SEE ALL MYTHS AND FACTS PAGES
SEE MYTHS AND FACTS ABOUT FATHERHOOD

This page is http://www.thelizlibrary.org/liz/mother-absence.html

Skip down to research on stepmothers

"Differences Found in Care With Stepmothers," by Tamar Lewin, Tim Shaffer for The New York Times Susan Sasse, vice president of the International Stepfamily Association, with her husband, Erik, and their children in Chesapeake City, Md. (August 17, 2000) http://www.geocities.com/thesagacontinues2000/stepmoms.html

Also see http://www.geocities.com/wellesley/9204/custody.html; and "What's Normal In a Stepfamily"? by Peter K. Gerlach, MSW. Board member Stepfamily Association of America http://sfhelp.org/04/reality3.htm

Also see: Children living with custodial fathers are less likely to have health insurance than children who live with their mothers. http://www.census.gov/prod/2003pubs/p60-224.pdf

Fact: "[C]hildren experiencing multiple transitions, experiencing them later in childhood, and those living in stepfamilies fared poorly in comparison with those living their entire childhood in stable single-parent families or moving into two-parent families with biological or adoptive parents. Other studies show benefits of stable single-parent living arrangements for children's socioemotional adjustment and global wellbeing (Acock & Demo, 1994), and deleterious effects of multiple transitions (Capaldi & Patterson, 1991; Kurdek, Fine, & Sinclair, 1995), supporting a life-stress perspective."

David H. Demo, Martha J Cox (2000) Families With Young Children: A Review of Research in the 1990s Journal of Marriage and Family 62 (4), 876-895.

Fact: "Stepmothers reported more depressive symptoms and parenting stress and lower perceptions of child regard than did biological mothers."

Danielle N. Shapiro, Abigail J. Stewart, Parenting Stress, Perceived Child Regard, and Depressive Symptoms Among Stepmothers and Biological Mothers Volume 60, Issue 5, pages 533-544, December 2011.

Fact: "[R]esearch suggests that being a stepparent is more difficult than raising one's own biological children, especially for stepmothers, and that stepmothers may compete with the child for the father's time and attention."

Pasley, K., & Moorefield, B. S. (2004). Stepfamilies: Changes and challenges. In M. Coleman & L. H. Ganong (Eds.), Handbook of contemporary families (pp. 317-330), cited in Valarie King (2007) When Children Have Two Mothers: Relationships With Nonresident Mothers, Stepmothers, and Fathers Journal of Marriage and Family 69 (5), 1178-1193.

---

Myth -- "The psychological literature indicates that children's overall adjustment following divorce does not differ between those living with custodial mothers versus custodial fathers. This finding holds true even with infants and young children." [Leighton E. Stamps, Ph.D. in Age Differences Among Judges Regarding Maternal Preference in Child Custody Decisions, referencing Mark Bornstein, HANDBOOK OF PARENTING (1995) http://aja.ncsc.dni.us/courtrv/cr38-4/CR38-4Stamps.pdf]

Fact: In a LaTrobe University therapeutic mediation study, McIntosh and Long found that the factors that most predicted children's poor emotional well-being one year after initial measurements were father's lower education, high conflict, shared care, and [a component of shared care] mother's low emotional availability during the year. Nonpredictors of children's emotional well-being included the mother's education, the amount of time since the parents' separation, and the father's relationship or closeness with the child.

McIntosh, Jennifer E. and Caroline M. Long, Final Report: Child Inclusive Post-Separation Family Dispute Resolution, LaTrobe University (2006).

Fact: Adolescents in single-father families report the highest level of delinquency, followed by those in father-stepmother and single-mother families. The gender of the single parent is significant; adolescents from single-father families are more delinquent than are those from single-mother families. Single-father families are characterized by somewhat lower levels of direct and indirect parental controls than are single-mother families.

Susan L. Brown, Family Structure, Family Processes, and Adolescent Delinquency: The Significance of Parental Absence Versus Parental Gender, Journal of Research in Crime and Delinquency, Vol. 41, No. 1, 58-81 (2004).

