Opportunity vs Outcome

 

Let’s accept, for the moment, that Daryanani et al. establishes what is in the abstract.

Further, single mothers were more likely to engage in rejecting parenting behaviors, which predicted to a higher prevalence of adolescent externalizing disorders. 

…

Surprisingly, rejection in single-mother families predicted to less severe anxiety symptoms in adolescents relative to two-parent families. It is likely that single mothers are not inherently inferior parents relative to cohabitating mothers; rather, their parenting practices are often compromised by a myriad of demands and stressors. Consistent with this postulate, low socioeconomic status was associated with single motherhood and negative parenting behaviors. Clinical implications and study limitations are discussed.

              …

Unfortunately, much of the evidence suggests that single-mother families tend to be disadvantaged at systemic and individual levels relative to two-parent families (Kendig & Bianchi, 2008). Single-mother families are far more likely to experience poverty than two-parent families due to the loss of a partner’s finances, lower maternal educational attainment, and discriminatory wages against women (Cherlin, 1992; Goodrum, Jones, Kincaid, Cueller, & Parent, 2012). Further, members of single-mother families spend less time together because of additional obligations that mothers and their children have in the absence of an additional primary caretaker (Kendig & Bianchi, 2008). The disruptions that the family as a system experiences often compound with maladjustments that individual family members experience. More specifically, single mothers are more likely than cohabitating mothers (mothers who live with a spouse or partner; Kendig & Bianchi, 2008) to experience episodic and chronic depression, anxiety, substance abuse, stressful life events, low self-esteem, social isolation, and lack of emotional support (Lipman, Offord, & Boyle, 1997; McBride-Murry, Bynum, Brody, Willert, & Stephens, 2001)

To engage in a little root cause analysis, although the study correlates single parenting vs coparenting as associated with psychological problems in kids, it doesn’t say what the root causes of single parenting are, the outcomes of psychological problems in kids or really what other mechanisms can cause either ‘bad parenting’ or psychological problems in kids.

As a matter of public policy, not psychology, there isn’t much we can attempt to do about single parenting, nor should we attack that as a problem without knowing the other three variables (causes of single parenting, outcomes of psychological problems, or mechanisms that single parenting would cause psychological problems). the study advances a couple of mechanisms, but is full of caveats about other correlations that could lead from A to B.

I’m also going to say that calling out single parenting, for that reason, caters to really bad associations on the right that poverty is due to moral failings (e.g. unmarried sex), or bad choices (such as unwanted pregnancies, family abandonment, etc).

What we do know is that there are strong drivers of continued poverty that are structural, not moral.

I’d urge you to read some of these with regard to structural poverty and outcomes vs opportunity as they relate to public policy.

https://jacobin.com/2012/06/meritocracy-chris-hayes

https://theconversation.com/why-equality-of-opportunity-is-neither-possible-nor-desirable-43407

https://www.vox.com/2015/9/21/9334215/equality-of-opportunity

I can think of more issues, but this is a start.

_________________

Daryanani I, Hamilton JL, Abramson LY, Alloy LB. Single Mother Parenting and Adolescent Psychopathology. J Abnorm Child Psychol. 2016 Oct;44(7):1411-23. doi: 10.1007/s10802-016-0128-x. PMID: 26767832; PMCID: PMC5226056.


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