Depressed Mom— or Displaced Dad 

Psychologists have known for some time that living with a depressed mother predisposes adolescent children to a range of social and mental problems.  A new study, however, suggests that similar problems can show up among teens living with a mentally healthy mother—but no father.

When researchers at Vanderbilt University recently began investigating the antecedents of teen behavioral problems, their primary focus was on maternal depression.  After all, previous research has shown that “children of depressed parents generally have higher levels of both internalizing and externalizing symptoms” than do children of parents free from depression.  Tracking data for 240 adolescents assessed annually from the 6th through the 12th grades, the researchers discern a pattern very much in line with their expectations.  In particular, a clear statistical linkage emerges between the “chronicity [and] severity of mother’s depression history” and the likelihood that her children will have sexual intercourse by age eighteen (p < 0.05).  Sexual intercourse by age 18, according to the Vanderbilt scholars, was reported by almost half (47%) of the offspring of chronic/severely depressed mothers and by slightly over half (55%) of adolescents with moderately depressed mothers.   In contrast, less than a third (29%) of adolescents with never depressed mothers reported sexual intercourse before age eighteen.

But while intent on investigating maternal depression, the Vanderbilt researchers uncovered data indicating that father absence can produce some of the same effects.  These data establish that “among offspring of mothers with either no or moderate depression histories, the absence of a male head of household was significantly associated with higher odds of engaging in sexual behavior” (p < 0.01).

The Vanderbilt team interprets the apparent effects of father absence as evidence that “in families without a father present, adolescents may be less well monitored.”  What is more, in a fatherless home “children may not receive the attention and affection they desire from a stable and consistent father figure and therefore may seek such support elsewhere by engaging in sexual relationships.”

Apparently, even a psychologically healthy mother may struggle to keep her adolescent children sexually continent if the father of those children is nowhere to be found.

(Source: Cara Bohon, Judy Garber, and Jason L. Horowitz, “Predicting School Dropout and Adolescent Sexual Behavior in Offspring of Depressed and Nondepressed Mothers,” Journal of the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry 46[2007]: 15-24.)

The Original Family Activist  

Advocates for the “natural family” often cite the 1948 U.N. Declaration of Human Rights as the origin of a phrase that describes a family headed by a married mother and father. Now a study by feminist scholar Michele Adams of Tulane University traces the use of that terminology to 70 years earlier by Samuel W. Dike (1839-1913), an American Congregational minister-turned sociologist who founded the influential National League for the Protection of the Family in 1887.

While seeking to discredit the League as a reactionary movement that aimed to counter women’s rights and oppress minorities, Adams’s research nonetheless uncovers in Dike’s extensive writings a robust reference to the family as a natural institution, as well as a sophisticated understanding of the nature of marriage and family and its relationship to society. As Dike proclaimed: “We must recognize that the family, not the individual, is the unit of society,” possessing “a life and unity of greater strength and importance than any other natural organism in the world” and giving “new life and promise to American institutions.”

According to Adams’s findings, Dike claimed that the family is a truly independent entity upon which society and the state depend, not the other way around as the modern welfare state presumes: “For the Family...does not need so much to have things done for it, as it needs understanding....A recognition of its nature and functions, and wise direction to its own appointed work under reasonable protection by law, is the best thing that can be done for the Family.”

Concerned about “disintegrating tendencies in modern society,” Dike identified “rampant individualism” as “the most subtle foe of the American family.” He claimed that the nation would be far stronger “if the American people had as clear and strong convictions about the nature, place, and lights of the family in civil society as they have acquired...concerning the individual.” Citing the Bureau of Labor’s Report on Marriage and Divorce in the United States, 1867 to 1886—a compilation of statistics that he played a leading role in putting together—Dike expressed alarm about “the startling increase of divorce in the most advanced of civilized peoples, the serious decline in the birth-rate of the classes best able to rear them, and the apparent decrease in marriages.” Foreshadowing President Teddy Roosevelt’s rhetoric, Dike considered the bearing of many children a patriotic duty.

While the feminist scholar expresses contempt for a white male who contended for what she calls an “idealistic” family that is “married, heterosexual, and implicitly White,” her work nonetheless reveals Dike as an early activist who perceived what in his day were subtle forces, but today clearly undermine the natural family.

(Source: Michele Adams, “Women’s Right and Wedding Bells: 19th-Century Pro-Family Rhetoric and (Re)Enforcement of the Gender Status Quo,” Journal of Family Issues 28 [April 2007]: 501-528.)

Family Structure and Child Development  

Sociologists continue to debate the effects of family structure on childhood outcomes, some contending that changes in family structure or the mother’s behavior and attributes may be more responsible for certain outcomes than family structure per se. Yet a study that explores the connections between all three factors by two Johns Hopkins sociologists suggests that family structure is often the more dominant explanation of childhood outcomes.

