Public Service Announcement re children raised by single mothers

[Clymene]

There is a recently deleted thread about a woman raising a son when his dad said he didn't want to see him.

This is not a TAAT but I wanted to correct the assertion made by several posters in that thread that children - particularly boys - have poor outcomes without fathers in their lives.

This is a myth.

Sadly a lot of single mothers live in poverty and are under immense stress trying to raise the children men have abandoned. It's poverty and poor mental health that causes the poor outcomes.

srcd.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/cdev.13342

The children with the best academic outcomes are raised in lesbian households.

journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/0003122420957249

What about outside the family? The rest of the world? The family isn’t a vacuum.

Equally I think a strong matriarchal figure is slightly more crucial for girls - maybe why @Babdoc daughters are doing so well in life. But a woman can’t teach a male how to be a man, not in my view anyway. That’s not to say most boys of single mums won’t end up perfectly fine, because most people aren’t arseholes.

Oh I definitely agree that girls need it. My daughter is showing signs of also being a strong matriarchal character already! I may not be able to teach my boys how to be men, but I can certainly teach them how not to behave. I do all the things a typical Dad would do where I can too, football, rough housing etc. It is not an easy situation but I think lumping all children of single mothers into a failure category is wrong.

I agree that it's the increased likelihood of being raised in comparative poverty that is likely to be the biggest determinant of outcomes.

But even though that is likely to be the proximate cause, the root cause surely is that there is an absent parent?

So while it is easy to garner sympathy for the statement:
Happy Single Parent Household > Toxic Two-parent Household
I don't understand why this invalidates the similar statement:
Happy Two-parent Household > Happy Single Parent Household

Seems that suggesting the latter is often a taboo in MN. The overwhelming advice on almost all threads is 'leave him' - which is fine, and I'm sure the risk of another toxic two-parent relationship is too great for some people to take, but there is a very real loss in income and time resources and an increase in other fixed costs that is being incurred by all the happy single parents who make that choice.

Did I say 'men are so toxic and nobody needs them'? No.

The reason I posted this thread is twofold:

1. That there are a lot of women raising our children alone (me included) and a lot of us aren't doing it through choice. Knowing that your children aren't going to become gun toting thugs is comforting.
2. To help women realise that they shouldn't stay in terrible relationships with awful men because if they leave, their children will turn into gun toting thugs.

So many women stay in awful toxic relationships because they've been led to believe that any dad is better than no dad. It's not true.

A good dad - like any good parent - is obviously going to be a real asset.

But this just feels like a ‘defensive’ thread because you’re a single mum. Of course you’re going to be defensive - we’re all defensive of our own life choices, including me! But I don’t think anyone out there truly believes all children of single mums turn into gun toting thugs. However equally I don’t think trying to spin it as ‘single mums = happier better kids cos men are shit’ is any better or more accurate either.

I think we all get caught up in our own situations/beliefs in these arguments and find it hard to step back and separate our own circumstances from them.

Plenty of women are toxic mums (like mine!) although of course not in a violent/physical sense. But if you read the stately homes thread an awful lot of it - the majority - is about emotional abuse at the hands of mothers rather than fathers. We have 2 lesbian families in my wider family - one a married couple, one a single mum who had her son at 43. The former has worked out fine so far - although the kid is a toddler, she seems happy and well cared for. The latter has been a disaster and I’ve had a few sleepless nights worrying about him - she’s physically abusive to all the women she dates (convicted in court), neglects him and I have no fucking idea why she thought she had anything to offer a child, I suspect she just felt entitled to one. She doesn’t have any money bar handouts from older relatives who feel sorry for her son, he has a really sad life and will become a damaged young man. Equally we’ve got some great dads in the family and some abusive ones.

Of course I am. I am trying to show them how they should be, not how their own father was. As a single parent, I am aware of the disadvantages and do my absolute best to mitigate all of the disadvantages. There are no males left alive in my own family and their father and his family are now off the scene. I do my best with what I have and that is all I can do.

