Stable, healthy, two-parent families still appear to do the best job of raising kids. But when income and job status are taken into account, children raised by single mothers are nearly as likely to succeed in adulthood, and, interestingly enough, they are even more likely to succeed than children raised in homes headed by a stepfather or a single father. "Kids from male-headed households, single dads, do worse socioeconomically than kids from mother-headed homes and also two-parent stepfamilies," said USC sociologist Timothy Biblarz, the study's lead author. The study analyzed a survey of 22,761 men ranging in age from 25 to 64. They had been asked to report the occupation of the head of the household in which they grew up and to list their own occupations. All occupations were ranked on a 100-point scale, with 100 requiring the most education and returning the most income. Men from traditional families averaged 42 on the scale, while men in mother-headed households averaged 40, no matter whether the mothers had been divorced, widowed or never married. Children from other types of nontraditional families ranked 35. Previous studies from the mid-'60s on have presumed that children did poorly in single-mother homes because the structure itself was "pathological." Even researchers skeptical about the effects of family structure on children's development have pushed for policies to bring a man into a divorced home because of his paycheck. "They assume if there's a divorce, you've got to have policies to encourage remarriage to get a man back into the household because of added income," Biblarz said. "Our findings challenge that to some extent." Most negative effects were due to the greater likelihood that single mothers would be unemployed, Biblarz said. "When you compare two-parent households where fathers were managerial / professional with kids whose single mothers were managerial / professional, there's not a lot of difference betwee...
