Do children need two parents for stability and well-being? Not necessarily, researchers conclude

Do children of cohabitating families fare worse than children in married families? Do children in stepfather families show more symptoms of depression and risk-taking behaviors than children in single-mother families? Do gender of the parents matter as far as parenting is concerned?

These questions and more were explored April 7 as part of the Contemporary Families session of the conference "Marriage and Family: Complexities and Perspectives," sponsored by the Evolving Family Research Project, which is the first three-year theme project of the Institute for the Social Sciences at Cornell University.

Scholars from such social science fields as sociology, psychology, economics, resource ecology and policy analysis and management gathered to share their research findings on the meaning of marriage, mate selection, cohabitation and strengthening of marriage and other marriage and family issues.

Claire Kamp Dush, a postdoctoral fellow with the project, presented her research findings that children who grow up in stable families are less likely to become depressed and tend to have higher self-esteem in adolescence and young adulthood than children from unstable families.

Family transitions related to cohabitation and marriage, she said, do not differ much in their effects on well-being of offspring. Parental divorce, however, is particularly detrimental to adolescent self-esteem.

"To improve child well-being, if new unions aren't successful, they actually may do more harm than if the mother had stayed stably single," she said, adding that her results suggested that stable single-parent families should be given similar credit as stable married families.

However, Megan Sweeney, a sociologist at the University of California-Los Angeles, who relied on the same data that Dush used -- the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health -- found that with the same divorce history, youths in families headed by a stepfather are considerably less likely than those in single-mother families to be in poverty and more likely to have a parent at home at key times of the day. Cohabiting stepfather families, however, tend to more closely resemble single-mother families than married stepfather families.

In stepfather families, Sweeney found that youths used seat belts less frequently and engaged in more drug sales compared with young people in cohabiting stepfather families or single-mother families. The risk of having unprotected sex, however, appears greater in cohabiting stepfather families than in either married stepfather families or single-mother families.

"The traditional belief is that women are better than men in their parenting skills, but this might be a misleading representation of sex and parenting because alternative family forms might be just as good at protecting children," said Judith Stacey, a sociologist at New York University. Stacey said she believed that most of the enduring parental skills are not dependent on gender and that research does not support the cultural prejudice that children need both a mother and a father. "President Bush was not right when he said the ideal is where a child is raised by their own married mother and father," she said.

After a panel discussion that followed the three presentations, Frances Goldscheider, a sociologist at Brown University, concluded by proposing that researchers in this area should "get men more enthusiastic about children, just like women are more enthusiastic about supporting themselves."

Graduate student Zheng Yang is a writer intern at the Cornell News Service.

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