Single Parenthood is Dangerous for Children

We educated Americans can afford to screw up. We have skills and we have backup. But there is a class of Americans that don’t. They are the children of single-parent families. In fact, as Kay S. Hymowitz tells us in Marriage and Caste in America, it’s gone beyond a question of class. The single-parent “lifetyle” choice is more of a caste, a separate world from the middle-class mainstream of American life.

As the Wall Street Journal folks put it:

experts who have looked closely at the phenomenon have hardly anything positive to say. Past research indicates that the bulk of unwed births are to young women, typically in their 20s, who are not college-educated and are not prospering. There's also a mountain of evidence to suggest that children raised by such single mothers are at an increased risk for virtually every social problem you can think of--poverty, crime, drug use, etc.--including single parenthood.

It’s curious really. Children who live with mother and boy-friend are something like 10 to 20 times more likely to suffer violence than the child of biological married parents. Imagine if fast food were 20 times more likely to result in negative outcomes for children! Why, the activists would be appearing twice daily to testify to Congress and twice nightly on the network news.

Why then is there silence on the danger, the physical danger to children of single parenthood?

The world wants to know.