The nation's pediatricians are worried about how late-20th century changes in family life are affecting children. In a newly published supplement to Pediatrics, a task force on the family created by the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) in 1997, reports the findings of more than five years of studying the effects of contemporary family life on American children.
No trend worries the AAP task force more than the one putting "more than one quarter (26%) of all children . . . with a single parent, usually their mother." The AAP scholars acknowledge that "many children who are raised by single or separated parents do well and many in 2-parent families do poorly." Nonetheless, they stress that "children who are reared in single-parent households are at greater risk of a variety of problems." To begin with, "single-parent households differ from 2-parent households in terms of economic and parental resources. Single-parent households have 3 to 5 times higher rates of poverty than do 2-parent households." For physicians, such patterns matter because "family income is strongly related to children's health." Moreover, "paternal absence" predicts "multiple and sometimes lifelong disadvantages" that go far beyond "health problems" to include "problems with school attendance, achievement and completion; emotional and behavioral problems; adolescent parenthood; substance abuse; and other risk behaviors." Children reared in fatherless homes are also especially likely to "be out of work as young men and women."
Given such dismal patterns in single-parent homes, the AAP task force predictably enough underscores the advantage of keeping children in two-parent households: "Unequivocally," they write, "children do best when they are living with [two] mutually committed and loving parents who respect and love one another."
Living with two parents may not confer many benefits on children, however, when those parents are not married or are in a second or third marriage. "Cohabitation," remark the AAP physicians, "is more unstable for children than either married 2-parent or single-mother families and tends to produce worse outcomes for children." One of the worst outcomes is that of abuse, which the AAP scholars note has been linked to living "with a mother and a cohabiting boyfriend." Though less problematic for children than living with cohabiting parents, living with stepparents also poses problems for children. "When a parent remarries," observes the AAP task force, "the child's life is made more complicated and is again disrupted." Consequently, even though remarriage improves household income, "it does not necessarily improve the experience for the child.... [I]n general, children who are raised in a stepfamily do about as well as do children of single mothers."
Having diagnosed the illness, the AAP doctors are ready with a prescription: successful and enduring wedlock. "Marriage," the AAP task force explains, "is beneficial in many ways," in large part because "people behave differently when they are married. They have healthier lifestyles, eat better, and mother each other's health. Being part of a couple and a family also increases the number of people and social institutions with which an individual has contact; this...increases the likelihood that the family will be a successful one."
So, just in case any policymakers are paying attention, the AAP task force is ready to take a position: "The task force favors efforts to encourage and support marriage." Good medicine, that.
