So why is it that nice people who live by their own rules have problems like this?
A child living with a single mother is 14 times more likely to suffer serious physical abuse than is a child living with married biological parents. A child whose mother cohabits with a man other than the child's father is 33 times more likely to suffer serious physical child abuse.You're not going to try to tell me that objective, external rules play some role in life, are you? That would just make you a hypocrite and a sanctimonious, moralizing prude.
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Here's a paper that I think is kind of relevant:
Family Structure and Children's Success: A Comparison of Widowed and Divorced Single-Mother Families
What the authors found when they compared 2-parent families, widowed mothers, and divorced mothers was that the children of the divorced mothers and never-married mothers did markedly worse than the children from 2-parent families, but the children of widowed mothers were not worse off.
Why would there be this difference between children of widows and children of other unmarried mothers, if the problem is entirely because of a mother raising her children without the father around?
Renee over at Cappadocia in Lowell is a social worker who's got a great take on this. Just as income and wealth are markers of financial behavior, marriage and commitment to marriage are markers of, shall we say, moral behavior. It's a sign of total commitment to another and that would probably carry to children as well as spouses.
I saw in passing a recent study that showed that cohabiting, impoverished single moms who got married didn't do much better ( or something like that). Lots of people jumped to the conclusion that marriage isn't the answer. in reality, the answer is that the relationship and the commitment needs to precede the children.
In general, perhaps this says that people who get divorced didn't have the same commitment as those who stuck it out. I've done all of the above, so I'm not pointing fingers that don't end up in the mirror.
in reality, the answer is that the relationship and the commitment needs to precede the children.
Sad that this needs to be said....
It's almost like the Biblical injunction to put off sex until after marriage had some value!
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