Child Abuse
The rate of child abuse in single-parent families is nearly twice the rate of child abuse in two-parent households.
Source: America's Children: Key National Indicators of Well-Being. Federal Interagency Forum on Child and Family Statistics. Washington, DC: GPO, 1997.
Crime
Even after controlling for family background variables such as mother's education level, race, family income, and number of siblings, as well as neighborhood variables such as unemployment rates and median income, boys who grew up outside of intact marriages were, on average, more than twice as likely as other boys to end up in jail.
Source: Harper, Cynthia C., and Sara S. McLanahan. "Father Absence and Youth Incarceration." Paper presented at the annual meeting of the American Sociological Association, San Francisco, CA, August 1998.
Drug and Alcohol Use
Even after controlling for the effects of gender, age, race-ethnicity, family income, and residential mobility, teens in single-parent and stepparent families were 2 times more likely to use illegal drugs compared to teens in intact, two-parent married families.
Source: Hoffmann, John P., and Robert A. Johnson. "A National Portrait of Family Structure and Adolescent Drug Use." Journal of Marriage and the Family 60(August 1998): 633-645.
Education
Even after controlling for differences in income, children who were born out of wedlock and either remained in a single-parent family or whose mother subsequently married had significantly poorer math and reading scores and lower levels of academic performance than children from continuously married households.
Source: Cooksey, Elizabeth C. "Consequences of Young Mothers' Marital Histories for Children's Cognitive Development." Journal of Marriage and the Family 59(May 1997): 245-261.
Poverty
Single-parent families are five times as likely to be poor as married-couple families. In 1999, 6.3 percent of married-couple families with children were living in poverty, compared to 31.8 percent of single-parent families with children.
Source: U.S. Census Bureau. Current Population Survey.
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