Executive Summary
A large and growing number of Canadian families with children are headed by lone mothers. Research undertaken in Canada, the United States and Britain have found evidence that children from lone-mother families exhibit more difficulties in the context of family life and school than children from two-parent families. For many, these difficulties continue into their adolescence and persist into early adulthood.
This paper examines the relationship between lone-mother status, mother and family characteristics, and child difficulties, through an analysis of data from children 6 to 11. The results demonstrate that lone-mother families are poorer, and their children have more difficulties in the behavioral, emotional, social and academic domains. While the analysis shows that lone-mother status on its own acts as a significant predictor of all child difficulties, the size of effect is weak. Importantly, the strength of association between lone-mother status and child outcome generally decreases when sociodemographic and personal variables are added to the model predicting child outcome. The evidence suggests that children from lone-mother families probably develop difficulties for the same reason that children from two-parent families develop difficulties, with two important exceptions. First, the presence of hostile parenting in a lone-mother family significantly increases the risk of child morbidity in a way that is not seen for two-parent families. Second, since lone-mother status remains a significant independent predictor of child outcome in the presence of other stronger predictor variables, further work needs to be done to explain the mechanisms through which lone-mother status influences child well-being.
These results suggest that policies aimed at healthy child development should be aimed at all families, and not specifically lone-mother families. Given equal access to programs, services aimed at alleviating the factors strongly associated with the child difficulties and/or problems should be aimed at the whole population and should be helpful to both lone-mother and two-parent families. The exception is in the area of parenting, where specific programs aimed at lone-mothers may be warranted. Low income, parenting problems, low maternal education and maternal depression are consistently and significantly associated with child difficulties and represent important areas for policy intervention.
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