Ballgame has a good point:
The notion that “Children GENERALLY do better with parents together” could be taken to mean that, out of the 100 families described above, children from the 80 non-divorcing families end up being mentally and emotionally healthier (as a group) than the children from the 20 divorcing families. That is very easy to believe. Indeed, there are any number of studies that show this, and these are the studies that are typically trotted out to misleadingly imply that divorce hurts children. In fact it’s just another rather banal observation that children from happy families do better than children from emotionally fraught ones, and hardly worth the price of a billboard. It’s almost like saying, “People with money are less likely to have difficulties making ends meet.”
But the other meaning of “Children GENERALLY do better with parents together” is quite different: namely, that the children in the 20 divorcing families would have been better off if those parents hadn’t gotten divorced. THAT notion is purely speculative as far as I know. I don’t know of any study that demonstrates this … indeed, I don’t know how any study could demonstrate it. There would be insurmountable practical and ethical issues: you’d have to do some kind of double blind study where couples considering divorce who have children would be permitted to divorce or compelled to stay together at random.
I’d also add that what “parents” means needs to be defined. If a child is being raised by a same-sex couple, would the people who put up the billboard say “great! The parents are still together!” or would they scowl and grumble that same-sex parents aren’t real parents? What about adoption? Etc, etc.
This is also the start of an experiment with a new moderation style for “Feminist Critics”: each post will now have two separate threads, one of which will be deemed “no hostility” and moderated appropriately, in the hope that more feminists will be willing to participate in discussions where we’re not attacked. (The change is due to Daran stepping down as moderator, because he’s enjoying his new relationship too much to waste time blogging.)
I don’t know if the new moderation style will work out — after all, the previous moderation style had the same good intentions, but wasn’t successful at retaining feminist comment-writers — but I hope it will.
I hope the new moderation policy will work as well. I voiced concern a few times when I saw a few comments I would say were “over the line”, but well, I’m less stringent than the moderation (the NoH one at least), and I don’t have moderation power either.
I hope it brings more interesting (and less derailing because of petty arguments) discussions.
There are two things being left out of this conversation: economics and sexism. In most cases the raising of the children will fall into the mothers lap. As we know women that live alone with children largely live in poverty. When one is forced to work a lot of hours, raise children, keep house something is going to fall through the cracks. Society does nothing to compensate for the domestic work that women do. It is expected to be free labor while we are totally dependent on it at the same time. It is hard enough to be a working parent with a partner and still handle all of the responsibilities that come with raising children. We would like to blame the individuals but in truth this is a social failing. If we want children to do better we need to invest in their mothers. This could mean things like education subsidies, reduced work hours with a tax break for household labour and socialized daycare. We need to stop thinking of this as someone else’s problem. It take a village to raise a child- and no that is not just some cliche statement.
I agree with those measures, but if you end up only targeting women, it might reinforce the actual paradigm that makes it less desirable for a man to be the caregiver. If he chooses to be a stay-at-home husband (or caregiver while working), he will undoubtedly face the same issues won’t he?
I’m just saying, the services should be available to caregivers in general, rather than just mothers. And I hope someday society stops promoting how “unmanly” (or even suspect) it is for a man to be the caregiver.
Thanks for the call out, Amp. I hope it attracts more people to FC who are interested in substantive discussions. I should point out that for the moment the new approach will likely apply only to my threads (though I’ll probably be doing a disproportionate amount of posting at FC in the near future).
Renee, I agree with Schala here. The sentence, “If we want children to do better we need to invest in their mothers,” tends to reinforce the same linguistic gender stereotypes that feminists rightly struggle against in other areas. There are significant numbers of single male fathers, and the gender neutral admonition “we need to invest in children’s parents” would soften the implication in your comment that raising children is ‘women’s work’, and that men are presumptive outsiders to this world. Advocating the notion that fathers are just as important in children’s lives as mothers could help to counter the gender imbalance you and many other feminists denounce.
