When One Parent is Better than Two

Conventional wisdom has it that growing up in a lone-parent family is bad for children. However, this interesting new working paper from the Princeton Fragile Families and Child Wellbeing Study suggests that what matters—for cognitive development at least—is stability. That is, it's better to be in a stable lone-parent family than one that oscillates between lone- and two-parent status:

when the comprehensive set of control and proxy variables are included in the model, there is no statistical difference in the effect on cognitive development when the father is completely present as opposed to completely absent. The findings of Fomby and Cherlin (2007) are also reinforced in that a father's partial presence in the home seems to make cognitive outcomes worse than if the father was not living in the household at all. Simply put, the results of this empirical study indicate that the pre-school aged child is not necessarily better off when the father is home all the time as opposed to never being home but the pre-school aged child seems to be better off when the father is never home as opposed to being home on a temporary basis. These results suggest that it is the stability of paternal presence that is essential to the cognitive development and academic readiness, not the fraction of the time that he is present (Jafee et al., (2003)).

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I cannot determine whether this negative disruptive effect is short-lived or improves over time, since the child may be able to adjust to his/her family structure as time progresses. In addition, the disruptive father presence effects seem to be more pronounced for girls than boys; these results are not very convincing due to the small sample size. The study was also unable to prove or reject the conventional hypothesis that stable paternal presence yields more positive outcomes than stable paternal absence.

This finding suggests that the effect of parental presence/absence on child well-being might be similar to the effect that various life events have on subjective happiness according to "set-point theory." This theory posits that people tend to have a personal set point of happiness that they tend to return to after experiencing positive or negative events. One study, for example, found that people's happiness levels spike before and after marriage, but returned to the set point over time. In the case of family structure, it may be that children adapt just fine (on average) to growing up in a lone-parent household, but that moving in and out of that structure makes adaptation much harder.