy marriage. Divorce, they said, is a liberating experience." One of the main results of the California study was to overturn this optimistic view. In Wallerstein's cautionary words, "Divorce is deceptive. Legally it is a single event, but psychologically it is a chain—sometimes a never-ending chain—of events, relocations, and radically shifting relationships strung through time, a process that forever changes the lives of the people involved."

Five years after divorce more than a third of the children experienced moderate or severe depression. At ten years a significant number of the now young men and women appeared to be troubled, drifting, and underachieving. At fifteen years many of the thirtyish adults were struggling to establish strong love relationships of their own. In short, far from recovering from their parents' divorce, a significant percentage of these grownups were still suffering from its effects. In fact, according to Wallerstein, the long-term effects of divorce emerge at a time when young adults are trying to make their own decisions about love, marriage, and family. Not all children in the study suffered negative consequences. But Wallerstein's research presents a sobering picture of divorce. "The child of divorce faces many additional psychological burdens in addition to the normative tasks of growing up," she says.

Divorce not only makes it more difficult for young adults to establish new relationships. It also weakens the oldest primary relationship: that between parent and child. According to Wallerstein, "Parent-child relationships are permanently altered by divorce in ways that our society has not anticipated." Not only do children experience a loss of parental attention at the onset of divorce, but they soon find that at every stage of their development their parents are not available in the same way they once were. "In a reasonably happy intact family," Wallerstein observes, "the child gravitates first to one parent and then to the other, using skills and attributes from each in climbing the developmental ladder." In a divorced family, children find it "harder to find the needed parent at needed times." This may help explain why very young children suffer the most as the result of family disruption. Their opportunities to engage in this kind of ongoing process are the most truncated and compromised.

The father-child bond is severely, often irreparably, damaged in disrupted families. In a situation without historical precedent, an astonishing and disheartening number of American fathers are failing to provide financial support to their children. Often, more than the father's support check is missing. Increasingly, children are bereft of any contact with their fathers. According to the National Survey of Children, in disrupted families only one child in six, on average, saw his or her father as often as once a week in the past year. Close to half did not see their father at all in the past year. As time goes on, contact becomes even more infrequent. Ten years after a marriage breaks up, more than two thirds of children report not having seen their father for a year….

Even for fathers who maintain regular contact, the pattern of father-child relationships changes. The sociologists Andrew Cherlin and Frank Furstenberg, who have studied broken families, write that the fathers behave more like other relatives than like parents. Rather than helping with homework or carrying out a project with their children, nonresidential fathers are likely to take the kids shopping, to the movies, or out to dinner. Instead of providing steady advice and guidance, divorced fathers become "treat" dads.

Apparently—and paradoxically—it is the visiting relationship itself, rather than the frequency of visits, that is the real source of the problem. According to Wallerstein, the few children in the California study who reported visiting with their fathers once or twice a week over a ten-year period still felt rejected. The need to schedule a special time to be with the child, the repeated leave-takings, and the lack of connection to the child's regular, daily schedule leaves many fathers adrift, frustrated, and confused. Wallerstein calls the visiting father a parent without portfolio….

Long-Term Effects

Since most children live with their mothers after divorce, one might expect that the mother-child bond would remain unaltered and might even be strengthened. Yet research shows that the mother-child bond is also weakened as the result of divorce. Only half of the children who were close to their mothers before a divorce remained equally close after the divorce. Boys, particularly, had difficulties with their mothers. Moreover, mother-child relationships deteriorated over time. Whereas teenagers in disrupted families were no more likely than teenagers in intact families to report poor relationships with their mothers, 30 percent of young adults from disrupted families have poor relationships with their mothers, as compared with 16 percent of young adults from intact families. Mother-daughter relationships often deteriorate as the daughter reaches young adulthood. The only group in society that derives any benefit from these weakened parent-child ties is the therapeutic community. Young adults from disrupted families are nearly twice as likely as those from intact families to receive psychological help.

… Obviously, not all children in two-parent families are free from emotional turmoil, but few are burdened with the troubles that accompany family breakup. Moreover, as the sociologist Amitai Etzioni explains in a new book, The Spirit of Community, two parents in an intact family make up what might be called a mutually supportive education coalition. When both parents are present, they can play different, even contradictory, roles. One parent may goad the child to achieve, while the other may encourage the child to take time out to daydream or toss a football around. One may emphasize taking intellectual risk, while the other may insist on following the teacher's guidelines. At the same time, the parents regularly exchange information about the child's school problems and achievements, and have a sense of the overall educational mission….

The Bad News about Stepparents

Perhaps the most striking, and potentially disturbing, new research has to do with children in stepparent families. Until quite recently the optimistic assumption was that children saw their lives improve when they became part of a stepfamily. When Nicholas Zill and his colleagues began to study the effects of remarriage on children, their working hypothesis was that stepparent families would make up for the shortcomings of the single-parent family. Clearly, most children are better off economically when they are able to share in the income of two adults. When a second adult joins the household, there may be a reduction in the time and work pressures on the single parent.