---

Myth -- Mother-absence is no different from father-absence; it's a single-parent family, and "gender" of the parent is irrelevant.

Fact: "In a recent Australian study of primary school students, Pike (2000) contrasted four groups: boys living with their father, girls with their father, boys with their mother, and girls with their mother. Boys living with their mothers scored significantly higher in scholastic, athletic and physical domains... There were no differences in performance of the four groups in the social and behavioural domains, or in self-esteem. In reading and spelling, girls living with their mother outperformed both girls and boys living with their father. In spelling, boys living with their mother outperformed both girls and boys living with their father. In other words, boys and girls raised by their father did not perform as well in academic areas as did the boys and girls from mother-resident families."

Background Paper, "CHILD CUSTODY ARRANGEMENTS: THEIR CHARACTERISTICS AND OUTCOMES", 2004-FCY-3E, Department of Justice, Canada. citing Pike, Lisbeth. 2000 Single Mum or Single Dad? The Effects of Parent Residency Arrangements on the Development of Primary School-aged Children. Western Australia: Edith Cowen University. http://www.aifs.org.au/institute/afrc7/pike.pdf :

("[I]n terms of their individual academic achievement as findings from this study indicate that, both boys and girls resident with their fathers are not performing as well as their matches from two parent families or single parent children resident with their mothers.")

("M]other resident girls (with a mean score of 107.69) outperformed [girls from two-parent homes] (with a mean score of 102.05) on the reading sub-scale of the WRAT-R.")

Fact: Losing a mother is more detrimental to children than losing a father. "The role of a mother in African families is even more essential to the well-being of a child than the role played by the breadwinner father, according to a study published in the latest issue of the journal Demography. The Oxford University research team found that if a child loses their mother before they are 15 years old, that child is likely to be shorter in height, poorer and have less schooling as than those who live with their mothers until that age. They discovered that motherless orphans were nearly two centimetres shorter, had a year less of schooling and were likely to be 8.5 per cent poorer over the course of their lifetime. Although children who lost their father were also found to have a lower final height and receive less schooling, this could not be directly linked to the death of the child's father. "

Orphanhood and Human Capital Destruction: Is There Persistence Into Adulthood? Demography - Volume 47, Number 1, February 2010, pp. 163-180 http://muse.jhu.edu/login?uri=/journals/demography/v047/47.1.beegle.html (Mother is "more essential" to orphans than breadwinner father -- Press Release, University of Oxford, March 15, 2010, http://www.ox.ac.uk/media/news_stories/2010/100315_1.html )

Fact: Gender may be irrelevant, but motherhood isn't. "...children residing without biological mothers fare worse than those without biological fathers, across most outcomes. In addition, only longitudinal measures of mother absence directly influence school outcomes. The time lived away from the biological mother is related to adolescents' grades and school discipline, while the number of mother changes significantly reduces adolescents' college expectations."

"The Longitudinal Effects of Mother and Father Absence on Adolescent School Success." Population Association of America, Minneapolis, MN. (May 1-3, 2003)

Fact: "Using data from four national surveys, Biblarz and Raftery (1999) show that mother-absence is much more detrimental than father-absence to children's educational and occupational attainment. They find that once parents' socioeconomic status is taken into account, children raised by single mothers are much better off than children raised by single fathers or fathers and stepmothers, and are just as likely to succeed as children raised by both birth parents. Biblarz and Raftery conclude that the pattern of effects across family types and over time is consistent with an evolutionary perspective which emphasizes the importance of the birth mother in the provision of children's resources (Trivers 1972). According to this view, children raised by their birth mothers do better than children raised apart from their birth mothers. Furthermore, being raised by a single birth mother is better than being raised by a birth mother and step-father since step-fathers compete with children for mother's time and lower maternal investment."

Case, Anne, I-Fen Lin and Sara McLanahan. Educational Attainment in Blended Families, August 2000.

Accord, Jim Sidanius and Yesilernis Pena, The gendered nature of family structure and group-based anti-egalitarianism: A cross-national analysis, The Journal of social psychology, vol. 143, no 2, pp. 243-25 (2003). (The greater the father's influence in the family, the greater the children's level of group-based social anti-egalitarianism, with mother-only households superior on this meausre to two-parent families.)

