Imagine how hard it is to raise a child, the fincial costs, all the work that needs to be done, the extra eyes ect.
This is an act that was once done by clans, by extended families, you had aunts, uncles, cousins, grandparents, and a host of other people who helped you raise your child and in return you helped them.
Now take all of that help and force the entire burden onto one singular person.
Is it any wonder the children of single parents do worse?
Absolutely, it does make sense that children of single parents would do worse, and I personally believe that being the child of a single parent does lead to worse outcomes. But I want to be careful not to let the correlation in combination with our intuition and values lead us to overestimate the effects. I am trying to be objective in questioning if the worse life outcomes for children raised by single parents are entirely because they are raised by single parents or if there could be some other more powerful factors that could be causing that correlation. It's why I said I think we need more data.
Intuitively, we can say that children benefit from and have traditionally benefited from a lot of people helping to raise and influence them, so lacking a parent (usually father) would have a negative effect. But, is the lack of a father countered by more exposure to the mother's family? By peers, teachers, babysitters, day care workers, and so on? My intuition would say not, but I don't want to draw too many conclusions without hard data.
One kind of data I would like to look at is for families where one parent died when the children were very young. Lets say we look at Group A which are children raised by their mothers and whose mothers were never married and never had a substantial relationship with their fathers. Group B would be children whose fathers died in some freak accident when the children were very young. We could have Group C as well, a control group of sorts with children who were raised by both parents in a stable marriage.
Will children in Group B have the same or close level of dysfunction as the children from Group A? That is what the prevailing hypothesis among conservatives would predict. If Group B is closer to Group C though, then that might lead us to believe that the two parent hypothesis is wrong. If Group B is somewhere in between A and C, then that would lead us to think that having two parents or not is an important factor in this correlation between social dysfunction and single parenthood, but not the only factor.
It could be the case, for example, that the kind pf people who are unmarried and get pregnant are less responsible in general and so make worse parents, that a responsible single mother (a widow by random chance) has more well adjusted children. Maybe unmarried people who have kids have lower IQ's and low time preference and so those negative traits are passed onto their children through genes, so upbringing isn't as important. I'm not claiming that these hypotheses are true, but that they possibly are or that there could be similar confounding influences. Like I said, we would need more data.
On that topic, if I had the resources to gather lots of data and do lots of studies, it might be interesting to compare 2 parent heterosexual households to 2 parent homosexual households - though I think that there are so many other variables at play there that a true comparison would be impossible. Though it be at least attempting to learn if children do better from just having 2 parents or from having a male and a female parent.
