All of the numbers reported in the tables shown have been adjusted for differences in family background characteristics such as race, parents’ education, family size, and place of residence. Thus the parents’ socioeconomic status cannot explain why children from one-parent families are doing worse.

Unfortunately, we cannot rule out the possibility that the gap stems from some unmeasured difference between one- and two-parent families, such as alcoholism, child abuse, or parental indifference.

In contrast, when a parent dies, children do not generally experience a major change in their standard of living. Social Security and life insurance help to make up the difference.

Out-of-wedlock birth rates have been going up gradually since at least the early 1940s. After 1960, the age of women at their first marriages began to rise, increasing the proportion of young women who might become unwed mothers.

Women who can support themselves outside marriage can be picky about when and whom they marry. They can leave bad marriages and they can afford to bear and raise children on their own. Thus single mothers will be more common in a society where women are more economically independent, all else being equal.

Children of single-parent families suffer measurable harm. But the problems of the family are far more complex than the popular debate often suggests.

The evidence, however, does not show that family disruption is the principal cause of high school failure, poverty, and delinquency.

The story is basically the same for the other measures of child well-being. If all children lived in two-parent families, teen motherhood and idleness would be less common, but the bulk of these problems would remain.

The consequences of family disruption are not necessarily the same in all kinds of families.

Some of the current debate presumes that being born to unmarried parents is more harmful than experiencing parents’ divorce and that children of divorced parents do better if their mother remarries. Our evidence suggests otherwise.

Remarriage is another instance where the conventional wisdom is wrong. Children of stepfamilies don’t do better than children of mothers who never remarry. Despite significantly higher family income and the presence of two parents, the average child in a stepfamily has about the same chance of dropping out of high school as the average child in a one-parent family.

However, our evidence shows that children in single-father homes do just as poorly as children living with a single mother.

it turns out that most sources to be found in fact tie matters of race and class inextricably to the matter of single parenting

Cart goes behind the horse, yo; poor people are more likely to be single parents because, poor people. Trying to artificially separate socioeconomic conditions from an issue like this is disengenuous at best, and more often outright dishonest; just like racists who try to use lies damn lies statistics to claim that Black people are inherently prone to criminal behavior— as if those statistics existed in a vacuum that didn’t include five hundred years of slavery and active institutional racism— most examples of “single mothers ___” are transparent attempts at victim-blaming, because it’s easier to trick an uninformed audience into abandoning and marginalizing others if that audience can be convinced their situation is somehow their own fault.