The research overturns this optimistic assumption, however. In general the evidence suggests that remarriage neither reproduces nor restores the intact family structure, even when it brings more income and a second adult into the household. Quite the contrary. Indeed, children living with stepparents appear to be even more disadvantaged than children living in a stable single-parent family. Other difficulties seem to offset the advantages of extra income and an extra pair of hands. However much our modern sympathies reject the fairytale portrait of stepparents, the latest research confirms that the old stories are anthropologically quite accurate. Stepfamilies disrupt established loyalties, create new uncertainties, provoke deep anxieties, and sometimes threaten a child's physical safety as well as emotional security.

Parents and children have dramatically different interests in and expectations for a new marriage. For a single parent, remarriage brings new commitments, the hope of enduring love and happiness, and relief from stress and loneliness. For a child, the same event often provokes confused feelings of sadness, anger, and rejection. Nearly half the children in Wallerstein's study said they felt left out in their stepfamilies. The National Commission on Children, a bipartisan group headed by Senator John D. Rockefeller, of West Virginia, reported that children from stepfamilies were more likely to say they often felt lonely or blue than children from either single-parent or intact families. Children in stepfamilies were the most likely to report that they wanted more time with their mothers. When mothers remarry, daughters tend to have a harder time adjusting than sons. Evidently, boys often respond positively to a male presence in the household, while girls who have established close ties to their mother in a single-parent family often see the stepfather as a rival and an intruder. According to one study, boys in remarried families are less likely to drop out of school than boys in single-parent families, while the opposite is true for girls….

One of the most severe risks associated with stepparent-child ties is the risk of sexual abuse. As Judith Wallerstein explains, "The presence of a stepfather can raise the difficult issue of a thinner incest barrier." The incest taboo is strongly reinforced, Wallerstein says, by knowledge of paternity and by the experience of caring for a child since birth. A stepfather enters the family without either credential and plays a sexual role as the mother's husband. As a result, stepfathers can pose a sexual risk to the children, especially to daughters. According to a study by the Canadian researchers Martin Daly and Margo Wilson, preschool children in stepfamilies are forty times as likely as children in intact families to suffer physical or sexual abuse. (Most of the sexual abuse was committed by a third party, such as a neighbor, a stepfather's male friend, or another nonrelative.) Stepfathers discriminate in their abuse: they are far more likely to assault nonbiological children than their own natural children.

Sexual abuse represents the most extreme threat to children's well-being. Stepfamilies also seem less likely to make the kind of ordinary investments in the children that other families do. Although it is true that the stepfamily household has a higher income than the single-parent household, it does not follow that the additional income is reliably available to the children. To begin with, children's claim on stepparents' resources is shaky. Stepparents are not legally required to support stepchildren, so their financial support of these children is entirely voluntary. Moreover, since stepfamilies are far more likely to break up than intact families, particularly in the first five years, there is always the risk—far greater than the risk of unemployment in an intact family—that the second income will vanish with another divorce. The financial commitment to a child's education appears weaker in stepparent families, perhaps because the stepparent believes that the responsibility for educating the child rests with the biological parent….

Diminishing Investments

There are several reasons for [stepparents'] diminished interest and investment [in their stepchildren]. In the law, as in the children's eyes, stepparents are shadowy figures. According to the legal scholar David Chambers, family law has pretty much ignored stepparents. Chambers writes, "In the substantial majority of states, stepparents, even when they live with a child, have no legal obligation to contribute to the child's support; nor does a stepparent's presence in the home alter the support obligations of a noncustodial parent. The stepparent also has… no authority to approve emergency medical treatment or even to sign a permission slip…." When a marriage breaks up, the step-parent has no continuing obligation to provide for a stepchild, no matter how long or how much he or she has been contributing to the support of the child. In short, Chambers says, stepparent relationships are based wholly on consent, subject to the inclinations of the adult and the child. The only way a stepparent can acquire the legal status of a parent is through adoption. Some researchers also point to the cultural ambiguity of the stepparent's role as a source of diminished interest, while others insist that it is the absence of a blood tie that weakens the bond between stepparent and child….

In short, as Andrew Cherlin and Frank Furstenburg put it, "Through divorce and remarriage, individuals are related to more and more people, to each of whom they owe less and less." Moreover, as Nicholas Zill argues, weaker parent-child attachments leave many children more strongly exposed to influences outside the family, such as peers, boyfriends or girlfriends, and the media. Although these outside forces can sometimes be helpful, common sense and research opinion argue against putting too much faith in peer groups or the media as surrogates for Mom and Dad….

The Two-Parent Advantage

All this evidence gives rise to an obvious conclusion: growing up in an intact two-parent family is an important source of advantage for American children. Though far from perfect as a social institution, the intact family offers children greater security and better outcomes than its fast-growing alternatives: single-parent and stepparent families. Not only does the intact family protect the child from poverty and economic insecurity; it also provides greater noneconomic investments of parental time, attention, and emotional support over the entire life course. This does not mean that all two-parent families are better for children than all single-parent families. But in the face of the evidence it becomes increasingly difficult to sustain the proposition that all family structures produce equally good outcomes for children.

