Children perform better when their father lives at home

Children perform better when their father lives at home



NEWS: goo.gl/a3kAcQ



Children are healthier and more likely to grow up with a good education and get a good job if their biological father lives with them, research reveals.

But when a stepfather moves into a family home there are no benefits for the children, the pioneering study of British families found.

The warning over the failure of stepfathers to help the families they bring up was drawn from records of the lives of more than 1,000 children born to single mothers at the turn of the Millennium.





The study, carried out by three researchers from the London School of Economics, checked on reports of the health, intelligence and social skills of the children up to the age of seven.

It said when single mothers were joined by the children's biological father, then if the family stayed together, the children were as likely to do as well as children of the best-off stable families, those which where always headed by both a mother and father.

But if a stepfather joins a family headed by a lone mother, then the children are likely to grow up with the same problems as children from families that continue to be led by a lone mother.

They are also less likely to do well at school or keep a job, and more likely to slip into teenage pregnancy or crime.

The study, the first to use evidence from a large-scale survey to analyse the influence of stepfathers, follows a series of less academic pointers which have suggested that families can face problems when non-biological parents move in.



Last year a poll for the Relate counselling service said that more than a third of stepfathers and over four out of 10 stepmothers doubt the strength of their bonds with the children they are helping to bring up.

Relate said its findings 'indicate some of the challenges that families can face following the breakdown of a relationship and blending families.'

The new study was based on reports provided by families to the Millennium Cohort Survey, which has been following the lives of nearly 20,000 children born across the UK between 2000 and 2002.

It found full records on 1,169 families where children were born to a single mother but a man subsequently moved into the home.



The researchers, led by Elena Mariani, said that a large body of evidence argues 'that children who grow up in a household with two married biological parents do better overall than those growing up with a single mother.'

But, they said, no-one has considered what happens to the children when a man, either the biological father or another partner, moves in.

It checked on the health of children up to the age of seven by looking at whether they were obese; at their test scores for recognising words, arithmetic, and patterns; and at their 'socio-emotional well-being'.



The study said that these indicate well-being in later life. Intellectual skills, it said, predict future earnings and employment, while 'socio- emotional' records show the likelihood that children will grow up to get a degree, whether they will smoke, become pregnant as teenagers, or get involved with crime.

Obesity indicates the likelihood of future serious illness and early death.

The researchers said they found that 'consistent with existing evidence, children who were born to lone mothers belonged to a lower socio-economic group than the children who were born and grew up in families with two biological parents.

They said that when a biological father joined the family, children 'fared better' and 'did almost as well as children who have lived continuously in a two-biological parent household since birth.'

But families which experienced a parental break-up or where a stepfather moved in 'had outcomes similar to children of continuously lone mothers.'



It said there were only small differences in the development of children in lone mother and in stepfather families, and added that 'the benefits of improved resources and parenting input are being offset by the difficulties in adjusting to a new situation in the child's home environment when a stepfather joins the family.

'The benefits of a father's entry for children's outcomes in different areas are clearest if the father is biological and the union is stable.'

The researchers said that the findings were likely to underestimate the real impact of stepfathers or biological fathers on families because families with 1,718 children had dropped out of the Millennium survey before the children were seven years old.

The drop-out rate may have happened because 'more disadvantaged mothers and those with more complex family histories are most likely to leave the survey,' it said.

Campaigners for marriage and the traditional family said the results pointed to the need to encourage couples to marry and biological fathers to stay with their children.