honoluluadvertiser.com

Sponsored by:

Comment, blog & share photos

Log in | Become a member
The Honolulu Advertiser
Posted on: Thursday, February 6, 2003

Children of single parents at greater risk, study finds

By Emma Ross
Associated Press

DOWOUNA-HYDE
LONDON — It's not as if single parents don't have enough to worry about.

Ask Dawn Dowouna-Hyde, who spends almost all day studying at college, hurries to pick up her two kids on her way home, makes supper and helps with their homework.

Then out comes a study from Sweden — the biggest, most convincing ever done on the subject — that says children in one-parent homes are twice as likely as those in two-parent families to develop serious psychiatric problems and addictions later in life.

"It's quite upsetting because it's like we're damned if we do, and we're damned if we don't," said Dowouna-Hyde, who took her two daughters and left her husband seven years ago because of domestic violence. "It's going back to 'blame it on the single parents.' I hear that quite a lot."

Yet, even though the challenges of raising children alone are tough, most kids do not have such severe problems: Roughly nine out of 10 teens and young adults don't have addiction or psychiatric problems serious enough for hospitalization.

In addition, "there's huge variation in how well kids do in single-parent families. Don't forget there are kids in two-parent families that do badly, too," said Dr. Tom O'Connor, a child psychiatrist at the Institute of Psychiatry at King's College, London.

Published in the Lancet's Jan. 25 issue, the research showed, among other things, that 2.5 percent of girls and 1.5 percent of boys in single-parent families were hospitalized with problems ranging from severe depression to paranoid schizophrenia, compared with just 1 percent of girls and 0.5 percent of boys in two-parent homes.

Similar risk differences were seen for alcohol problems, and the increased risk for drug addiction was even higher than for other problems.

The study also showed that 2.2 percent of girls and 1 percent of boys living with a sole parent either killed themselves or ended up in the hospital after an attempted suicide by the age of 26, compared with 0.8 percent of girls and 0.3 percent of boys living with two parents. Because the study relied on records over 10 years, some of those cases could have overlapped with earlier hospitalizations for psychiatric problems.

Because researchers looked only at those hospitalized, experts said many more children suffer emotional problems, though perhaps not so severe.

Experts didn't dispute the findings because the study involved almost 1 million children over nearly a decade. They also said the results were similar to those seen in smaller studies elsewhere, including those in countries much more heterogeneous than Sweden.

But the study did not answer a question that researchers have been chasing for years: What exactly is it about a single-parent home that puts children at higher risk for such problems?

Although there are several theories, none seems to prevail. All seem to explain part of the problem, and it's unclear which factors are most significant.

Experts cite money, the level of hostility between the parents who separate, the quality of the parenting, the timing of divorce, and the extent and quality of the social network, which includes school, friends and adult role models.

The chances of any child developing serious psychiatric problems is very small. In two-parent homes, this study indicated about 1 in 200 boys and 1 in 100 girls would experience problems serious enough to be hospitalized. So a doubling of the risk results is a still small chance of problems. But because so many millions of children live in one-parent families, the numbers can add up.

One in three children in the United States today is born outside marriage, according to government records. And recent estimates suggest that 54 percent of American children will spend some time living apart from one of their parents by the time they are 15.