[T]he case against the two-parent family is remarkably weak. It is true that disaggregating data can make family structure less significant as a factor, just as disaggregating Hurricane Andrew into wind, rain, and tides can make it disappear as a meteorological phenomenon. Nonetheless, research opinion as well as common sense suggests that the effects of changes in family structure are great enough to cause concern. Nicholas Zill argues that many of the risk factors for children are doubled or more than doubled as the result of family disruption. "In epidemiological terms," he writes, "the doubling of a hazard is a substantial increase… the increase in risk that dietary cholesterol poses for cardiovascular disease, for example, is far less than double, yet millions of American have altered their diets because of the perceived hazard."

The argument that family conflict, rather than the breakup of parents, is the cause of children's psychological distress is persuasive on its face. Children who grow up in high-conflict families, whether the families stay together or eventually split up, are undoubtedly at great psychological risk. And surely no one would dispute that there must be societal measures available, including divorce, to remove children from families where they are in danger. Yet only a minority of divorces grow out of pathological situations; much more common are divorces in families unscarred by physical assault. Moreover, an equally compelling hypothesis is that family breakup generates its own conflict. Certainly, many families exhibit more conflictual and even violent behavior as a consequence of divorce than they did before divorce.

Finally, it is important to note that clinical insights are different from sociological findings. Clinicians work with individual families, who cannot and should not be defined by statistical aggregates. Appropriate to a clinical approach, moreover, is a focus on the internal dynamics of family functioning and on the immense variability in human behavior. Nevertheless, there is enough empirical evidence to justify sociological statements about the causes of declining child well-being and to demonstrate that despite the plasticity of human response, there are some useful rules of thumb to guide our thinking about and policies affecting the family.

For example, Sara McLanahan says, three structural constants are commonly associated with intact families, even intact families who would not win any "Family of the Year" awards. The first is economic. In intact families, children share in the income of two adults. Indeed, as a number of analysts have pointed out, the two-parent family is becoming more rather than less necessary, because more and more families need two incomes to sustain a middle-class standard of living.

McLanahan believes that most intact families also provide a stable authority structure. Family breakup commonly upsets the established boundaries of authority in a family. Children are often required to make decisions or accept responsibilities once considered the province of parents. Moreover, children, even very young children, are often expected to behave like mature adults, so that the grown-ups in the family can be free to deal with the emotional fallout of the failed relationship. In some instances family disruption creates a complete vacuum in authority; everyone invents his or her own rules. With lines of authority disrupted or absent, children find it much more difficult to engage in the normal kinds of testing behavior, the trial and error, the failing and succeeding, that define the developmental pathway toward character and competence. McLanahan says, "Children need to be the ones to challenge the rules. The parents need to set the boundaries and let the kids push the boundaries. The children shouldn't have to walk the straight and narrow at all times."

Finally, McLanahan holds that children in intact families benefit from stability in what she neutrally terms "household personnel." Family disruption frequently brings new adults into the family, including stepparents, live-in boyfriends or girlfriends, and casual sexual partners. Like stepfathers, boyfriends can present a real threat to children's, particularly to daughters', security and well-being. But physical and sexual abuse represents only the most extreme such threat. Even the very best of boyfriends can disrupt and undermine a child's sense of peace and security. McLanahan says. "It's not as though you're going from an unhappy marriage to peacefulness. There can be a constant changing until the mother finds a suitable partner."

McLanahan's argument helps explain why children of widows tend to do better than children of divorced or unmarried mothers. Widows differ from other single mothers in all three respects. They are economically more secure, because they receive more public assistance through Survivors Insurance, and possibly private insurance or other kinds of support from family members. Thus widows are less likely to leave the neighborhood in search of a new or better job and a cheaper house or apartment. Moreover, the death of a father is not likely to disrupt the authority structure radically. When a father dies, he is no longer physically present, but his death does not dethrone him as an authority figure in the child's life. On the contrary, his authority may be magnified through death. The mother can draw on the powerful memory of the departed father as a way of intensifying her parental authority: "Your father would have wanted it this way." Finally, since widows tend to be older than divorced mothers, their love life may be less distracting.

Regarding the two-parent family, the sociologist David Popenoe, who has devoted much of his career to the study of families, both in the United States and in Scandinavia, makes this straightforward assertion:

Social science research is almost never conclusive. There are always methodological difficulties and stones left unturned. Yet in three decades of work as a social scientist, I know of few other bodies of data in which the weight of evidence is so decisively on one side of the issue: on the whole, for children, two-parent families are preferable to single-parent and stepfamilies.

From Barbara Dafoe Whitehead, "Dan Quayle Was Right," The Atlantic Monthly (April 1993). Copyright © 1993 by Barbara Dafoe Whitehead. Reprinted by permission.

NO

June Stephenson

The Two-Parent Family Is Not the Best

Introduction

This is… about parenting and the human relationships involved in the process of raising children. It evaluates how well parents did in raising their children by what the children, now grown, say about their childhood….

The children…, now grown to adulthood, speak out from four different family groups. These groups are composed of 368 women who were raised by single fathers, or by single mothers, or by both biological parents, or by a step parent. Their answers to a lengthy questionnaire asking a multitude of questions were compared from group to group….

This… is about young girls, how they were raised and how they are now adults. The initial quest was to learn about girls raised by single fathers, but the study was then expanded for comparison purposes….