Juan Battle and Deborah L Coates, Research on father-headed households: Family status of Black girls and achievement, The Journal of Negro Education. Washington: Fall 2004. Vol. 73, Iss. 4; pg. 392, 16 pgs. (Parental configuration was not as significant a predictor of achievement as was socioeconomic status; in 12th grade in 1992, the students in mother-only households outperformed their counterparts in father-only households; in 1994 the parental configuration differences disappeared when socioeconomic status was held constant.)

Fact: The American Psychological Association officially has recognized that in general, women are better parents than men. "...Flaks, Ficher, Masterpasqua, and Joseph (1995) found that lesbian couples had stronger parenting awareness skills than heterosexual couples. Bos, van Balen, and van den Boom (2005, 2007) reported that lesbian social mothers (non-biological mothers) had higher quality parent-child interactions, were more committed as parents, and were more effective in childrearing when compared to fathers in heterosexual marriages."

American Psychological Association Guidelines for Psychological Practice with Lesbian, Gay, and Bisexual Clients (2011), Guideline 8. http://www.apa.org/pi/lgbt/resources/guidelines.aspx

[liznote:This isn't about sexual orientation. It's obviously about the sex of the parent. That women are better parents is a strong enough determinant to create measurable results when multiplied by two in research assessing both heterosexual couples and homosexual couples. And now reported -- or rather, buried -- in the APA LGBT Practice Guidelines, where it's more politically correct to say so, is the official APA position and recognition of this fact.]

Fact: "Recent work on the determinants of children's human capital investments suggests that the absence of a child's birth mother puts the child at risk. Those investments that are typically made by a child's mother -- in food, health, and education, for example -- are made at a lower level when the child is raised by a non-birth mother."

Case, Anne, I-Fen Lin and Sara McLanahan. Educational Attainment in Blended Families, August 2000.

Fact: "[M]ean levels of delinquency are highest among adolescents residing in single-father families and lowest among adolescent in two-biological-parent married families... Adolescents in single-mother and stepfamilies fall in the middle... The high levels of delinquency characterizing adolescents in single-father families reflects the particularly low levels of involvement, supervision, monitoring, and closeness exerted by the fathers."

Demuth, Stephen and Susan L. Brown. "Family Structure, Family Processes, and Adolescent Delinquency", 41 J of Research in Crime and Delinquency 58, February 2004.

Fact: "[H]ypotheses posit that the impact of family structure on adolescent behavior is, in part, explained by the different types of communities within which families reside and that community characteristics moderate the impact of family structure on drug use. The results of multilevel regression models fail to support these hypotheses; adolescents who reside in single-parent or stepparent families are at heightened risk of drug use irrespective of community context. Moreover, adolescents who reside in single father families are at risk of both higher levels of use and increasing use over time. A significant community-level effect involves jobless men: Adolescents are at increased risk of drug use if they reside in communities with a higher proportion of unemployed and out-of-workforce men."

John P Hoffmann (2002) The Community Context of Family Structure and Adolescent Drug Use, Journal of Marriage and Family 64 (2), 314-330.

Also see Jeffrey T. Cookston (1999) Parental Supervision and Family Structure: Effects on Adolescent Problem Behaviors, Journal of Divorce and Remarriage 32 (107) (Children in single-father homes appear to be at the highest risk for the acquisition of problem behaviors).

David Eitle (2005) Parental gender, single-parent families, and delinquency: Exploring the moderating influence of race/ethnicity, Social Science Research 35 (3) (Living with father only found to increase the risk of alcohol use generally. Girls living with their fathers are at an increased risk of delinquent behavior. Living with father increases the risk of Hispanic/Latino adolescents engaging in marijuana use. Children living with single fathers may be at an increased risk of being involved in delinquent behavior.)

