Father Absence is Fine at The Times
Here's a piece in The New York Times Sunday Magazine that would like to convince us that, if you've got the money, single motherhood is pretty much an ideal arrangement for all concerned (The New York Times, 2/1/ 09). Like so many Times writers, Emily Bazelon seems to think that the world consists of a few privileged, professional white people. Article after article deals with them and only them.
So Bazelon has sought and found a half-dozen or so well-heeled, well-educated single women who have had children either via in vitro fertilization or foreign adoption. These women also have immense social safety networks. They have friends and relatives who seem to be committed to helping out with childcare and the myriad organizational requirements that entails. So, given comfortable incomes and reliable support systems, they seem pretty happy raising children without men around.
There are some problems with Bazelon's scenes of domestic bliss, though. On the sixth page of her piece, she gets around to admitting that, according to the study she cites, 98% of single mothers believe it's either moderately or very important that their children have a male role model in their lives. She doesn't mention how it happened that all of the women she interviews fall into the 2% who don't.
And, despite the length of her article, we never really see how these women conduct their lives. There are a lot of close-in shots of children playing with dolls and mothers sitting around Chick-Fil-A, but little of the nitty-gritty of who's taking care of Lili while Mom's at work, or what happens when she has to work late, has to travel, is sick or a child is sick. We never see these women at work. An intelligent space alien reading this article would conclude that single-motherhood is, almost literally, a walk in the park.
Not only that, but the children of these families, while visible, are scarcely discussed. Again, we see them playing and eating, but does Bazelon ever ask the older ones about fathers or men? No. Does she let us know how they do in school or how they relate to their peers? No. Does she suggest anything about the potential problems fatherlessness may pose as they mature. No. This article is all about the mothers and what they think and feel about raising kids without a father. They think it's fine.
In fact, it's better than fine. To have a man around would mean they'd have to "share that authority," i.e. over the kids, and that's a prospect that's "mostly unwelcome." So we see again the maternal gatekeeper at work. She's the one who decides how much input dads have into children's upbringing, and in these cases, it's none, regardless of the effects of that on the children.
And that's where Bazelon really runs into trouble. She tries to branch out from the few women she interviews into social science on the subject of fatherless children. Because as we know, social science has been quite clear for several decades at least, that father involvement is vital to children's wellbeing, and that it's absence is highly correlated with poorer outcomes for children.
So when Bazelon embarks on her project of convincing us otherwise, she's got a high mountain to climb. Predictably, she doesn't get far. To support her thesis that children of single mothers do as well as those of two-parent families, she cites a single study of 38 children of single-parent families. And apparently it's unpublished since Bazelon provides no link to it and no citation to any publication.
Bazelon tries to recruit Sara McLanahan to her cause, but that's a non-starter. If she'd read McLanahan and Sandfur's book "Growing Up With a Single Parent," she wouldn't have bothered. In it, the authors stated that "the evidence is quite clear," that, regardless of race, education, place of residence, number of children in the family and occupation of the parents, children of single parents fare worse than do their peers with two parents.
Her treatment of McLanahan's work might qualify Bazelon for a job dealing a crooked game of three-card Monte, but not making principled social commentary. In the space of two paragraphs she goes from saying accurately that lack of income is the greatest factor in the poor outcomes of the children of single mothers, to pretending it's the only one. In fact low income explains about half their deficits and Bazelon prefers to ignore the other half.
Nowhere do we see the "social capital" on which McLanahan and Sandefur place such emphasis in children's outcomes. Maybe that's because they state that deficits in social capital come about "first and most importantly" by father absence.
And nowhere do we see the well-reported fact that fathers and mothers typically parent differently, with mothers being more verbal and restrictive, and fathers being more physical and willing to give children freedom to explore. Much social science suggests that both approaches are important to successful childrearing.
Bazelon goes on to assert that these educated single mothers are better able to address the language and literacy problems so often seen in children of single-parent households. Who knows? That may be true although she offers the thinnest possible support for the proposition. But even if it is, does she seriously expect us to believe that those are all the problems faced by the children of single mothers by choice? They're not, and if Bazelon knows anything about her subject, she should admit it. But she doesn't.
Of course, it is entirely possible for a single parent to raise a healthy, happy and successful child. Bazelon may have found a few who are. But to suggest, as she does, that all it takes is a good income, good friends and a healthy absence of men to give children an adequate start in life, is arrant nonsense, as huge amounts of social science show.
Maybe if The Times would send a reporter into Harlem or even Queens instead of Princeton, they'd get an idea of how the world actually works. I won't hold my breath.
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