Hooray! At least I finally have an explanation for why my daughter continually poops her pants…
The U.K.’s Telegraph reports that “12 per cent of children brought up by one parent displayed behavioural problems by the age of seven, it was disclosed, compared with just six per cent of youngsters raised by both natural parents.” This based on research conducted on 14,000 British children born between 2000 and 2002, as part of the Millennium Cohort Study.
Researchers found that “family make-up, parental qualifications and household income had a major effect on children’s behaviour at a young age, which could have damaging long-term consequences.” And in a separate analysis, “researchers also discovered that children with younger mothers had a much more difficult start in life than those with mothers over 30.”
But of course, so often, all of these things go hand in hand. A young girl gets pregnant at let’s say 20. She drops out of college (if she was going at all), tries living with her boyfriend. They both work part-time, so they don’t have much money. They argue because they’re broke, which leads to a break-up. The young girl, now 21 or 22, lives alone, trying to raise her child. The child has a “difficult start in life” as a result, which leads people like Lisa Calderwood from London University’s Institute of Education to say, “Living apart from natural fathers can be associated with poverty and negative outcomes for children.”
Okay, but here’s the thing. How is it that “living apart from natural fathers” is automatically the reason that children in the scenario I described above could potentially wind up troubled? There’s some kind of faulty logic working here. If a child’s natural father is unemployed or abusive, his presence does not automatically change that child’s life circumstances for the better. In these situations, it’s ridiculous to say that the presence of a child’s biological father functions as some kind of deus ex machina, made to fix everything up neat and tidy at the end of the play.
I write this post from a unique vantage point – and not just because I’m divorced. Yes, I consider myself a single mother, because I’m an unmarried woman with a child. But I have plenty of help in raising my daughter. My mother is virtually omnipresent in our lives, and my daughter has a very strong relationship with her father. This study mentions nothing about the distinction between children who have no contact with their father, some contact with their father, 50/50 contact with their father, etc., nor does it explicitly state that single mothers are the ones raising these poorly behaved, psychologically scarred monkeys – which is why Calderwood’s comment incenses me.
The researchers use the term “single parent” in this particular study – but the media conflated this study with previous un-cited studies that “found children raised by lone mothers are likely to have less economic security, less attention and guidance and more likely to live in deprived areas,” thus maternalizing this issue. Single dads are out there, to be sure, and I bet they see their children suffering in various and perhaps different ways from whatever lack of exposure they have to their mothers, as well, but as a single mom, I get a little grumpy about the way research like this gets reported.
After all, I have a 5-year-old who, in addition to being a champion pants-pooper, also likes to stay up ’til all hours and read and write and sing 4-minute long socially conscious folk songs that she knows all the lyrics to… so, I hardly get any sleep at night. She’s so poorly behaved, that kid of mine! She’s always asking questions about science in the middle of the dinner we eat together every night at the table with no distractions as a family, and she’s always bugging me, asking me to color with her and tell her jokes. (You know, cuz she loves me so much. Annoying!)
If only I was stuck in a sham relationship with a deceit-filled man and screaming all the time because I knew in my heart I was saddled with a sociopath but was being manipulated at every turn! That sounds like a dream. I’m sure if I risked my mental health in order to maintain the hetero-nuclear status quo that my daughter would really be blossoming. But, you know me! Always looking out for number one. And thanks to my degenerate kid’s pooping problem, number two, too.
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