Single mum or single dad? The effects of parent residency arrangements on the development of primary school-aged children

Permanent parental separation and divorce is increasingly a part of the fabric of contemporary Australian life. Over the past thirty years there has been a steady increase in divorce rates, with current figures indicating that two in every five marriages will end in divorce. It should be noted there is a large but unknown number of permanent separations that occur without going through the legal process of divorce. In short, the statistics are likely to be conservative in their estimation of the incidence of relationship breakdown (legal or de-facto).

As the incidence of parental relationship breakdown has increased, so has the number of children involved in family restructuring increased. Data published by the ABS reveals that in 1982, 10.7 per cent of all types of families were single-parent families. The latest figures available indicate that 14.7 per cent of all Australian families are single-parent families, the vast majority of which are headed by women. In 1995, 49 666 children experienced their parents’ divorce.

While the effects of parental separation or divorce on children and adolescents have been widely reported in the literature emanating from the USA, inspection of relevant Australian databases reveals considerably smaller numbers of published studies reporting the effects of parental separation and divorce overall, and an even smaller subset of studies focussing on Australian primary school-aged children. Examination of the Australian literature reveals the same level of claim and counterclaim concerning child outcomes as a consequence of parental separation and divorce. Some authors promote the idea that maladjustment, particularly in later life, is virtually inevitable while others argue the contrary. The evidence is at best mixed and often compromised by methodological shortcomings.

Further, common to both US and Australian published research findings, the majority of research relies on child adjustment data that is drawn largely from samples of children (girls and boys) primarily resident with their mothers. One obvious explanation for this is related to the fact that in most Western cultures there has been a long legal tradition of custody or residency decisions being made in favour of mothers. The rationale behind this has that it is in the best interest of (young) children to be raised by their mothers.

Notwithstanding the above, there has been a long-held belief generated from the American separation, divorce and child outcomes literature that children are most advantaged by being raised by a parent of the same sex. The origins of this belief trace back to the Texas Custody Research Project, which was conducted in the USA in the late seventies and early eighties.

The Texas Custody Research Project was one of the first to look at custody outcomes by sex of parent and is identified as the beginning of what has sometimes been called the same-gender tradition or the same-gender hypothesis, that is, that boys are advantaged when growing up with their fathers and girls are advantaged when growing up with their mothers. This was described as a "major and robust finding" from the study and "substantiated by the results of (six relatively independent) data sources".

American research examining the claims of the same-gender tradition has continued into the 1990s with the most recent works producing contradictory findings to most of the earlier studies. Commenting on the earlier same-gender tradition or same-gender hypothesis research studies, contemporary researchers are critical of the previous research, noting that while there is some slim evidence for the same-gender advantage for adolescent children, there is much less support for this advantage operating with younger children.

In reviewing the contemporary research in this area, Clarke-Stewart and Hayward note that the study that has been most frequently used to support the same-gender hypothesis, is the Texas Custody Research Project. "It is this study from which the implication has been drawn most strongly that there is an advantage of having a custodial parent of the same gender". Yet, as Clarke-Stewart and Hayward note, the Texas Custody Research Project "did not report differences between boys in father custody and boys in mother custody or between girls in father custody and girls in mother custody", which they describe as "the real test of the same-gender hypothesis".

In summary, there is a dearth of data on the effects of parental separation and divorce on primary school-aged children in contemporary Australian families, and a need for a greater understanding of the effects of the range of post-separation or divorce family forms on children’s development. The necessity to re-examine this area is made all the more urgent not only by the recent commentaries on the methodological shortcomings evident in previous empirical research but also by the increased incidence of fathers seeking residency of their children in Australia.

The study described in this paper was an attempt to address this need and presents data collected on children in the late 'nineties in Western Australia. The children were all attending primary schools and were living with single parents who had been separated or divorced for a minimum of twelve months. These single parents had sole residency with their children.

Description of the study

There were a total of 272 participants in the study comprised of 136 single-parent children (72 girls and 64 boys) and 136 two-parent children matched for age, sex, school year and educational cohort. Participants were drawn from 35 state and 10 private schools.

Single-parent children of both sexes resident with parents (for a minimum of one year) of both sexes, were matched and compared with children from two-parent families. The children were individually matched on criteria believed to be crucial for any meaningful comparison of the children’s performance: age, sex, school year and school cohort

The study generated data about the children’s competence and self-esteem from the children themselves. Data measuring the children’s competence and self-esteem were gathered on a range of dependent measures including the Self-Perception Profile for Children (SPPC), developed to measure perceived competence in cognitive, social, athletic, physical and behavioural domains as well as general self-worth, the Social Support Scale for Children, was selected to assess children’s perceived level of support from significant others, the Wide Range Achievement Test (Revised), selected to provide a quick measure of the academic achievement of the children in the three basic academic skills areas of reading, mathematics and spelling , and the Everyday Household Responsibilities Life Skills Inventory (EHRLSI), designed to examine the range of everyday household responsibilities and life skills performed by Australian children.

In the present study, comparisons were made between the performance of the single and two-parent children and the performance of the children in the different single-parent residential groups on these four measures using a series of t-tests and ANOVAS.

