Study: Mom's marital status may not indicate kids' success

Marquita Ridgeway, a single mother "by circumstance," picked up her two sons after day care at the Holy Sanctuary Temple of God in west Florence.

"There are some things that I can't teach them," said the 26-year-old University of North Alabama student about the challenges of being a single mother.

For example, Dequarrian, 4, likes to play sports.

"I'm not the active type," said Ridgeway.

Ridgeway said by pursuing a nursing career, she was "trying to get stable." Her main income sources are a UNA stipend and disability for her 3-year-old who has heart problems.

Of her family, Ridgeway said, "I would rather have a stable father."

Research is at odds on whether policy makers and nonprofits need to focus on promoting marriage and nuclear families or focus on better social services for single mothers, such as Ridgeway.

As the nuclear family structure morphs across the U.S. from adoptions, single parents, blended and multi-generational families, how best to help single mothers, who are typically poor, is still up for debate.

New analysis published in November concluded that family structure predicts little of how low income children fare in life, regardless of their ethnicity.

"Policies seeking to change the living arrangements of low-income children may do little to improve child well being," concluded authors E. Michael Foster, child health professor at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, and Ariel Kalil, developmental psychologist at the University of Chicago.

The results smack in the face of the $150 million per year the federal government has spent since 2005 to promote "healthy marriage and fatherhood" and counters advocacy groups such as the National Fatherhood Initiative.

"These things are very misleading as sound bites in the media," said Roland Warren, who was critical of the study. He is president of the National Fatherhood Institute.

A father's contribution cannot be replaced, said Warren, who argues for father's involvement.

"The strategy of replacing those things (that a father provides) is very expensive," said Warren, since many low income single mothers fall back on social services and extended families.

"It's the difference between having a quilt and having a blanket. A quilt can cover everything, but a quilt is made of a bunch of patches that have to be sewn together perfectly for it to work," said Warren. "We're never going to have enough mentors, that's just the reality of it, but we'll always have enough fathers; every kid comes with one.

"Everyone has an involved father at conception, the question is whether he'll be involved at graduation? Anybody could take this and say we shouldn't worry about marriage or family structure because we can, quote, replace all that stuff," said Warren, who grew up in a single mother household. "In my view, it's extremely short sighted."

The study was based on the Comprehensive Child Development Project, a five-year $125 million federal project started in 1990 to "identify family needs and refer these families to different services in hopes of improving developmental outcomes for children and self-sufficiency for families."

The conclusion of the study was that it "did not produce any important positive effects on participating families."

The project tested children for vocabulary, social behavior and emotional well being.

The researchers suggested that comparisons of children at a single point in time, common in many studies, can confuse the impact of socioeconomics with a family's makeup. The study followed children during the span of five years.

Nationally, the number of single mothers nearly doubled in the last generation. From 1980 until 2003, the percentage of births of unwed mothers increased from 18 percent to 35 percent, according to federal statistics.

The separation between marriage and economic status is difficult to discern, however, as poverty and single-mother families tend to go together. In 2003, mother-only households were five times (42 percent) more likely to be living in poverty than married couple families (9 percent), according to federal statistics.

"I suspect what those researchers have done in taking the long view is that whatever the number of parents or the array of adults in the household, those adults are loving, create a secure environment and boost the child's self-esteem," said Joel Sanders, director of the family assistance division at the department of human resources. "There are single parents who have done a terrific job.

"Does the fact remain that the odds are stacked against the child of a family whose mother didn't finish high school and had a child before 18? Certainly the odds are against the child," said Sanders.

So concluded a 2007 federal study, "America's Children: Key National Indicators of Well-Being" that noted "children are at greater risk for adverse consequences when born to a single mother because the social, emotional and financial resources available to the family may be more limited."

The research also contests a body of research that shows that marriage training may be a better solution than parent training for low income families.

Scott Ketring, marriage counselor and member of Auburn University's "Alabama Community Healthy Marriage Initiative" said social services typically don't address the "chronicity of poverty," which can be passed from generation to generation.

"Poverty is a chronic stressor, and there are no clear solutions," Ketring said. "Family therapy typically works whereas patching up the crises didn't have a good outcome."

But Foster and Kalil found that even after single mothers married, their children's performance changed little.

"The findings do not invalidate the use of living arrangements as a means of identifying at-risk children and youth," said Foster, the study's lead author. "The key distinction, however, is that living arrangements may not be an effective target of intervention for very low-income children."

As for Ridgeway, originally from Mobile, the only family in the area is her sister. "We're the only ones here, so we help each other out," she said.

Trevor Stokes can be reached at 740-5728 or trevor.stokes@timesdaily.com.