This study should dampen the assumption that the two biological parent family is the best for all children, because that did not prove to be true.

Among the other things that were learned were that single parent families have advantages over two-parent families, that girls growing up in single father homes have strong feminine characteristics, and girls growing up in single mother homes have strong masculine characteristics, and most girls growing up in step mother families are emotionally and physically abused….

Just "to test the waters," I put an advertisement in the Berkeley, California weekly newspaper, The Bay Area Guardian, asking women who had been raised by fathers to volunteer for a research study. I was surprised to get several responses from women enthusiastic to participate. All of the women said they had never known anyone else raised by a single father and were eager to communicate. Encouraged, and now wanting to expand my initial curiosity into a reliable research study, I needed to find research participants from different geographical, economic, ethnic and educational backgrounds. I also needed to find women willing to participate who were not raised by their fathers so I would have one or more control groups for comparison…. To secure a more balanced sample, I then put advertisements in Ms. Magazine, Graduate Woman, 50 Plus, National Enquirer, True Romance, Modern Romance, Psychology Today, Mother Jones, Globe, The Sun, and The Examiner, and True Story.

The ads asked for volunteers in four categories: women raised by fathers only, women raised by mothers only, women raised by both biological parents, and women raised by one biological parent and one step parent, where the biological parent had died at about the time the woman had been five years old. This latter category was set up so that there would not be respondents with two sets of parents. The ads asked simply for women to volunteer to answer a questionnaire for a research project and to indicate their category.

…[A]pproximately seventy percent of all women who volunteered returned the nine page questionnaire. There are over 120 questions…. Respondents were also encouraged to write personal narratives about their growing up. These are heartfelt explorations which illuminated the individual lives of women in all groups.

… There are 119 respondents from the "Single Fathers" group, 106 from the "Single Mothers" group, 92 from the "Biological Parents" group, and 51 from the "Step parents" group, with a diversity of ethnic, religious, educational, economic, and geographical backgrounds, ages 18–83….

In addition to the questionnaire which we developed… we also used The Gough Adjective Check List…. This is a standardized test of 300 adjectives. The respondent is asked to check which adjectives describe herself. We believe that the use of this check list, in conjunction with our own questionnaire, helps to validate our findings. When applicable, the results of the questionnaire on certain questions and the results of the Adjective Check List are correlated. For instance, one question on the questionnaire asks if the respondent was permitted risks which other girls were not permitted. The results from this question were then compared with the results on the Adjective Check List, specifically the Creative Personality Scale. Are girls who are permitted more risks more apt to develop creative personalities compared to girls who are not permitted risks? The Adjective Check List indicated that the answer to that question was "Yes."

What Has Been Learned?

The results of this research represent the group of women who responded and the results may also represent most women in this country in each particular group. The results suggest a variety of indications about women who have been raised by both biological parents, or by single fathers, or single mothers, or by step parents. Five of the major indications are these:

1. The Two-Parent Family Is Not the Best

… This research indicated that, contrary to a long-held belief, the two-parent family is not the best family for children. Though a large percentage of this group responded that their childhood had been happy, followed closely by the two single parent groups, and though, on the Adjective Check List, the biological parent group had the highest percentage who scored above 51% on a number of positive traits, there are indications from the women's answers and written comments on the Research Questionnaire that the family situation with two parents, while sometimes very good, was, also, just as often, not good at all. This does not say that the results concerning the biological parents group are wholly negative. But it does say that this group, which has always been thought to be the best family combination for raising children, appears to provide no clear advantage.

For example, only slightly over half of the women responded that their fathers were "there for them" when needed. Most have negative relationships with men. There is a higher percentage of women among single parent families who felt their families were close knit than did women in two-parent families. Where there were brothers in the family, fewer boys in this biological parents group shared in the household work than did brothers in the other three groups. This was also true of fathers sharing in household work. As a result, girls in the biological parents group did an unequal share of the housework. There was a general complaint among women in this group that their fathers spent much more time with their sons than with their daughters. Most wished their fathers had been at home more….

In a recent conference of the 4400 member National Council on Family Relations, Graham Spanier spoke of an assessment of various family structures. He referred specifically to a report which pulled together the results of more than 100 studies of different family situations and their effect on children. The report was written by David Demo of Virginia Polytechnic Institute and Alan Acock of Louisiana State University. What they found was that there was no definite evidence that the family structure per se was crucial to the children's psychological and social well-being. What was important was the quality of the relationship between parent and child and, if there were two parents, the quality of the relationship between parents.

Negative impact on children's self-esteem was affected by parents not spending much time with their children and greatly affected by persistent family discord. Spanier also referred to a study by Paul Amato, University of Nebraska, who found that adults who had experienced their parents divorce or a parent's death when they were young were no different in self-esteem than those raised in a family that had not experienced such disruption.