Paula Fomby and Andrew J. Cherlin looked at the 1979 through 2000 waves of the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth and its 2000 mother-child supplement to developmental outcomes among children, 5-14 years of age. While they found that a higher number of family transitions correlated with lower scores of cognitive achievement and higher scores of problematic behavior among white children (but not among black children), their measures of family structure were more consistently associated with outcomes of all children, whether white or black.

Among white children, living with a single mother in early childhood was associated with an increase of one-third of a standard deviation in externalizing behavior scores and one-third to one-half a standard deviation in cognitive achievement indicators; among black children, currently living with a single mother was associated with an increase of more than one-third of a standard deviation increase in externalizing behavior and the same decrease in cognitive achievement scores.

In tests that controlled for mothers’ behaviors and attributes, the inverse correlation between the number of family transitions and the cognitive achievement of white children diminished almost completely while the positive correlation with misbehavior among the same children remained statistically significant (p < .01). These controls also reduced the effects of family structure during early childhood on measures of cognitive achievement of both black and white children. But such controls exerted little change to the effects of early family structure on externalizing behaviors (which remained statistically significant on black children and marginally significant for white children) and to the effects of current family structure on black children (which remained statistically significant).

That the mother’s behavior and attributes largely explain the negative effects of the multiple family transitions on outcomes of white children offers nuance to the complicated picture of child outcomes. But as the researchers state: “The magnitude of the association with living with a mother-only household in early childhood exceeds the association with the number of transitions for most children.” Had they also compared the differences in the number of family transitions between children starting out with a married mother and father vs. their peers who started out with a single mother, they may have quantified that the former almost always have mothers with more promising background characteristics, suffer fewer family transitions, and experience better developmental outcomes.

(Source: Paula Fomby and Andrew J. Cherlin, “Family Instability and Child Well-Being, American Sociological Review 72 [April 2007]: 181-204.)

Different Kinds of Unions, Different Dynamics of Dissolution  

Having done their best to obscure the differences separating marriage from cohabitation, progressive commentators have of late tried to deny the difference between marriage and same-sex unions.  But even in a country renowned for its relaxed social attitudes, the fundamental differences between marriage and cohabitation and between marriage and same-sex unions still persist.  These differences stand out clearly in a study recently published in Demography by a team of Dutch researchers from Tilberg University and Statistics Netherlands.

Analyzing data collected for unions formed in the Netherlands between 1989 and 1999, the Dutch researchers first highlight a pronounced difference in dissolution risk for the three types of unions.  “The risk of separation is much higher,” the researchers acknowledge, “for cohabiting relationships than for marriages.”  More specifically, the percentage of married couples who separate stands at less than 4% for the first year, drifts slightly lower for the second year, and drops to just above 2% for the third year.  In marked contrast, the percentage of cohabiting couples who break up is almost 16% for the first year of the union, drops to slightly below 12% for the second year, and comes in at 10% for the third year. 

But even cohabiting heterosexual unions look very stable when compared to same-sex unions.  The researchers calculate that “same-sex couples have 3.1 times higher dissolution odds than opposite-sex cohabiting couples and 3.66 x 3.15 = 11.5 times higher dissolution odds than married couples” (emphasis in original).

Nothing appears very likely to foster permanence in homosexual unions.  However, the Dutch demographers do uncover evidence indicating that certain income patterns favor continuity in heterosexual unions, though the patterns that reinforce marriage look different from those that maintain cohabitation.      

When looking at both cohabiting unions and marriages, the Dutch researchers find “a moderately positive effect of the female partner’s relatively high income on separation.”  That is, “the higher the female’s share of the household income, the higher the risk of separation.”  But a closer look reveals both similarity and difference in the way this risk affects cohabiting unions and married couples.  The researchers find that in cases in which “women have more income than men,” the statistical record indicates “higher dissolution risks for both marriage and cohabitation.”  Things look very different, however, when women’s income is significantly less than their male partners’—which the researchers acknowledge is the “most common” situation, even in the egalitarian Netherlands.  “Higher [income] shares of the husband,” report the researchers, “reduce the divorce risk for marriages...but higher [income] shares of the male partner increase the dissolution risk for cohabiting couples” (emphasis in original). 

The Dutch scholars interpret their findings as “more in line with the cultural approach [to social theory] than with the economic approach.”  For it is from a cultural not an economic perspective that they can see how “male [economic] dominance is stabilizing for marriage because it concurs with traditional gender values, whereas male dominance is destabilizing for cohabiting unions because it conflicts with preferences for gender equality.”  In other words, complementary “specialization” in gender roles is “protective for marriage,” but not for cohabitation. 