Just to add a bit more about me; I have a 3yo daughter and currently pregnant with a boy. Do I think he will be sexist? To some degree yes. Hopefully not in an overt horrible toxic way, but in that way that ‘nice men’ are without even knowing it - not really liking it when women have better ideas (even if they don’t express this), subconsciously expecting a man to be making the announcement when he boards a plane, and so on. Because I will be stunned if, regardless of what I do, his experiences in the wider world as a man don’t shape this somehow. This whole ‘not MY lovely son’ really doesn’t help, in fact it’s just burying your head in the sand. Perhaps because women think it’s a reflection on the quality of their mothering, which itself is sort of internalised misogyny…

I also wonder what these ‘male role models’ think about being automatically handed such a responsibility. Their dads should be stepping up, not your cousin Ken or Jay who runs the football team. It’s an unfair responsibility to put on them really. But I guess that’s a different thread…

Leading on from that if a single dad by choice said ‘oh it’s fine my sisters will be a mum figure to the baby’, I get the feeling that would be deemed ‘sexist’ - why should female family members automatically fill that role, etc.

I never claimed to have it to hand, I have just read many news articles over the years which state that children growing up without a father does have a negative impact on them I’m a single mum myself so would like it to not be true but I believe there is truth to it, but that’s more likely not that they WILL. “The United Kingdom Office for National Statistics has reported that children of single parents, after controlling for other variables like family income, are more likely to have problems, including being twice as likely to suffer from mental illness.[28] Both British and American researchers show that children with no fathers are three times more likely to be unhappy, and are also more likely to engage in anti-social behavior, abuse substances and engage in juvenile deliquency.[29][30]”

I also don’t agree male role models are easy to find! I don’t see my own father so my kids have no male role models at all, one had a male teacher but it’s not the same. Male role models aren’t easy to find if you don’t have one in the family not everyone has grandads/ uncles/ brothers etc

Not all of us are lucky to have brothers or a father who can step in and play daddy, 2 of my kids had a male teacher one has never even now he’s in year 4. That’s not the same as having a father though is it? Like having a sports coach isn’t. And it actually made my daughter much worse when she had a male teacher. They are only easy to find if you happen to have loads of men in the family and like someone else said I wonder how they feel about taking on that role?

Actually, I have read about that too but the writer of the article was good at pointing out that the effect of children growing in toxic environments with both parent was seriously under researched.

The single-parent family correlation with gang membership has been an ongoing theme in US studies, e.g. pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/25682209/

US gang culture is different from UK and single parent families isn’t the only factor identified. I don’t know if the studies in the US have teased out cross correlation.

I wonder when the penny is going to drop ...

Feminism wasn't invented by the current generation. There have been prominent feminists in every generation going back centuries. Do you think the mothers raising their sons in the '60s (kids who are often grandparents already themselves nowadays) or those raising their sons in the '80s (who are today's dads) were all intent on raising misogynist patriarch-supporting ogres? None of them wanted that. They did everything in their power to raise their sons and daughters to be the most enlightened, fairest, kindest men and women possible. Obviously not all of them succeeded, but that doesn't invalidate their hopes. They really weren't any different to today's parents in that regard.

What has changed is the level of expectation. That expectation comes from society, peers, and partners. The expectation of material wealth, which necessitates one-career-per-adult, when in the '60s it was commonplace for one-career-per-family to suffice. The expectation of parenting success, which necessitates expensive after-school activities and clubs, whereas in the '80s it was still commonplace for children to play in the street with their friends. And the expectation of complete personal, individual autonomy and independence, which makes cooperation, collaboration and compromise between partners almost impossible. That's why relationships fail and people end up raising children alone. It's not men that are toxic, it's the whole system.

What has this got to do with OP?

It's poverty and poor mental health that causes the poor outcomes.

Well yes these are huge factors but if they are a direct consequence of being a single parent - which they often are - then it doesn't really prove people like me, who think single parenthood is a disadvantage for DC, wrong.

What has changed is the level of expectation. That expectation comes from society, peers, and partners. The expectation of material wealth, which necessitates one-career-per-adult, when in the '60s it was commonplace for one-career-per-family to suffice.

@Mark19735 I would argue it comes from long term low interest rates which have pushed up the price of housing so much that both parents need to work. This is a much bigger input than "materialistic expectations".

Perhaps also women learning that without economic independence there is no independence at all and they are vulnerable to the whims of their DH's no matter how dysfunctional they are!

Many such cases

I have heard a few tales of domestic violence in lesbian relationships.Their partnerships are just as toxic to children when there is
an abusive partner. Possibly more so because of the 'different' factor.
You don't mention the possibility - dare I even mention it - that most fathers are not toxic at all. And boys and girls too long for one if they are deprived of one. A passing sports coach doesn't fill the father void, not by a long chalk.
You give Dads no credit for anything which is just plain silly when many of us reading this had good Dads, grandpas, brothers, husbands and sons.

The lack of father can easily be made up for by having positive male role models, relationships and mentors.

Really? I'm not sure I agree.