This appears to be contrary to the results written in a book by Judith Wallerstein, "Second Chances." In her book, Wallerstein tracks 60 families who had experienced divorce and concludes that "almost half the children entered adulthood as worried, underachieving, self-deprecating and sometimes angry young men and women." Wallerstein's methodology is criticized by other researchers because she used no control group for comparison. It is possible she could have tracked 60 families which had remained intact and found the same results with the children. There is no definitive study on the long-term effects of divorce. Wallerstein's results are criticized by Mel Krantzler, author of "Creative Divorce," who says "Any book that gives the impression to people that divorce is such a traumatizing experience that kids are permanently damaged for the rest of their lives is destructive. A child can understand that life has adversities… children can learn that they have the capacity to overcome a difficulty rather than wallow in it."

A 1991 article in the journal, Science, reported that 18,700 families were studied over a period of years in England and in the United States. What was learned was that the children of divorced parents had behavioral problems long before the actual divorce. This, the article stated, should cause people to question the blame they put on divorce for the children's problems. If Wallerstein had studied the children in her research before their parents divorced, she may have found they had the same problems then as they had after the divorce.

Dr. Lindsay Chase-Lansdale, one of the study's psychologists at the University of Chicago, said the findings indicate, "if a marriage is in trouble, there are effects on the children whether or not the parents divorce." The co-author, Dr. Andrew Cherlin, a sociologist at Johns Hopkins University, added, "More attention needs to be paid to the children when there is marital conflict. Conflict hurts children, regardless of whether it leads to divorce or not. If there is conflict, the children need to be sheltered from it, not caught in the middle between warring parents." The conclusion is that more of the problems which children had could be attributed to marital discord than to divorce. The study indicated that staying together for the sake of the children can be harmful to the children if the marriage is filled with conflict and discord. Difficult as it is, divorce is often a relief for many children.

There are also indications that children growing up in two-parent families where the mother does not work outside the home may develop excessive dependency. Because there is no particular prestige for women who are full-time homemakers, they are apt to overinvest in their children and to slow down their children's personal growth by not permitting adventuresome activities….

This research, based on a comparison of four groups of women raised in four different kinds of family situations, is one in the over 100 already existing which says that whether a child has two biological parents or only one, or only one remaining step parent, or only one friend or grandmother or grandfather or whomever to raise her, she has a good chance of doing well if the personal relationships are wholesome, caring and supportive. The myth that the two biological parents group is the best for children leaves people who were raised differently feeling at times like outsiders. And it leaves people who divorce feeling guilty because they are led to believe that they are harming their children. That is not so, as long as the relationship between remaining parent and child is good.

Perpetuating the myth that the two-parent family is the best serves the status quo. It is politically and economically expedient to keep women in jobs which pay less than men, or to keep them in a position where they are in and out of the labor force depending on the needs to take care of their children which prevents them from building up job promotions, seniority or retirement benefits….

2. Single Father Daughters Develop Strong Feminine Traits

Though most women in single father families felt older than their years and most said they had lost their childhood because of their responsibilities as children, at least three-quarters had fathers who were there for them when they were needed. Also, more fathers were helpful in their daughters' bereavement when their mother died than were single mothers helpful when a child had lost a father. If there were brothers in the family, more were helpful with household chores than were brothers in the biological parents group.

As might be expected in single father families where most fathers worked all day, most girls were on their own much of the time. Also within this group there was the highest percentage of fathers who permitted risks. Yet a higher percentage of women who reported being permitted risks scored over the 60th percentile range on the Adjective Check List Creative Personality Scale than did women who were not permitted risks….

The single father group is the group which grew up without mothers, yet apparently they feel comfortable in the role of mother, as most evaluated themselves as very good mothers. This group had the highest percentage who scored above 51% on the Nurturing Scale of the Adjective Check List which is described as "To engage in behaviors that provide material or emotional benefits to others." Having a single father and no mother did not diminish the women's mothering or nurturing skills.

Also, the single father group had the highest percentage of women who said that "nurturing" was the most important quality for mothering and for fathering. The women in this group had the highest percentage who said that a father can be a good substitute for a mother.

Also 71% said that "nurturing" was the most important quality for fathering compared with 57% who said the same thing in the biological parents group. Fifty-one percent (compared with 42% in the biological parents group) have positive relationships with men. Having been brought up almost exclusively by a man, more girls in this group are comfortable with men than are those brought up by a man and a woman. However, not as many in the single father group (56%) have positive relationships with women as do the women (72%) in the biological parents group. When asked if their childhood had been happy, 64% reported that they had had a happy childhood….

Though most said they felt different, and most of these because they believe they had more masculine traits than others, which correlates with their high percentage on the upper ranges of the Adjective Check List Masculine Attributes Scale, they also had the highest percentage who scored 51%–100% on Feminine Attributes Scale. This group has the highest percentage which desires feminine characteristics of listening and caring in a mate. It would appear that the girl raised by her father has an excellent opportunity to develop an androgenous personality with both well developed masculine and feminine traits.

3. Single Mother Daughters Develop Strong Masculine Traits

In addition to financial security, what the women in the single mother families missed most in not having a father in the home was an appearance of being "normal," or "traditional." Though three-quarters in the single father group said they had not known anyone else raised by a single father, and only one-quarter of the single mother group said they had not known anyone else raised by a single mother, that is, there are many more children who were raised and are now being raised by single mothers, it is the women in the single mother group who seemed to have suffered a stigma or a sense of shame for their family situation.

