Give kids their best start in life, whether they have one parent or two

Research shows kids from two-parent households do better in outcomes such as education. I grew up in a single-parent household. My father died of lung cancer when I was seven.

 

My mother raised my sister and me by herself, even managing to take care of my paternal grandmother, who had dementia, until she died. As a child, I would look at the kids with two parents and envy them. To me, two-parent families looked happier, wealthier and somehow more complete. Long after I had stopped grieving for my father, I grieved for the memories of what my life had been like: the family outings, the holidays, and the security of having both parents present and engaged in my life.

So I was intrigued when I came across The Two-Parent Privilege (2023) by best-selling United States author Melissa Kearney. The professor of economics at the University of Maryland has been studying US family structures, poverty and inequality for the last 20 years. In her book, Prof Kearney "puts a spotlight on the role of marriage between parents and the benefits that institution brings to children – not as a religious or cultural institution but as a practical and economic one that makes the challenging work of raising kids less impossible". She says that in 2019, almost half of all babies in the US were born to unmarried mothers, compared with less than 5 per cent in 1960.

Not surprisingly, there was a drop of almost 20 per cent in the number of children in the US who lived with married parents between 1980 and 2019.

Her data shows that the large decline in marriages happened primarily in the population of mothers who did not get a university education. Mothers were studied because children who live in single-parent homes are predominantly raised by their mothers. To sharpen the conclusion about the importance of marriage, Prof Kearney was able to exclude cohabitation, divorce and teen births as significant drivers for the drastic drop in marriages.

Benefits of marriage for the kids

In her book, she quantitatively shows that kids in two-parent households do better in terms of outcomes such as education, financial security and staying out of the penal system as they grow up.

Prof Kearney believes that better outcomes are achieved because marriage pools resources across two people, amassing more resources than a single parent. These resources include spending on educational enrichment, parental time and attentive parenting. She believes that another reason kids raised in two-parent households do better is that the marriage allows the parents to specialise in their tasks. Similar to how task specialisation in a manufacturing plant results in greater productivity, she believes that a marriage allows parents to specialise in the parenting tasks that they are more suited for. This, in turn, leads to better outcomes for their kids.

Interestingly, Prof Kearney did not find a similar decline in marriages among Asian families in the US data she reviewed. Singapore, as an Asian country, has seen a slight drop in the marriage rate over the years, but has not seen the dramatic shifts described in her book. According to the Ministry of Social and Family Development's (MSF) report on families and households released in 2022, there are about 30,000 single- parent households with children that are aged 20 and below.

Overall, only slightly more than two out of 100 Singapore households are without the two-parent privilege, which is much lower than in the US. This is possibly due to the years of pro-family government policies.

Ms Charlotte Beck, senior adviser to MSF, has been quoted in the media saying that Singapore will continue to "retain pro-family incentives to promote marriage and parenthood within marriage in line with societal values".

Help for single-parent families

At the same time, I am heartened to see the activism that organisations such as women's advocacy group Aware and MP Louis Ng are providing to vulnerable single-parent families.

In 2018, in response to Mr Ng's question in Parliament, MSF shared that the median income for single unwed parents under 35 years old was between $600 and $700 from 2015 to 2017. Given that the country's median household income was $10,099 according to the Singapore Census in 2020, it appears that single-parent families need significant support to afford necessities such as housing, childcare and education. {SEE CORRECTION ABOVE} Prof Kearney is also a proponent for enhancing public support to low-income and under-resourced families to help close the gap for the kids.

She believes that the support needs to go beyond what can be offered by school systems, because the work done in schools is complex enough, without relying on teachers to make up for a gap in parenting at home.

I, too, am in full support for giving single-parent families as much help as possible. Such families are already a parent short at home, so anything that can be done to close the gap, can and should be done. While some might suggest that there is a need to decide on whether to support single-or two-parent families, the discussion should not be about choosing one or the other. I believe that support for both types of families is important and necessary. While single parents need more support, it does not mean that the Government should let up on pro-family incentives and policies.

The focus of support should be on giving kids the best start possible in life, independent of their family structure.

To be clear, I have nothing against the financial independence of women, and spouses leaving abusive and troubled relationships. Having said that, it would be sad for Singapore to go in the direction of the US in terms of a de-linking of marriage and having kids, with a record number of children being raised in single-parent families. I stay married because I love my wife and my kids. But I also want to give my kids the best possible start in their lives by conferring on them the two-parent privilege, something that I did not have.

Source : The Straits Times

Abel Ang is the chief executive of a medical technology company and an adjunct professor at Nanyang Business School.