The time to have done this study was when there was much more disparity across states in the ease with which one could divorce. Legally speaking, so long as a couple has the economic means to separate physically for a year, a divorce is easily obtained in every state in the Union today. However, when there were major reforms of divorce law occurring earlier in the 20th century — particularly after WWII, which was when even South Carolina broke down and started allowing anyone to get divorced at all — scholars could have compared couples of similar socioeconomic backgrounds and levels of conflict in their marriage, with the differentiating factor being that Couple A lives in California (an “easy divorce” state) and Couple B lives in New York (a “harder divorce” state). Compare how the kids of divorced couples in one state did compared to the kids of couldn’t-get-divorced couples in another state. Obviously you’d need a sample size much larger than A and B, but you get the idea.
PG:
If they had done such a thing, how would they have accounted for other variable factors among the states? Take for exmaple education. Every state has a different education system, so how would one be able to truly determine if a kid is smarter because their parents didn’t divorce?
Schala, ballgame, & Renee:
I agree with the measures. Another possible solution (though I’m unsure how pragmatic) would be to actually pay workers better and to offer more flexibility. I think this solution could potentially open up more choice in daycare and give similar results as the measures currently suggested.
I agree with those measures, but if you end up only targeting women, it might reinforce the actual paradigm that makes it less desirable for a man to be the caregiver.
The initial statement may have been about investing in the children’s mothers, but as far as I can tell, the specific suggestions are gender neutral. Men can benefit from subsidized daycare, reduced or flexible working hours, etc as well as women (as long as the legislation providing such is written in a gender neutral way.)
thebigmanfred,
There’s actually more variation in quality of education within a state than between states, due to public education’s being funded by property taxes. That is, there’s a bigger gulf between the education of middle-to-upper class suburban kids in Grapevine and their peers in inner-city Dallas or rural Texas, than there is between the Grapevine education and the Irvine, Calif. education, or the Fairfax County, Virginia education. All middle-to-upper class suburban kids will receive an education with fairly similar levels of quality, with the only likely variation based on geography being how much of evolutionary theory they’re taught. (In more religious areas, they’ll learn more about other aspects of biology and probably end up doing just as well on the AP Biology exam anyway.) Therefore, if you compare only similarly socioeconomically situated families, there won’t be a substantial difference based on state of residence; you can hold other things constant and keep state divorce law as the variable.
The thing is that men, even custodial fathers, are already more invested in than women – if women had pay equity, for example, the change in living standard would be much less after divorce.
There are fathers we do not invest in, too – young men of color have the same kind of pay and work condition inequality, compared to young white men, that women have compared to men. Men who do caring work also get a lot more social support, because they’re considered extraordinary.
The programs may need to be gender-neutral, but the problems they’re designed to fix sure the heck aren’t.
(and, I HATE those studies. Where are the studies that show if there is more domestic abuse when parents stay together, or not? Me & my brother’s lives got so much better after my parents split up, it was just amazing. Poorer, but otherwise *way* better.)
“Men who do caring work also get a lot more social support, because they’re considered extraordinary.”
If by social support, you mean “assumption that they are pedophiles” or gay, then yeah, they do. You probably mean something other than that.
When I was babysitting my brothers (2 of them, for many years), I was considered male, and no one ever thought I was extraordinary for the deed. It was what was expected from me. Given I never bought into the division of tasks as “guy’s work” and “girl’s work” around the house, I also never thought washing dishes, or babysitting, were work suited better for girls. I did what I was able to do (which included raking leaves and shoveling snow as well, but only on our propriety).
I’d add that this isn’t something that can be seen through the lens of my transition, because in general, openness about so-called gendered tasks isn’t present on either side. Many men will think the average woman is clueless with power tools or fixing a car, and many women will think the average man can’t cook or clean even if his life depended on it. Notice I said average, as they’re probably aware of women mechanics and men professional cooks.