Fact: "Some argue that single fathers adapt to single parenting by taking on more stereotypical "mothering" activities (Risman, 1987), making their involvement no different from that of single mothers. Downey (1994), however, finds that single mothers provide more interpersonal resources, whereas single fathers provide more economic resources. Given mothers' greater involvement in school activities, biological mother absence may have a more negative influence than biological father absence. Downey, Ainsworth-Darnell, and Dufur (1998) found mixed evidence of gender differences among single-parent families on a comprehensive list of child outcomes; all of the significant differences, however, occurred in educational measures and consistently showed a disadvantage for children living with single fathers... I find support for the hypothesis that, at least in early childhood, mother changes have more lasting influences on college expectations and school discipline than father changes..."

Holly E. Heard (2007) Fathers, Mothers, and Family Structure: Family Trajectories, Parent Gender, and Adolescent Schooling Journal of Marriage and Family 69 (2), 435-450.

Fact: "Some research... suggests that resident fathers may not be as involved with (Hawkins, Amato, & King, 2006), or as close to (Clarke-Stewart & Hayward, 1996), children as resident mothers and that resident stepmothers take over more parenting responsibilities than resident stepfathers do (Pryor & Rodgers, 2001). Consistent with this premise, Buchanan et al. (1996) report benefits of a close father-child relationship for adolescent outcomes in father-resident families but found these effects to be weaker than the benefits of a close mother-child tie in mother-resident families."

Valarie King (2007) When Children Have Two Mothers: Relationships With Nonresident Mothers, Stepmothers, and Fathers Journal of Marriage and Family 69 (5), 1178-1193.

Fact: "Although early research suggests that youth living in two-parent biological families fare better on a range of developmental outcomes than those in single-parent or alternative structures (Amato and Keith, 1991), this research typically finds that effects of family structure on developmental outcomes such as delinquency are not strong (Hetherington and Kelly, 2002)... More tangible differences in family dynamics or circumstances -- such as supervision practices -- are largely responsible when study groups have different outcomes... The highest rates of delinquency were for youth in father-only households, followed by father-stepmother..."

U.S. Department of Justice, Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention (April 2010), Causes and Correlates of Girls' Delinquency, By Margaret A. Zahn, Robert Agnew, Diana Fishbein, Shari Miller, Donna-Marie Winn, Gayle Dakoff, Candace Kruttschnitt, Peggy Giordano, Denise C. Gottfredson, Allison A. Payne, Barry C. Feld, and Meda Chesney-Lind.

Fact: "Although empirical investigations have explored such differences among dual-parent households, researchers have only begun to challenge general assumptions that mother-only and father-only families are relatively homogeneous with respect to children's behaviors and subsequent outcomes... a key finding from the data indicates that girls living with only their fathers are at significantly greater risk for illicit drug use than girls living with only their mothers. Across every category -- inhalants, marijuana, and amphetamines -- girls in father-only households used significantly more illicit substances than girls in mother-only or dual-parent households."

Vanessa Hemovich and William D. Crano, "Family Structure and Adolescent Drug Use: An Exploration of Single-Parent Families", Subst Use Misuse. 2009; 44(14): 2099-2113. http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3075408/

Fact: "[Children's residing in single mother households was associated with a double risk of incarceration, but] youths from stepparent families are even more vulnerable to the risk of incarceration, especially those in father-stepmother households, which suggests that the re-marriage may present even greater difficulties for male children than father absence."

Cynthia C. Harper, Sara S. McLanahan. FATHER ABSENCE AND YOUTH INCARCERATON, Center for Research on Child Wellbeing, Princeton University, Working Paper #99-03. harperc@obgyn.ucsf.edu

---

Myth --  Who is "family" is based on biological ties.

Fact: "Family membership and parentage appear to be at least partially socially constructed, not based solely on biology or law, as structuralists would suggest... adult children did not perceive their stepmothers to be more fully family and parents than stepfathers... When current and former stepparents had coresided with adult children, they were perceived more fully as family and parent... No other study that we know of has examined this relationship before; it is generally assumed that once stepparents and biological parents divorce, relationships with stepchildren are dissolved. This research shows that this is not necessarily the case. This finding has important theoretical and policy implications. It is inconsistent with the argument that family structure is the driving force behind family function (Popenoe, 1999). Although structural factors were significant, associational factors were also important... "

Maria Schmeeckle, Roseann Giarrusso, Du Feng, Vern L Bengtson (2006) What Makes Someone Family? Adult Children's Perceptions of Current and Former Stepparents Journal of Marriage and Family 68 (3), 595?610.