(Source: Kalmijn Matthijs and Anneke Loeve, “Income Dynamics in Couples and the Dissolution of Marriage and Cohabitation,” Demography 44 [2007]: 159-179.

The Permissive Children of Divorced Parents  

Among children who have watched their parents’ marriage disintegrate, many view nonmarital cohabitation favorably.  The permissive thinking of these children of divorced parents receives scrutiny in a study recently published in the Journal of Divorce & Remarriage by researchers from the University of Michigan and Western Washington University.

To understand how parental divorce affects children’s marital attitudes, the authors of the new study examine data from a probability sample of white children born in 1962 and repeatedly interviewed between 1980 and 1993.  These data clearly indicate that “parental marital dissolution is strongly related to young adults’ attitudes toward cohabitation.”  More specifically, the researchers document “increases in [children’s] cohabitation tolerance of one-third of a standard deviation in the case of [parental] divorce alone and more than 60 percent of a standard deviation when divorce is followed by [parental] remarriage.”

The Michigan and Washington scholars plausibly reason that “parental divorce may lead children to become less supportive of institutionalized marriage, thus enhancing their support for available alternatives such as cohabitation.”  These researchers further argue that parental divorce followed by remarriage fosters even greater acceptance for cohabitation than does parental divorce alone because “a greater proportion of those mothers who divorce and remarry cohabited and/or had a sexual relationship had a [nonmarital] sexual relationship with the new spouse.”

When the authors of the new study probe the dynamics of parental divorce, they uncover evidence of a weakening of religious involvement that significantly affects children’s attitudes.  Thus the researchers conclude that “an important reason the children of divorced mothers view cohabitation more favorably [than do peers living in intact families] is that those mothers reduce their religious involvement, which in turn leads to more positive attitudes toward cohabitation among the children.” 

If parental divorce weakens or destroys their religious ties, it is altogether understandable that children would drift into casual sexual ethics.  However, the authors of the new study do find that “adult children who attend religious services frequently are likely to hold less positive views of cohabitation than are their peers who attend religious services less frequently.”

The authors of the new study speculate that in an era of “continued high rates of divorce and pre-marital sexual activity...cohabitation is likely to be viewed in an increasingly favorable light.”  Those who care about the integrity of marriage can only hope that many of the children of divorced parents will find their way to a chapel or synagogue where they can find an anchor to secure themselves against such destructive tides in social attitudes.

(Source: Mick Cunningham and Arland Thornton, “Direct and Indirect Influences of Parents’ Marital Instability on Children’s Attitudes Toward Cohabitation in Young Adulthood,” Journal of Divorce & Remarriage 46.3/4[2007]: 125-142.)

Worried About Teen Mothers?  

Social commentators and researchers have expressed intense concern about teen mothers in recent years.  But results of a new Canadian study suggest that at least some of that concern should be redirected away from the age and toward the marital status of these young mothers. 

Conducted by social scientists at the Universities of British Columbia and New Brunswick, this new study focuses on children born to adolescent mothers, limning their “academic and behavioural trajectories” between the ages of 10 and 15.  To determine these academic and behavioral trajectories, the Canadian researchers examined longitudinal data collected between 1994 and 2001 for a nationally representative sample of Canadian adolescents.  These data do—as expected—identify a number of problems characteristic of the adolescent children born to adolescent mothers.  However, closer scrutiny of the data reveals that the well-being of these adolescent children depends on more than the age at which their mothers found themselves in the maternity ward.  Their mothers’ marital status also figures prominently as a statistical predictor of a number of important adolescent outcomes.

The Canadian researchers find, for instance, that “living in a lone-parent family...[was] associated with higher levels of Anxiety-Emotional Disorder at age 10”  (p < 0.01).  A similar pattern emerges when the focus shifts to the juvenile criminality of “property offences.”  “Living in a lone-parent family,” the researchers report, “was associated with higher levels of the behaviour” ( p < 0.05). 

The picture is much the same when the concern is Hyperactivity-Inattention at age 10 (p < 0.001 for family structure).  Indeed, when the researchers looked closely at the statistical linkage between Hyperactivity-Inattention on the one hand and birth to an adolescent mother on the other, they uncovered an important underlying reality:  “The effects [of maternal age] for Hyperactivity-Inattention disappeared when family structure and socioeconomic characteristics were accounted for.” 

The authors of the new study conclude by stressing the need to “continue efforts to encourage delayed childbearing beyond the adolescent years.”  Serious readers of the study will recognize, however, that policymakers will still leave children at risk if they do not do all they can to ensure that childbirth takes place within wedlock.

(Source: V. Susan Dahinten, Jennifer D. Shapka, and J. Douglas Willms, “Adolescent Children of Adolescent Mothers: The Impact of Family Functioning on Trajectories of Development,” Journal of Youth and Adolescence 36[2007]:  195-212.)