Source: Dad Talk Today, FacebookSource: Dad Talk Today, FacebookKenya N. Rahmaan
There has always been divisiveness within families, married and never married, when separation happens and children are involved. Unmarried parents tend to fight over possession and visitation issues because of legal rights to a baby born “illegitimately” or out of wedlock. In contrast, divorcing parents can have more drawn-out and acrimonious uncoupling because of property division, child support, and alimony payments. To be sure, unmarried parents more than not find themselves caught in The Child Support Hustle, too. https://youtube.com/live/j4LStMGWCvo However, if the mother receives welfare benefits, the couple’s involvement is by the government’s strong arm, not the long arm, as married couples.
The trending topic within the child support/family court/shared parenting/whatever else reform chaos that’s going around is that children are in danger when raised by single mothers. The commentary started as a whisper a few years ago but has now evolved into an outright growl that is louder than any heard when the fight for meaningful reform to child support, family court, and shared parenting laws was desperately needed. The ‘research’ and ‘statistics’ floating around to support the slanderous charge against single mothers are from a few sources, but the studies are not what they seem. Who could have guessed that?
When questioned about the preposterous claim, the original post’s author quickly added a couple of links to a journal published by the National Library of Medicine in 2016 as proof. The authors hypothesized in the journal entitled Single Mother Parenting and Adolescent Psychopathology that single mothers were more likely than cohabitating mothers to:
A commonality often occurs when people are trying to substantiate a claim. They omit important details of their argument. In the case of single mothers being worse parents, the authors based the study on single motherhood in contrast to two-parent families and not single fatherhood, as some would imply. In fact, the authors explain why single mothers are likely to find themselves raising children alone in the first place. According to Daryanai et al., single-mother families are far more likely to experience poverty than two-parent families due to:
These three factors change the entire trajectory of the argument that single moms harm their children when raising them singlehandedly. When including other aspects of the study, such as the sample size of only 385 single mothers or that 4.6% and 4.7% of the single mothers either became cohabitating or became single, respectively, during the study, the full scope of the original claim shifts. Finally, the scholars concluded that adolescents in single-mother families experienced less severe anxious symptoms at the first follow-up than adolescents in two-parent families. The group suggested several ideas to account for the discrepancies. However, evidence will always trump a hypothesis. Daryanai et al. write, “There is nothing inherently detrimental about growing up in a single-mother family; in fact, the majority of children raised by single mothers are well adjusted.”
Unfortunately, if not sad, I see a movement that began as a fight for reform in an unconstitutional child support system, the re-abolishment of the use of debtor prisons, and equal rights for fathers into nothing more than a competition about who can sling the most dirt on the other. It is one thing to produce information that may be negative, but at least offer a suggested solution to counter the negativity. It is entirely different to spread propaganda and prejudice as a revenge tactic. Saying the single-parent homes are worse than two is statistically correct for many reasons. When it works for the children and parents, it’s a winner.
However, single-parent homes are the topic, whether led by mothers or fathers. Instead of categorizing every single mother as bad, look at the source. Many organizations claim to fight for fathers’ rights but only want clicks, views, and money. Claiming that every single mother is dangerous is no better than saying that every father who pays child support is a deadbeat dad or labeling all children living without their father in the home as fatherless. https://youtube.com/shorts/O_Iv7K7EHBM The government profits from our division; likewise, all foes do not come dressed as your enemy.
References:
Daryanani, I., Hamilton, J. L., Abramson, L. Y., & Alloy, L. B. (2016). Single mother parenting and adolescent psychopathology. Journal of Abnormal Child Psychology, 44(7), 1411-1423. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10802-016-0128-x
