Over my short lifetime, Britain has made tremendous progress towards becoming a more tolerant society. Unfortunately, there remain a number of groups who suffer from widespread prejudice in what is a hangover from the paternalistic and conservative society. One such group is single parents.
Single parents- or more specifically, single mothers- are a pet hate of conservatives. One would conclude from the ocean of reports, policy memoranda, speeches and studies that parents are single through choice, most probably because the mother, probably a teenager, slept with too many people to know who the father is, and the candidates have no interest in this anyway. Either that, or the parents split up over a trivial matter because they fancied it.
A sketch from Two Johns and a Dinner Party springs to mind. If you are unfamiliar with the TV programme, the sketches feature two ageing, upper middle class couples who are always having a dinner party, discussing what they consider to be major issues, offering their deluded, out-of-touch ideas and reinforcing their delusions of grandeur. Anyway, when talking about single mothers, the characters scramble each other to declare that ‘when children grow up without fathers, they inevitably go to prison. That’s just how it works.’ A very funny piece of satire, but unfortunately it isn’t that much of an exaggeration of the prevailing view. When there are thousands of studies showing that children in single-parent households (but strangely, single fathers seem to suffer less hostility and criticism) are more likely to proceed to commit crime, fail qualifications, face unemployment, surely it proves that children need two parents to avoid failure, right? Wrong.
Any secondary school student will tell you that a correlation between two variables doesn’t mean there’s a definite causal link between them. And in fact, there’s one factor that these studies tend to overlook: income. It stands to reason that a two adult household is likely to earn more than a one adult one, and social mobility is limited. Once income is factored in, children from ‘broken homes’ actually do better than their peers from nuclear families. So get lost, Daily Mail. That felt good. I’ll say it again: get lost, Daily Mail! Also, has it not occured to these judgmental old fools that a family may lack one parent because that parent was having a bad effect on the children. Presumably children should be left with a violent mother, or a father who is so heavily addicted to drugs that the fumes pervade the living room 24/7.
My point is: most parents will give 110% to give their children the best start in life. A few can’t or won’t. As long as children have somebody in the former group, it doesn’t matter if its one parent, a same-sex couple, or adoptive parents. ‘Love is all you need’.