Most likely this feeling different or not normal was because when mothers, who traditionally earn less money than fathers, raise children by themselves, it causes financial hardship on children and they compare themselves with their peers, who not only have two parents, but also have more things. One of the prerequisites for being "normal" may mean being able to be equal.

In their earliest years, life was lonely for many of these girls. Only slightly over half of their mothers were there for them when needed, and only one-quarter were helpful to their daughters when the girl's father died or left because of divorce or desertion. Nevertheless, women in the single mother group have the highest percentage who felt they had a close knit family, and the highest percentage where, if there were brothers, the boys shared equally in the housework. Sharing housework can contribute to a feeling of working together, being a team, and being close knit.

The women in this group also had the highest percentage who were the little mothers, taking care of younger siblings when their mother worked. Sixty-four percent said they felt older than their years though a lesser percentage said they had lost their childhood than women in the single father families. This group had the highest percentage who were on their own, slightly higher than the women in the single father families, and over half were permitted risks which were not permitted to other girls.

The negative result of being on their own was that many of these girls felt lonely. Yet others on their own explored and developed their creativity which was a positive result of being permitted risks. Being on their own, as with women in the single father family, these women were free to make many of their own decisions. About two-thirds described their childhood as happy….

Women in this group have the highest percentage who have negative relationships with men. When answering the question of how life would have been different if they had had a father, the highest percentage said they would have had financial security, and the next highest percentage said they would have better relationships with men. This is the group which had the highest percentage of women who do not vote and who said they would not vote for any man. Their relationships with women are very good….

When asked what qualities they desire in a mate, most desired androgenous qualities such as sense of humor, honesty, friendship, and companionship. They had the lowest percentage of women who desired stereotypical feminine qualities. As a comparison, 62% of the women in the single father group desired sterotypical feminine qualities of caring, listening, understanding, and only 20% of the women in the single mother group desired these qualities….

In all likelihood, the father who finds himself or chooses to place himself in the position of raising children has either been conditioned to permit his feminine side and is a nurturing type man to begin with, or the act of raising children has brought out the nurturing side of his personality….

Therefore women raised by nurturing single fathers not only have strong masculine traits but also strong feminine traits. But women raised by single mothers have more masculine traits than feminine traits. This is borne out by their perception of themselves in the Adjective Check List where a higher percentage scored in the upper percentile range in Masculine Attributes Scale (51%) than in the Feminine Attributes Scale (39%). The girl who grows up with a caring father in the home has the opposite sex on which to "bounce off" her adolescent sexual development. If it is a healthy father-daughter relationship he will assure her that she is doing all right in her role of growing up to be a woman. The girl in the single mother home does not have that opposite sex parent who will approve of her feminine side.

4. Single Parent Families Have Advantages

A father in the home gives the appearance of stability, even though he may be uncommunicative, often absent, or abusive. A mother in the home gives the appearance of wholesomeness, even though she may be alcoholic, demanding, or intrusive. Under the best circumstances, with a father who is present, communicative, supportive and caring, and a mother who is gentle, loving and understanding, and because she does not work outside her home has unlimited time for her children, and where there is enough financial security in the home, a child is blessed. And there are such families. But they are the exception rather than the rule. Actually a family with a father and a mother who does not work outside the home represents only 8% of the families today.

Tradition, which is important in the biological parents group, has been destroyed in the single parent group. When one parent dies or leaves, whatever habitual patterns of family life there were come to an end. For a long time, maybe even for years, there is a void. What to do at Christmas? Can the family take a vacation? As time goes on, the trauma of the shock subsides and new patterns evolve, usually without planning. One might say, "new traditions" replace the old.

People learn that they can survive what might have been seen as impossible to bear. Widows and divorcees find jobs to support their children and widowers pick up the threads of their lives and arrange for child care. The children go back to school after the funeral or after the shock of being deserted by one of their parents. Though they are hurting inside, they play on the swings and teeter-totters and force themselves to learn their multiplication tables. They realize earlier than other children that a lot of the work of keeping the household running rests on their shoulders. No doubt reluctantly and sadly at first they absorb the jobs of vacuuming rugs, getting dinner started, caring for younger children to keep them off the streets. But what they have learned in all of this is how to adapt, how to shed the old, and how to get on with the new.

These are hard lessons, and it is not recommended that children live through this kind of trauma in order to learn adaptation. But children who have survived hardship, and have had a supportive remaining parent, claim they are the stronger for it. Having to make a major life change in their future will probably not be devastating. Many in all groups, including the biological parents group, have said that the problems they have survived have made them stronger.

Girls who are brought up by single parents, whether mothers or fathers, develop strong, independent personalities, but society has a problem with strong, independent women. These women are apt to be assertive, to know that they can get along without men, that they can try new things, that they can test authority. Many have had tremendous responsibilities most of their lives and most are ready and eager to open new doors for themselves because, for them, tradition is not sacred.