I simply did what I could do, because I could (and to earn money since I had no source of income).
I wasn’t considered, gay, pedophile, or suspect for babysitting my brother (at least that I heard of), but I never worked in a daycare where my work is public (basically, no one knew I was babysitting). Similarly to women being judged less than their actual abilities in science, or say, mechanics, men are judged less in the caretaking category, which includes nursing.
I had thought that there were some studies bearing on this question. Old, but likely still good. My memory is that some of the longitudinal psych studies were able to demonstrate, at least, that kids in families that later divorced were just as miserable, statistically speaking, before the divorce as after. In some cases more, because the divorce eliminated certain sources of conflict.
And of course by eliminating families with divorce from your studies of married-time happiness, you pretty much assume the result you’re trying to prove.
In most cases the raising of the children will fall into the mothers lap.
God knows I’ve spent my share of time trying to convince some of the local fathers to spend some quality time with their kids. Many of them plead a heavy-duty work schedule. But two of the ones with the heaviest schedule (one guy works two jobs 6 days a week and the other is a anesthesiologist with 4 sons) manage to carve out time to go on campouts and meetings with us. I do think that there’s a definite cultural bias towards “raising the kids is Mom’s job”. I’m convinced that kids need Dad to actually get involved hands-on.
I’ll ditto this. And at least in my social group, there are a number of men who are or are planning to be primary caregivers in their stable marriages.
O good gravy , thanks so much for posting this. A friend of mine who was raised by a single parent saw this billboard near where she lived and almost called me in tears, she was so angry. The idea that somehow her mother could have “done better” by magically finding a spouse, or by “hanging onto” her father was ridiculous.
As I recall, her anger stemmed from two things:
1. There is nothing that really could have been done to make her have a two-parent household. It wasn’t a realistic option. Therefore, the billboard really had no good advice for her or her mother, other than “wow, no matter what you do it will never be good enough.”
2. It undermined the incredible job her mother did of raising two bright, college-educated (her sis graduated from the Naval Academy!) thoughtful daughters. And that made her pissed.
After chatting about this, we both agreed that basically if they had taken the money for that billboard and given it to a charity for single parents, more good probably would have been served. Not angry at the idea of helping out young couples who need access or counseling….but the way it is phrased is just offensive.
As a marriage and family therapist, I can tell you that the research we have says that the best possible situation for children, in aggregate, is a home with two committed, involved parents (of any gender combination) who function as an effective parental team and who don’t have high levels of marital conflict.
In the absence of that possibility, the next best thing is for children to have two committed, involved parents who are not partnered, but who still function as an effective parental team and who keep a good boundary around their relationship conflict (past or present) to insulate the children from it.
Another good possibility is for children to have one committed, involved parent who has sufficient resources and community support to meet their and their children’s needs, either without a second parent in the picture at all or with a second parent who is only distantly involved but not in a way that spills conflict over onto the children.
All of these situations have fairly good odds of having good outcomes for the children, even when there has been a separation or divorce that the children have gone through.
From there, it gets muddy, because there’s a lot of less-desireable possibilities:
– Two parents still in a relationship who are a poor parenting team and/or who have high levels of marital conflict that the children are exposed to on a regular basis.
– Two parents not still in a relationship who triangle the children into their conflicts and/or who work at odds with each other as parents.
– A single parent with insufficient resources and support.
– A person parenting largely on their own who has the other parent cropping up erratically and dramatically, making for many disruptions in the children’s lives and possibly in their living situation and economic well-being.
None of these doom children. None of them. I am the child of divorce, a high-conflict divorce for that matter, of two parents who battled each other through my sister and me. We’ve got our dings and scratches but we turned out OK. Love and resiliency helps a lot. So does a supportive community of friends and family. So does therapy.
