Commentary
In today’s “woke” cultural climate, there are certain things you can’t say. You can’t say that chromosomes, and not surgery, hormones, and clothes, determine gender. You can’t say that
38,000 illegal immigrants are currently in U.S. prisons, according to The Associated Press. And you can’t say that children from single-mother households have issues.
Twelve years ago, in her 2009 book “Guilty: Liberal ‘Victims’ and Their Assault on America,” conservative author Ann Coulter proposed exactly that in a chapter called “
Victim of a Crime? Thank a Single Mother” and received immediate and lasting media black eyes.
It wasn’t that Coulter didn’t do her statistical homework. She
documented that children raised in single-mother homes “are five times more likely to commit suicide, nine times more likely to drop out of high school, 10 times more likely to abuse chemical substances, 14 times more likely to commit rape (for the boys), 20 times more likely to end up in prison, and 32 times more likely to run away from home.”
It wasn’t that Coulter
blamed divorced, separated, and widowed women, who often are victims of circumstance, in her indictment; she confined her wrath to those who choose to be a single mother.
No, Coulter’s problem was that stating the truth was a micro-aggression
. It was mean and hurt people’s feelings, yelled the women on “
The View”—in unison—when she appeared on the show.
Yet, Coulter wasn’t alone in her sociological audacity and its result.
“Mentioning the cultural catastrophe brought about by single-parent households may be ‘insensitive,'” read an
editorial in the News and Record, “but ignoring the source of the problem will solve nothing.” The problem? Like Coulter, the editorial cited “about 70 percent of the perpetrators hail from single-parent households.”
Scientific research confirms some of the correlations. “Growing up in single-parent families is associated with an elevated risk of involvement in crime by adolescents,” the authors of a study published in June 2020 wrote in the journal
Psychology, Crime & Law. “More research is needed to determine the effects of the different constituting events of single-parent families.”
Growing up in a single-parent family also “has negative effects on children’s emotional well-being, cognitive development, and school performance,” and correlates with “poor school adjustment,” the
authors add.
Children, notably boys, who grew up in a single-parent household commit the highest number of high-profile gun crimes
says author and activist Warren Thomas Farrell.
“There’s common denominators among mass shooters, the most obvious is that they’re male—98 percent are male. A second common denominator is that they’re almost all dad-deprived males,” Farrell told The Epoch Times in April.
These young criminals “are deprived of their dads” and likely “feeling neglected and depressed,”
said Farrell, the chair of the Coalition to Create a White House Council on Boys and Men.
As a reporter, I’ve also noted negative emotional consequences, such as feelings of guilt, in people who grew up in single-parent homes.
“My mother was always telling me what sacrifices she made for me and how she had given her whole life to me,” Michael, who sought recovery from addiction, told me. “She was all alone and it was difficult, almost impossible, for me to find my own partner in life. I felt so responsible for her. I still do.”
The negative results of growing up in single-parent homes, whether on society or on children, are too often buried.
Martha Rosenberg is a former advertising copywriter who knows a lot about marketing. She began as an investigative journalist and since has been on TV and radio as a health expert. Martha has taught about drug marketing tactics at a Chicago medical school and is part of the FDA press corps. Her book “Born with a Junk Food Deficiency: How Flaks, Quacks, and Hacks Pimp the Public Health,” exposes what goes on behind the scenes in the food and drug industries.
Views expressed in this article are opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.