Findings

The performance of the single-parent children was evaluated in two ways. First, the single-parent children were compared to their two-parent matched peers in terms of their performance on the dependent measures. This provided a comparison of how they were going against the "benchmark" or "norm" of children growing up with the perceived benefits of two parents. Second, single-parent children in the four parent-residency groups were compared with one another in terms of their performance across the dependent measures thus allowing a more detailed examination of each of the residential groups. In combination these two types of comparison provided important data contributing to the "real test of the same-gender hypothesis".

1. Comparison with two-parent peers

The data revealed that girls in the mother-residency group show significant differences in their performance when compared with their matches in two specific domains (physical, behavioural) of the SPPC, two sub-scales (parent, teacher) of the SSSC, and one sub-scale (reading) of the WRAT-R1. With the exception of the reading score, all other differences indicate significantly lower mean scores for the single-parent girls than their two-parent matches.

Girls in the father-residency group show no significant differences in their performance with their matches in either the SPPC or the SSSC. Their spelling and mathematics scores on the WRAT-R1 indicate a significantly lower level of performance than that of their matches.

Boys in the mother-residency group show no significant differences from their two-parent matches on any of the measures. On the other-hand, boys in the father-residency group show significant differences in three specific domains (scholastic, social, behavioural) on the SPPC and, reading and spelling on the WRAT-R1 in comparison to their two-parent matches.

There were no significant differences identified between single and two-parent children on the EHRLSI in either the number or frequency of skills performed as measured by the instrument and reported by the children.

It is worth noting that even where there were statistically significant differences between the single and two-parent children indicating that the single-parent children were not performing as well as their two-parent peers, examination of mean scores revealed that overall, the single-parent children’s scores on the dependent measures were still in the average to above-average range. In one instance, the significant differences between the single and two-parent children occurred where the single-parent children were outperforming their two-parent matches. Overall, these results suggest that these single-parent children are not at risk in terms of their development of competence or their self-esteem as measured by these instruments.

2. Comparison of the four residential groups to one another

These analyses showed that on the SPPC there were significant differences between the groups in the scholastic domain, the athletic domain and the physical domain. Post-hoc comparisons revealed that boys in the mother-residency group scored significantly higher on these three specific domains. Boys in the mother-residency group scored higher than boys in the father-residency group on the scholastic domain and higher than girls in the mother-residency group in the athletic and physical domains. There were no significant differences in performance between the four residential groups on the social and behavioural domains, in global self-esteem and the discrepancy scores.

On the WRAT-R1, there were significant differences between the groups in reading and spelling. Post-hoc comparisons indicated girls in the mother-residency group were outperforming both girls and boys in the father-residency groups in reading and spelling. Boys in the mother-residency group were also outperforming both girls and boys in the father-residency groups on the spelling sub-scale. There were no significant differences between the groups on the SSSC or the EHRLSI.

These findings confirmed the contention that when considering competence and self-esteem, single-parent children cannot be treated as a homogeneous group. The findings have identified subtle but important differences between the patterns of performance between the four single-parent residency groups. The findings also suggest that it is not necessarily advantageous for single-parent children to be raised by a parent of the same sex.

Implications

There appear to be two major sets of implications flowing from this research: one primarily for researchers and the other primarily for professionals who work with single-parent families. There are also some implications pertinent to both researchers and professionals. For example, for both researchers and professionals, the study highlights the need to develop a more sophisticated way of identifying and talking about single-parent children, because single-parent children cannot be treated as a homogeneous group.

Of particular importance for researchers are the methodological implications. Whereas recent methodological advances in researching this field have seen a distinction between a child experiencing single parenthood as a result of parental death and one experiencing single parenthood as a result of the ending of a marital relationship, the same level of distinction must be exercised when considering parent residency arrangements and their potential impact on the child’s development. To date, the research methodology has generally not taken residency arrangements into account.

Findings from this study suggest that on the whole, most children will make satisfactory adjustments and cope adequately with these changes to family structure and family process resources. Therefore, it would behoove professionals working with children whose parents had separated or divorced to be aware of the more positive rather than negative prognosis for these children that this study and some other Australian studies have identified.

The study has identified that there are different profiles of competence for each residential group. This would suggest that professionals working with single-parent families must consider the different profiles generated by both children and parents and tailor any necessary involvement to accommodate these profiles. There is thus a case for teachers to specifically monitor children from father-residential arrangements in 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 or mother-resident families.

There are also some implications for public policy and legal decision making. The findings suggest that fathers, as parents with sole residency responsibilities, are just as able as mothers in raising their children to be competent and have a healthy self-esteem. The study has not identified any particular support for the "tender years doctrine" which in the past has favoured the mother as the residential parent and minimised fathers’ opportunities for gaining residency of children.

Residential fathers appear to be capable of providing a supportive and nurturing home environment comparable to that provided by residential mothers. This residential-father family home encourages the development of a range of competencies in the children that are age-appropriate and developmentally normal. It would appear that the guiding judicial principle of "in the best interests of the child" must also accommodate fathers who wish to undertake the responsibility of caring for and raising their children as sole residential parents.

Finally, the predominantly positive single-parent child outcomes identified in the study are consistent with and, substantiate previous Australian research findings in this area. This adds weight to the claim that single-parent children growing up in Australia do have a different experience of single parenthood in comparison to children in other countries. Additionally, the study underscores the importance to both researchers and professionals of collecting contextual and contemporary data about Australian single-parent families and not being solely reliant on outcomes generated from studies overseas.