Warning: Your Romance May Be Dangerous to Your Kids

by Maggie Gallagher
08/31/2011

Excerpt:
For most of that time policymakers have focused on the problem of "father absence," and it is a real problem. Very few boys and girls have involved, loving, supportive fathers if the man that made them is not married to their mama.

But a new crop of research is challenging the idea that the main or only problem with the decline of marriage is the absence of fathers. An equally big or even bigger problem may be the churning romantic lives of unmarried and divorced mothers.

A new study in the July 2011 issue of Sociology of Education by Arizona State University professor Carey E. Cooper and colleagues (including Princeton's esteemed family scholar Sara S. McLanahan) looked at how "partnership instability" affected children's well-being at age 5, using data from the Fragile Families and Child Wellbeing Study, a national survey that follows approximately 5,000 parents and their children from birth to age 5.

What sociologists call "externalizing" problems are behavior problems associated with aggression and rule-breaking. As Cooper and colleagues put it, the checklist asks mothers how often the child "attacks others, screams, sulks, is suspicious, teases, argues, bullies, is disobedient at school, is disobedient at home, destroys others' things, destroys own things, fights, threatens, and is unusually loud."

The rule-breaking subscale assesses whether a child, "prefers being with older children, runs away from home, sets fires, steals at home, steals outside of home, swears, hangs around with others who get in trouble, lies or cheats, and vandalizes."

In assessing "internalizing" problems, mothers are asked whether their child is "overly guilty, self-conscious, worried that no one loves them, worried they might think or do something bad, worried that they have to be perfect, and worried in general."

Attention problems include whether children "stare blankly, are confused, daydream, and act without thinking," while social problems include asking whether children "are not liked by other children, prefer being with younger children, get jealous easily, get teased a lot, and feel others are out to get them."

The results are striking. the rest