Growing Up With a Single Parent: What Hurts, What Helps

Non-white and white, rich and poor, born to an unwed mother or weathering divorce, over half of all children in the current generation will live in a single-parent family - and these children simply will not fare as well as their peers who live with both parents. Based on four national surveys and drawing on a decade of research, "Growing Up With a Single Parent" sharply demonstrates the connection between family structure and a child's prospects for success. What are the chances that the child of a single parent will graduate from high school, go on to college, find and keep a job? Will she become a teenage mother? Will he be out of school and out of work? These are the questions the authors pursue across the spectrum of race, gender and class. Children whose parents live apart, the authors find, are twice as likely to drop out of high school as those in two-parent families, one and a half times as likely to be idle in young adulthood, twice as likely to become single parents themselves. This study shows how divorce - particularly an attendant drop in income, parental involvement, and access to community resources - diminishes children's chances for well-being. The authors provide answers to other practical questions that many single parents may ask: Does the gender of the child or the custodial parent affect these outcomes? Does having a step-parent, a grandmother or a non-marital partner in the household help or hurt? Do children who stay in the same community after divorce fare better? Their data reveal that some of the advantages often associated with being white are really a function of family structure, and that some of the advantages associated with having educated parents evaporate when those parents separate. In a concluding chapter, McLanahan and Sandefur offer clear recommendations for rethinking our current policies. Single parents are here to stay and their worsening situation is tearing at the fabric of our society. It is imperative, the authors show, that we shift more of the costs of raising children from mothers to fathers and from parents to society at large. Likewise, we must develop universal assistance programmes that benefit low-income two-parent families as well as single mothers. "Growing Up With a Single Parent" should serve to inform both the governmental policies and the personal decisions that affect the future of our children.

The concluding chapter of this short, clearly written book suggests sensible policy directions for the support of single-parent families by noncustodial parents, governments, and communities. A strength of this book is the clarity of the analysis...Highly recommended. This is essentially a text which reports the findings of the authors' analyses of American survey data on the achievements of children from 'disrupted' families. As such it will be primarily of interest to researchers. Nevertheless, it is written in a style which undergraduate students will find very accessible. Moreover, data presentation is refreshingly clear; effective bar charts and simple tables appear in the main text, whilst more complex data displays are located in an appendix, along with a description of methodology. -- Jane Pilcher "Reviewing Sociology" This book posits a view embedded in the authors' stated belief that 'children who grow up in two-parent families will do better, on average, than children who grow up with only one parent'...The strongest aspect of this book is the excellent job the authors do of sorting through theories and existing data in an attempt to explain why additional research is needed on single parenthood. Unlike some other earlier research accounts of the effect of family structure on child well-being, McLanahan and Sandefur clearly document the role of income, parenting styles, and the contribution of non-resident fathers as well as stepfathers to the child's social capital as explanations for children in one-parent families doing less well than children in two-parent families. The reader is not left wondering exactly how or why the authors take the position they present...Scholarly, thoughtful... this book includes information that is both important and timely given the welfare reform debate at the state and local level. -- Edwin P. Gordon "Social Policy" is the clarity of the analysis...Highly recommended. complex data displays are located in an appendix, along with a description of methodology. information that is both important and timely given the welfare reform debate at the state and local level. itself severely injurious...The very richness of its analysis makes the book a powerful tool for social policy. [This book] posits a view embedded in the authors' stated belief that 'children who grow up in two-parent families will do better, on average, than children who grow up with only one parent'...The strongest aspect of this book is the excellent job the authors do of sorting through theories and existing data in an attempt to explain why additional research is needed on single parenthood. Unlike some other earlier research accounts of the effect of family structure on child well-being, McLanahan and Sandefur clearly document the role of income, parenting styles, and the contribution of non-resident fathers as well as stepfathers to the child's social capital as explanations for children in one-parent families doing less well than children in two-parent families. The reader is not left wondering exactly how or why the authors take the position they present...Scholarly, thoughtful...[this book] includes information that is both important and timely given the welfare reform debate at the st Based on careful analysis of data from various national surveys...[this book is] the first systematic attempt to disentangle the effects of poverty from family breakdown across a range of problems afflicting children...By using sophisticated statistical techniques to control for such background characteristics as income and race, McLanahan and Sandefur show that, although growing up poor is very damaging to children, single parenthood is in itself severely injurious...The very richness of its analysis makes the book a powerful tool for social policy.--Douglas J. Besharov "Washington Post " This clearly written and remarkably jargon-free monograph is highly recommended to all practicing physicians.--Leon Eisenberg, MD "New England Journal of Medicine " [This] is essentially a text which reports the findings of the authors' analyses of American survey data on the achievements of children from 'disrupted' families. As such it will be primarily of interest to researchers. Nevertheless, it is written in a style which undergraduate students will find very accessible. Moreover, data presentation is refreshingly clear; effective bar charts and simple tables appear in the main text, whilst more complex data displays are located in an appendix, along with a description of methodology.--Jane Pilcher "Reviewing Sociology "