Further to the post below, I receive in the mail today yet more research suggesting that living with both parents is important to the well-being of children. It is from the ISER.
It found:
Our research indicates that individuals who experience lone motherhood during childhood are more likely to smoke, and hence are at greater risk of poor lifetime health. This finding is clear cut according to models controlling for a wide range of observed confounding factors,and holds regardless of the socioeconomic origin of the young adult and the measure of smoking behaviour.
To take just one set of figures from the research: in the west German sample, 46% of young adults who lived with a lone mother during childhood smoked, compared with 32% from those who lived with two parents.
The ISER magazine comments that the research "is consistent with the views of medical professionals as well as psychologists that growing up in a family headed by a lone mother may raise an individual's stress levels and lower their self esteem with these factors, in turn, leading to a greater chance of smoking."
Posted by James Bartholomew • Indexed in Parenting
Comments (3)
TrackBack (13)
Comments
I'm pretty certain they're getting the cart before the horse here. Because I recall seeing other research to the effect that teenage girls who smoke are more likely to have had sex than non-smokers of the same age.
(Anecdotal evidence also supports this ....)
Posted by: Laban at December 1, 2009 09:54 PM
Oops. I must read the post more carefully. I see it's not the mothers, but the children, who are more likely to smoke.
But I bet it's true for the mothers as well.
Posted by: Laban at December 1, 2009 09:56 PM
Warning: file(http://63.247.138.2/~bartholo/randomquotes.dump) [function.file]: failed to open stream: No route to host in /home/bartholo/public_html/archives/2009/12/children_brough.php on line 294
Warning: implode() [function.implode]: Invalid arguments passed in /home/bartholo/public_html/archives/2009/12/children_brough.php on line 294
While I agree with you on every level, it saddens me that it is deemed necessary to research (forgive me) the bleeding obvious; that those who come from a broken home will have abandonment issues. Time was when we were able to work out what makes a society strong and what doesn't by using our loaves; now we need an expensively commissioned report to validate - well - everything.
Posted by: Mara MacSeoinin at December 1, 2009 01:03 PM