Is single motherhood a problem for children, or is the problem rather that single mothers tend to have less money and less education?
Brad Wilcox’s Wall Street Journal op-ed of last Friday (which David blogged about below) addresses that question. A highlight:
…Until recently, there was one primary challenge to the intellectually fashionable view that fathers are fungible. It came from scholarship showing that children did better—e.g., were much more likely to finish school, avoid teen pregnancy and stay out of prison—in intact, married families than in homes headed by a single parent, most of whom are women.
Yet scholars such as Ms. Drexler were able to retort that much of the research relies on a comparison of middle-class married families with poor single mothers, so that differences in how children fare might be largely the result of socioeconomic differences. In their view, middle-class women who have a decent income and a good education can do just as good a job as a middle-class married mother and father.
That view ran into some major trouble this month, with the release of the report, “My Daddy’s Name is Donor“…
Significantly, [in the study]Â the single women who chose to have a child by donor insemination were better-educated and slightly better off than the parents who had biological children together. So the study’s results cannot be dismissed on the grounds that affluent marrieds were being compared to poor single mothers.
The study, which was co-authored by Elizabeth Marquardt, Norval Glenn and Karen Clark, paints a troubling portrait of the children conceived by single mothers who chose donor insemination. Young adults with maverick moms and donor dads report a sense of confusion, loss and distress about their origins and identity, and about their inability to relate to their biological father and to his kin.
Seventy-one percent of the adult offspring of these single mothers agree that: “My sperm donor is half of who I am,” and 78% wonder “what my sperm donor’s family is like.” Half report that they “feel sad” when they see “friends with their biological fathers and mothers.” Donor offspring with single mothers also are much less likely to report that they can rely on their family. Fifty-six percent of these offspring said they depend more on friends than on family, compared to just 29% of young adults born to two biological parents.
…Such a sense of loss may help explain why the study found that adult offspring of single-mothers-by-choice were 177% more likely to report having had trouble with drugs and alcohol than children born to two biological parents. Perhaps in part because they did not enjoy the love, discipline and example of a flesh-and-blood father, young adults conceived through donor insemination to a single mother were also 146% more likely to report having been “in trouble with the law” before age 25….
I would also add that the single mothers in our study who used donor insemination to have a child were not women who found themselves pregnant “by accident.” My take: Being wanted is important, but being wanted isn’t enough. Fathers matter.
Categories: Fatherhood, Marriage, Motherhood, My Daddy's Name is Donor
Reading that piece, I had the thought that people don’t “turn out” until they are pretty much done with their lives. Assessing if people have turned out all right when they are still teenagers seems a little premature. And when we extend the goal posts out to the end of life, then we see that far more people are affected by donor insemination than just the DC children themselves. There are the men who are passed over because DC remains an option, the men’s parents who are denied grandchildren, the women who wind up frantic, even if they don’t go ahead with that old back-up plan they’ve had since they were 22.