Dan Quayle right again--Single Moms at Midlife have more health problems

Remember Dan Quayle--how he was ridiculed for taking on the Murphy Brown single mom story line about 20 years ago? Oh, the press had a ball with that--said he was too dumb to know she was fiction. Then a few years later, the research shows that despite the income and social class of the mother, children of single mothers didn't thrive as well as children in two parent homes with a mom and a dad. It turns out that Uncle Sam can't be a step-father--even for those kids who don't need any financial assistance and have educated moms.

According to a growing body of social-scientific evidence, children in families disrupted by divorce and out-of-wedlock birth do worse than children in intact families on several measures of well-being. Children in single-parent families are six times as likely to be poor. They are also likely to stay poor longer. Twenty-two percent of children in one-parent families will experience poverty during childhood for seven years or more, as compared with only two percent of children in two parent families. A 1988 survey by the National Center for Health Statistics found that children in single-parent families are two to three times as likely as children in two-parent families to have emotional and behavioral problems. They are also more likely to drop out of high school, to get pregnant as teenagers, to abuse drugs, and to be in trouble with the law. Compared with children in intact families, children from disrupted families are at a much higher risk for physical or sexual abuse. Link to Barbara Dafoe Whitehead's article.

This study done at OSU shows that later marriage doesn't reverse some of the negative health affects of single motherhood. It "was beyond the scope of this study to determine why unwed mothers in general had poorer health than others. But other research suggests it may be related to the high levels of stress and the poor economic conditions faced by single moms." Or maybe women who don't take care of their bodies when it comes to sex, don't take care of it in other ways?

Single Moms Entering Midlife May Lead To Public Health Crisis

Seems God was on to something when he created marriage for man and woman.