ED375224 UD030127
Title: Growing Up with a Single Parent. What Hurts, What Helps.
Author(s): McLanahan, Sara; Sandefur, Gary
Pages: 204
Publication Date: 1994
ISBN: 0-674-36407-4
Available from: Document Not Available from EDRS.
Availability: Harvard University Press, 79 Garden Street, Cambridge,
MA 02138 ($19.95).
Language: English
Document Type: Book (010); Information Analysis (070)
Geographic Source: U.S.; Massachusetts
Journal Announcement: RIEFEB1995
Using information
from four national surveys and a decade of research, this book demonstrates
the connection between family structure and a child's prospects
for success. It shows how divorce, particularly with often-attendant
drops in income, parental involvement, and access to community resources,
diminishes children's chances for wellbeing. It is revealed that
children whose parents live apart are twice as likely to drop out
of high school as those in two-parent families, one and a half times
as likely to be idle in young adulthood, and twice as likely to
become single parents themselves. Additionally, data show that some
of the advantages often associated with being white are really a
function of family structure and that some of the advantages associated
with having educated parents evaporate when those parents separate.
The concluding chapter offers recommendations for rethinking our
current policies. The authors explain why it is imperative that
more of the costs of raising children be shifted from mothers to
fathers and from parents to society at large, as well as why universal
assistance programs that benefit low-income two-parent families
and single mothers must be developed. Appendixes contain data and
variables from the studies, bivariate probit models, and sex-difference
factors statistical tables. (GLR)
Descriptors: Child Advocacy; *Child Development; Child Support;
Community Support; Divorce; Family Environment; Family Income; *Family
Structure; *Futures (of Society); Marital Instability; *One Parent
Family; *Parent Child Relationship; Policy Formation; Success; Surveys
