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| Is
It Healthy For the Kids? |
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| Unconventional
families can give children the love, stability and support they
need—but it’s much tougher |
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NewsWeek -
Accessed May 21, 2001 http://www.msnbc.com/news/575961.asp |
Remi
Neuman-Kelly at home in Alameda, Calif., where he lives with his
mom and dad, who aren't married
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By
Karen Springen and Pat Wingert
NEWSWEEK |
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| May
28 issue — Cassie
DenHaese’s mother’s divorce worked out so well for her,
Cassie is already thinking about her own, in case she ever needs
one. DenHaese, now 15, was 1½ when her father left, and she’s
seen him only twice since. “The cons? I don’t think there
really are any,” she says. A man her mother dated for four
years “is still like a father to me,” even though her mother
has a new boyfriend; group activities with Parents Without
Partners stood in for an extended family. Cassie’s mother,
Becky Medicus—a staff training officer for the U.S. Army
Reserves—found that single parenthood worked better than the
alternative: “I didn’t have to worry about whether my
husband agreed. I made the rules, and the rules stood.”
Compared with the trauma of her teenage friends whose parents
are going through their first divorces, DenHaese thinks she’s
got the better deal: even though she believes “very firmly in
the whole marriage-family thing... if I was going to have a
divorce, I’d have it when my kids were younger.” |
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“All
different kinds of structures work for kids, as long as there’s love,
adequate supervision, structure and consistency.”
—
BARBARA HOWARD
pediatrician,
Johns Hopkins |
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DENHAESE’S TALE illustrates at least two important truths about the
continuing evolution of American families: the resilience kids bring to
their lives, and the powerful hold the “whole marriage-family thing”
still exerts on their expectations. “All different kinds of structures
work for kids, as long as there’s love, adequate supervision,
structure and consistency,” says Barbara Howard, a pediatrician at
Johns Hopkins. But those are four big requirements; not all “nontraditional”
families can meet them. And, says child psychiatrist Elizabeth Berger,
there is no escaping the “psychological reality of something in every
child’s heart that wants to say, ‘Mommy, Daddy, me’.”
Until recently, the
dysfunctionality of nontraditional families was a self-fulfilling
assumption; children without a biological mother and father were
stigmatized and shunned. Now, in all but the most conservative milieus,
that is no longer true. Still, to state the obvious, two parents are
better than one by reason of simple logistics (although many parents
would add that even two is a ridiculously inadequate number). “It pays
to have two committed, able-bodied parents popping out of bed in the
morning,” says Berger. “Then one relieves the other.” |
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The
Cover: Family's New Faces |
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Only
a quarter of America's households fit the old 'Leave It to
Beaver' model, and single mothers are on the front lines,
raising kids and redefining the meaning of 'family.' |
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| Newsweek |
Money, relatives and
sheer effort can help substitute for the missing spouse. But they are of
less value in providing the stability that children need even more than
another person to drive them to ballet class. On that basis, says
Howard, the children of lesbian couples can fare as well as those of
heterosexual couples; lesbian relationships tend to be very stable and
long-lasting. Howard also believes that single women who choose to have
babies, whether by donor insemination or adoption, generally make
successful mothers. “They’re determined,” she reasons. “They’ve
got the financial resources. They’re not downtrodden or depressed
because they’ve been abandoned.”
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A NEW MAN TO CALL DADDY
In contrast, children of
divorce often do feel abandoned, or, perhaps worse, responsible. “It
is the nature of the childlike mind to believe the world revolves around
them,” says Berger. “They may think, ‘If only I hadn’t
interrupted Daddy’s nap’.” But probably the most problematic
situation for children is a series of relatively short-term
relationships—a new man to call Daddy every few years. “We’re much
happier without a man in the house,” says Janice Brooks, 41, a
benefits manager in Houston, who lives with two daughters by two
different men—one of whom she never married—and a 2-year-old
granddaughter. Her daughters’ attitude toward her second husband, she
recalls, was: “You’re not my father, so you can’t discipline me.”
Susan Brown, a sociologist at Bowling Green State University, has been
studying cohabiting families in terms of kids’ behavior and emotional
problems. “Generally, kids living with cohabiting parents are not
doing too well,” she says, compared with those whose parents are
married. The gap widens above the age of 6, which Brown attributes to
“the cumulative effects of family instability. The older they get, the
less likely they are to be living with two biological parents anymore.” |
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Children in
cohabiting families may also be at higher risk of abuse from their
mothers’ boyfriends—although researchers are still debating the
question. Jill Glick, medical director of child protective services at
the University of Chicago, says that more than half the serious brain
injuries her hospital sees in infants are inflicted by “paramour
perpetrators”—men who lack the biological and emotional connection
that inhibits parents from hurting their own children. Recognizing that
children’s health can be affected by the stresses of growing up in a
single-parent family, or with a succession of stepparents or
revolving-door boyfriends, the American Academy of Pediatrics is
introducing the concept of “family pediatrics.” “We’re not
saying pediatricians need to take care of all the problems,” says Dr.
Edward Schor, “but they should be identifying them.”
But while these circumstances
“may make it more difficult to have good outcomes for children,”
Schor admits “it’s nowhere near impossible.” It’s reassuring to
know that millions of children of divorced, never married or gay and
lesbian parents can hope to lead happy and productive lives as adults—which,
after all, is a goal that can elude the offspring of even the most
conventional families. It may be, as Berger says, that every child
yearns to be part of a triad of Mommy, Daddy and me. But then again, who
do you think psychoanalysis was invented for?
© 2001 Newsweek, Inc.
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