Fact: "Adolescents who are closer to their nonresident mothers exhibited significantly fewer internalizing problems and marginally fewer externalizing problems than adolescents who are less close to them. Closeness to the resident stepmother was unrelated to either outcome. Further, these findings did not vary by adolescent gender, providing no evidence for the same gender hypothesis, nor did the influence of one parent depend on ties to another parent.
        "The stronger association between adolescent outcomes and ties to nonresident mothers compared with ties to stepmothers stands in contrast to the results reported in prior research on resident mother families where close ties to resident stepfathers are more strongly associated with positive adolescent outcomes than ties to nonresident biological fathers (King, 2006; White & Gilbreth, 2001), suggesting important differences in the role of nonresident parents and stepparents by gender.... An unanswered question for future research to explore is why close ties to resident stepmothers do not result in better outcomes for adolescents despite the fact that adolescents report being closer on average to resident stepmothers than to nonresident biological mothers and as close to nonresident biological mothers who maintain contact with their children."

Valarie King (2007) When Children Have Two Mothers: Relationships With Nonresident Mothers, Stepmothers, and Fathers Journal of Marriage and Family 69 (5), 1178-1193.

---

Myth -- Stepfathers are less engaged with their stepchildren than biological fathers are with their own offspring, and are more likely to injure or kill the children with whom they reside than are biological fathers.

Fact: This is not a myth. It's true. However "biological fathers were more likely to physically abuse their partners than were stepfathers or other men, and... children were more likely to witness IPV if it was perpetrated by their biological father instead of a stepfather (Sullivan et al., 2000)...
        "We found some support for our first hypothesis that biological fathers would be more likely than social fathers to report that they observed negative effects of IPV [on their children]... We also found support for our second hypothesis that biological fathers would be more likely to express worry about the long-term effect of their abuse on their children, particularly on female children. In response to our third hypothesis regarding parenting, co-parenting, and partner's ability to parent, we found that biological fathers were more likely than social fathers to report that abuse negatively affected their partners' ability to parent but not more likely to report that IPV made it more difficult to co-parent or that this abuse negatively affected their feelings about themselves as fathers. Finally, we found no support for our hypothesis that biological fathers would be more likely than social fathers to report that they would take action to stop their violence, seek professional help, or take other protective actions if they saw that their abuse was harming their children.
        "Our findings suggest a disconnect between biological fathers' professed concern for their children who are exposed to IPV and their intentions of changing their abusive behavior. If this finding is replicated in future investigations, the consequences for child custody decisions could be significant."

Emily F. Rothman, David G. Mandel and Jay G. Silverman. Abusers' Perceptions of the Effect of Their Intimate Partner Violence on Children, 1179 VIOLENCE AGAINST WOMEN 2007; 13; 1179, available at http://vaw.sagepub.com/cgi/content/abstract/13/11/1179

Also see Hetherington, E., & Clingempeel, W. (1992). Coping with marital transitions: A family systems perspective. Monographs of the Society for Research in Child Development, 57(2-3, Serial No. 227), and Hetherington, E., & Jodl, K. (1994). Stepfamilies as settings for child development. In A. Booth & J. Dunn (Eds.), Stepfamilies: Who benefits? Who does not? (pp. 55-80). Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum.

---

Myth -- Who gestates a child is irrelevant; genes determine parentage.

Fact: More and more research confirms that pregnancy is not akin to being a container hosting a fetus. See generally, the research and articles listed on thelizlibrary surrogacy page -- Who is the "mother"?. In addition to the continuing two-way-transfer of DNA, body tissue and nutrients between mother and fetus, and that the fetus takes its nutrients in part from the mother's body, learning begins in utero. Newborn babies know who their mothers are, and that has nothing to do with DNA.