As one woman in the single father group wrote, "I feel that I have obtained a great benefit from my childhood. I think because I had to be responsible for taking care of myself and my sister, etc., that I got a ‘jump’ on maturity, in relation to others my age. This has meant that there are levels of growth which I feel I have access to, which a majority of people don't seem to have." Other women in the single father group wrote, "I believe that one good parent—mother or father—is better than one or two lousy ones. But I am well aware of the burdens of raising children alone. I would not choose to do it that way. It was not my father's choice either." "I think it would be an advantage to have both parents, only if they were happy together, or course." "I feel like being raised by my dad was beneficial. I saw a man's point of view clearer than many women ever see."…

[Another woman in the single father group wrote,] "I feel that having been raised by my father was both an advantage and a disadvantage. Of course it would have been better to have had both a mother and father, loving and supportive of each other and their children. This is Utopia. I feel the perfect family does not exist, and am only now beginning to be mature enough to make the best of what we had. I think I have an inner strength many women never will have. Because of growing up with no female role model, I was forced to learn to rely on my own intuition and intelligence. This makes me no better or worse than other women. However it does make me inherently stronger."…

While the loss of a parent was not without trauma for the women in this study, for some there is compensation. For instance, for women in the single father family who never knew their mother, or women in any group who were badly treated by their mothers, it is said that in adulthood, in having and caring for their own children these women experience themselves as the "mothered child" which they never were. These women transfer to their children the love and understanding which they did not receive and in so doing restore their own lack of mothering to themselves.

There is also the advantage in single parent families that a girl does not have to compete with her mother for the affection of her father, or a boy does not have to compete with his father for the affection of his mother….

[One woman] who mentions both the advantages and disadvantages wrote, "I don't feel as if I've missed very much. I have had a lot of wonderful experiences. Yet I do believe I missed a wonderful experience when I grew up without a mother. I grew up as a happy person, yet I do believe that on the sub-conscious level something was always missing." In families where there are two parents, many children have been exposed to severe parental fighting from which children of single parents were spared, though many related to fighting before a divorce. One in the single father group wrote, "I used to witness fights among my friends' parents and remember feeling lucky I didn't have to see my own parents fight."…

Most statistics on single families refer to single mothers. It is as if the single father family does not exist. Yet, even without statistics, there is an awareness that fathers raising their children by themselves is a growing phenomenon. Eventually the statistics may tell us about the level of education of a single father, his salary range and type of employment as the statistics now tell us about single mothers. For instance, in a study made by the National Association of Social Workers of single mothers in 12 states in 1987, 60% of the mothers said they believed their families were stronger than two-parent families; and 25% said they were just as strong.

Generally conceded to be the root of many social problems, the single parent family, which invariably means the single mother family, has been the scapegoat for many of this country's ills. It is usually the female who is either directly or indirectly blamed. The common erroneous complaint has been, "If only women would stay home and take care of their kids there wouldn't be so many divorces, kids wouldn't be dropping out of school and getting into trouble. There would be better morals." As history has recorded, the virtue of a country rests on the virtue of its women. A woman raising children by herself, or even an employed mother in a two-parent family, is not held up as an ideal mother….

5. Most Children With Step Mothers Are Emotionally and Otherwise Abused

While there were some disturbingly sad anecdotes from women in all groups in this research, the most consistently cruel came from the women who had grown up with a step mother. Not that all step mothers were cold and uncaring. There were several who were dearly loved by their step daughters. But these were rare. Not only did the step mothers cause grievous unhappiness for the girls in these families, but their own biological fathers, married to their step mothers, failed their daughters.

These girls had nowhere else to go. One of their parents had died so it wasn't as though there had been a divorce and then remarriages and a second set of parents. Sometimes relatives of the deceased parent attempted to help, but often the step parent prevented the girl from seeing these relatives. It is almost as though the step parent was more or less jealous of the ghost of their spouse's first spouse.

On every question, when comparing answers from women who had step mothers with those of women who were in the step parent group but had their own biological mother, there is almost a two to one difference in the degree of either helpfulness or loss. For instance, on the question, "Do you feel because of your family situation that you lost your childhood?" 30% of the women who had biological mothers in this group answered, "Yes," compared with 58% of the women with step mothers. To the question, "Was your childhood happy?" 63% with biological mothers in this step parent group answered, "Yes," compared with 37% of the women with step mothers.

To the question, "Was your father there for you?" 36% with step fathers answered, "Yes," compared with… 32% with biological fathers in this group. "Was your mother there for you?" 32% of the women with step mothers answered, "Yes," compared with 60% of the women with biological mothers in this step parent group. Biological fathers were not very helpful for their daughters when the mother had died….

This group, as a whole, has the highest percentage (27%) of women who had been sexually abused. When the group is separated as to those with step mothers and those with step fathers, it is the group with step fathers that has the highest rate of sexual abuse. Thirty-eight percent of the women with step fathers had been sexually abused, mostly by their step fathers, though neighbors, step brothers, family friends, a janitor and a teacher contributed to this percentage. Sixteen percent of women with step mothers had been sexually abused; the abusers included brothers, step brothers, an uncle and a cousin.

This step parent group has the highest percentage of women who had fantasy mothers (56%) of those with step mothers, and the highest percentage of those with fantasy fathers (42%) of those with step fathers. Almost half of the women with step mothers did not get along with their step mothers at all. The group as a whole has the highest percentage who have hostile relationships with women, the highest which have negative relationships with women, the highest which have difficult relationships with women, and the highest percentage which have hostile relationships with men. Thirty-one percent of women in this group are over weight….

