Growing up with a Single Parent: What Hurts, What Helps

McLanahan, Sara, and Sandefur, Gary. (1994). Growing Up With a Single Parent: What Hurts, What Helps. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. 196 pp. Hardcover ISBN 0-674-36407-4, price 19. 95. Integrating their insights from more than a decade of research on single-parent families, McLanahan and Sandefur rekindle debate concerning consequences for children growing up in households where only one biological parent is present. Their news is not good. Based on extensive analyses of four national data sets, authors conclude that disadvantages for children living with single parents are substantial, they occur across several important life domains, and they persist long into adulthood. The authors fmd that regardless of parents' race or educational background, children spending some part of their childhood in a single-parent household earn lower grades in school and are less likely to graduate from high school, less likely to attend or graduate from college, and more likely to be unemployed during late adolescence and early adulthood. Young women from single-parent households are more likely to bear children outside of marriage. This research is made more significant by fact that most studies have examined children's short-term adjustment to divorce and other single-parent arrangements, and very few have examined long-term effects. Attempting to establish linkages between childhood family structure and later success, authors systematically explore potential mediating influence of parenting practices, socioeconomic differences, and community involvement across family types. They document that, according to high school sophomores, divorced parents provide less supervision and less help with homework than married parents and that children from single-parent households are more likely than other children to be poor, to live in poor neighborhoods, to attend poorly funded schools with high dropout rates, and to have peers who do not value education. Importantly, when predivorce and postdivorce income are controlled in analyses of high school dropout risk and other outcomes, differences between adolescents who experience divorce and those who do not diminish to 3 to 4 percentage points. Readers should be aware that authors value standard packagethe heterosexual, conjugal, nuclear, domestic unit headed by a male breadwinner and female caretaker. Most of these families are assumed to be happy and functional and when adverse circumstances arise, they should stay together because the child would probably be better off (p. 31). The authors argue that in single-mother families, parental affection and warmth is. …