As to the weird vagueness of this billboard, it’s not clear whether it’s better, say, to be the child of an unmarried mother whohas to work two jobs to keep the bills paid but who doesn’t have the kids’ father around to fight with, than it is to be the child of married parents who have physically or emotionally violent conflict, and for the billboard to even imply that it’s always better for the marriage to continue is disingenous at best, downright untruthful at worst. We don’t have that research. It’s unclear why anyone would want to create such a hierarchy of misery, frankly, because it’s not as though we can go in and force people to divorce if the children would be better off, or force them to stay married if the opposite were true.
What we know is this: children do best when they have the regular, predictable presence of one or more loving adults who are committed to their care. They need clear expectations and guidelines, age-appropriate expectations, a family unit that is flexible enough to tolerate individual differences and growth through the life cycle but strong enough to set healthy boundaries, emotional and instrumental responsbilities appropriate to being children in the family (e.g. they shouldn’t have to be the primary emotional outlet for one parent, or a parent’s best friend, or take sole care of themselves at a young age), love and affection, basic health and safety needs met, an orientation to their culture and community, etc. etc. They can get all of those things from parents living as a couple, parents living apart, or only one parent.
And, they can be denied those things in any number of family configurations as well.
It’s unclear why anyone would want to create such a hierarchy of misery, frankly, because it’s not as though we can go in and force people to divorce if the children would be better off, or force them to stay married if the opposite were true.
Actually, we can force people to stay married to some extent just by limiting the legal availability of divorce. That’s what I was talking about above on how one might have been able to do a comparative study of how divorce affects children by doing it when states had quite different divorce laws. If we want people to be able to get divorced where there is abuse, but not where there are “irreconcilable differences,” we make abuse an easily-proven basis for divorce, and don’t permit divorces where there are no specific grounds (i.e. adultery, abuse, abandonment, addiction). However, I am a huge fan of the no-fault divorce because people who really wanted a divorce just had much more nasty, bitter ones when fault had to be assigned.
PG:
That’s probably true. My own personal experience seems to match much of that.
In my own state (what I consider my state), my school was considered one of the best (I happened to live in one of the more prosperous parts of my state). We still only offered half of the AP courses that a student could test on. We certainly considered ourselves fortunate to even have that many. I don’t know if we we’re just an anomaly among top schools by state or not.
thebigmanfred,
There are very few schools that offer all 34 courses that have AP exams. My high school was mediocre (in working-class small town in Texas) and it theoretically offered 10, though I was the first person ever to take the Calc AB exam and I don’t know of anyone who actually attempted the French and German exams. If your school offered 17, especially in major subject areas like physics, chemistry, economics, advanced calculus or statistics, and the teachers taught well enough that students actually took the exams, you probably had as good an educational opportunity as most middle-to-upper-class suburbanites.
PG thanks for the info. Education problems are something that always interest me, because I partly curious what my educational experience would have been like if I didn’t move around as much growing up. I’ve been to nine different schools (excluding college), in 2 different states, and 2 different countries (DOD schools though). I’ve always noticed that there always seem to be inconsistencies in teaching wherever I go. But it’s good to know that I probably wasn’t missing too much (with the exception of the limited foreign culture experience). And that does make me feel a little better about my high school education. We offered roughly about 12 Ap courses at my school, although I took only one AP test (there really wasn’t a point since the college I was going to didn’t accept the AP for credit). Also since leaving, my former school apparently has an IB program.
I don’t know, I think it’s quite important for a child to have two parents. And no, I don’t care about what genders they are or how their sexual relationship is – if they’re an open couple who likes to get a sitter and then go to the bathhouse for orgies, more power to them.
As long as the kids get a consistent, loving family where all the burden of supporting the household isn’t on one person (both financially and personally) then I think they’ll do alright.
Of course, any hard-lines are obviously stupid. Forcing an abusive or otherwise emotionally broken couple to stay together is silly… but on the other hand, supporting a divorce that breaks up parents without exhausting every other option is equally wrong.