It is the step parent group that had the highest percentage scoring over the 50th percentile range on Autonomy on the Adjective Check List. Autonomy is described by the Scale as "To act independently of others or of social values and expectations." If one survives emotional hardship, one apparently develops a strong sense of independence. Though many were emotionally and some physically and sexually abused, most of the women in this group were capable of getting on with their lives. Being autonomous, they have achieved a separation from their earlier traumatizers. And as they have the highest percent which scored high in the personality trait, "Change," on the Adjective Check List, described as "seeks novelty of experience and avoids routine," most of the women in this group may very well keep life interesting for themselves and others….

Implications for the Future

Rewriting the Myth of the Two-Parent Family

Changing myths seems impossible, especially when there are advantages to some people to keep them. The myth that the two-parent family is the best is just that—a myth. Myths serve an important purpose and are the basis of religion and governments. But they are not based on fact. Our government is founded on the myth of equality. Actual equality does not exist but it is something to aspire to. The myth that the two-parent family is best for children served a purpose. It was something to aspire to and no doubt kept fathers in families who might otherwise have left their wives and children, at a time in history when women did not work and were therefore dependent on a man for subsistence.

Many happy two-parent families have existed throughout history, and many unhappy two-parent families have survived, locked in emotional misery because divorce was scandalous (a method for preserving the myth), because women could not earn a living, and because of the power of the myth. Unhappy people stayed in marriages "for the sake of the children"—a great burden to put on children—and themselves.

Because women in the biological parents group in this research had as much strife in their childhood as the women in other groups, it is time to rewrite the myth of the two-parent family being best for children.

Among much of what has been learned in this research is that maintaining the myth of the superiority of the two-parent family not only lends itself to deceit but it is also harmful to those not in a two-parent family. If a child is not in what is considered the best or the normal family arrangement, she/he feels different as most of the women in this research felt who were not in the biological parents group. Being in what is perceived as a second class situation can tarnish a child's self-esteem. Many women expressed a sense of shame which they felt in their childhood because of their single parentage.

While most of the women in this research who lived in single or step parent families overcame that sense of being outside the norm, it was something the children today should not have to overcome. There are and will be so many children growing up in single parent homes that their numbers should help relieve stress about not having both parents and should keep them from feeling so different. But more importantly, they should know that the two-parent family, which is held up to them as the ideal, in which they have no part, is, as a category, no better than their family category.

The increase in the number of single parent families and the lower financial ability of single parent families means that there will be more children living in poverty because most single parents are women. When the media refers to single parent families it is understood that the single parent is a woman. The growing number of single father families is practically ignored. It is known that single father families fare better economically than single mother families because men generally earn more money.

Now and in the future, conferences on family life must include some recognition that families other than two-parent families deserve respect, support, encouragement and praise for doing a difficult job. Single parents and children of single parents need to know that any family, including single and step parent families, which has financial security, good personal relationships, which cares about its children and promotes their healthy interests, is a good family for children.

From June Stephenson, The Two-Parent Family Is Not the Best (Diemer, Smith, 1991). Copyright © 1991 by June Stephenson. Reprinted by permission of Diemer, Smith Publishing Co., Inc.

POSTSCRIPT

Is the Two-Parent Family Best?

Stephenson's attack on the traditional two-parent family as being the best situation for nurturing young children may offend some, but it grants credibility to successful parents in nontraditional systems. Her research-based conclusions may not set well with those who tend to hold conservative, traditional beliefs. But her questioning of the stereotype provides a necessary parry to the foil presented by Whitehead's writings supporting the conservative "family values" position touted by many in the political and religious arenas.

Human services professionals, business and industry employers, government bureaucrats, educators, court workers, physicians, judges, and childcare providers deal frequently with the questions that are raised about parenting form and style in these two selections. Current discussions have yet to provide any easy answers about how to handle the many situations that arise.

The issue is not likely to go away. Perhaps by studying various family lifestyles and learning from the parenting styles that are used within them we can build a set of principles and practices that are in the best interests of the children. For example, in Social Origins of Private Life: A History of American Families, 1600–1900, Stephanie Coontz tells the story of a Native American in the sixteenth century whose parenting style was being criticized by a French missionary. The Jesuit missionary was trying to introduce "civilized family norms" to the New World native. The Naskapi Indian with whom the missionary was talking responded, "You French people love only your own children; but we love all the children of the tribe."

Suggested Readings

S. Coontz, Social Origins of Private Life: A History of American Families, 1600–1900 (Verso, 1988).

S. Coontz, The Way We Never Were: American Families and the Nostalgia Trap (Basic Books, 1992).

J. Held and A. Shreve, Remaking Motherhood: How Working Mothers Are Shaping Our Children's Future (Viking Penguin, 1987).

R. Kagan, Families in Perceptual Crisis (W. W. Norton, 1989).

J. Wallerstein and S. Blakeless, Second Chances: Women and Children a Decade After Divorce (Ticknor & Fields, 1989).