Over at the Civitas blog, Anastasia de Waal argues that the research of American academics supporting ‘the benefits of the “traditional” family’ can be used to persuade ‘policy makers and government that two-parent families are fundamentally valuable to society, and thus in terms of average “returns”, must be invested in.’ She points to only one example of this research, citing it as ‘Heather Antecol and Kelly Bedard’s study, “Does single parenthood increase the probability of teenage promiscuity, substance use, and crime?” ’. Presumably because she does not expect her audience to want to read the research in question for themselves, she neither provides a full citation nor even a hyperlink to the work in question. Fortunately, Google can provide what de Waal does not. There appear to be three drafts of the working paper floating around the web:

1. Heather Antecol, Kelly Bedard, and Eric Helland (2001), ‘Does Single Parenthood Increase the Probability of Teenage Promiscuity, Drug Use, and Crime? Evidence from Divorce Law Changes’ (Claremont Colleges Working Papers 2001-11; Claremont Colleges).
2. Heather Antecol and Kelly Bedard (2002), ‘Does Single Parenthood Increase the Probability of Teenage Promiscuity, Drug Use and Crime?’ (Claremont Colleges Working Papers 2002-23; Claremont Colleges).
3. Heather Antecol and Kelly Bedard (forthcoming), ‘Does Single Parenthood Increase the Probability of Teenage Promiscuity, Drug Use and Crime?’, Journal of Population Economics [PDF, 279 kb].

Presumably, de Waal was referring to the latest draft.

De Waal claims that ‘[r]esearch of this sort … pushes the case for implementing social policy which encourages and supports the two-parent family’. But if we actually read Antecol and Bedard, they explain how their research cannot be used to justify policies that discourage divorce (pp. 18—19):

To the extent that we have adequately controlled for family and environmental characteristics, and hence isolated the impact of paternal presence on youth participation in deviant behaviors, the estimates indicate that the longer the father remains in the household the ‘better off’ the youth is. However, the results reported in this paper do not necessarily suggest a policy of discouraging divorce for at least two reasons. First, the reported estimates do not inform us about youth outcomes in the event that divorce does not occur but family stress continues to increase because marital dissolution is barred. Secondly, maternal bargaining power may be reduced if divorce is less easily obtainable. To the extent that mother’s [sic] invest more in children, such a shift might be to the detriment of children in ‘unstable’ intact families.

This caution reflects a growing recognition that ‘[w]hile children of divorced parents, as a group, have more adjustment problems than do children of never-divorced parents, the view that divorce per se is the major cause of these symptoms must be reconsidered in light of newer research documenting the negative effects of troubled marriages on children’ (to quote the abstract of a recent meta-study, sadly not available online, of a decade’s research, in the Journal of the American Academy of Child & Adolescent Psychiatry).

One paper which controlled (or, rather, attempted to control) for the effects of failing to separate, with a different dataset (the Cambridge Study in Delinquent Development, a prospective longitudinal survey of 411 South London males from age 8 to age 46), found that children from high-conflict intact families were more likely to be delinquents or juvenile convicts than children from broken homes. See Heather Juby and David P. Farrington (2001), ‘Disentangling the Link between Disrupted Families and Delinquency’, The British Journal of Criminology, 41:22–40 (106 kb PDF digitised by the Canadian fathers’ rights organisation FACT). They were however slightly less likely to have adult convictions, which Antecol and Bedard did not (and could not with their data) test.

Even if de Waal is not thinking of discouraging separation but of discouraging childrearing where the father is never involved, this study does not give her all the support she seems to think. When the biological father has always been absent, Antecol’s and Bedard’s figures (see their Table 2) show that children are less likely to smoke and equally likely to drink than when he has always been present (they are still more likely to have sex, smoke marijuana, and get a juvenile conviction).

In addition to their acknowledged failure to investigate the effects of ongoing marital conflict, three defects in this study stand out to me (de Waal of course mentions none). The first is admitted by the authors (p. 11, n. 8): although they were able to control for many aspects of maternal background (e.g. years of education, age at youth’s birth, religion in 1979), they did not have similar data with which to control for similar aspects of the father’s background. Second, they present no data and so no controls for the behaviour of either parent with regard to the disreputable activities under investigation (smoking, drinking, sex, marijuana use, and crime). Third, although they include a measure of the mother’s intelligence (her AFQT score), they have no data on personality, on parenting styles, or on the reasons for father’s absence and whether the separation was amiable or acrimonious. There are thus many other ‘socio-economic influences’ which are not controlled for by this study, which must cast doubt on the extent to which they have isolated the importance of ‘the presence of a father during childhood’ (in de Waal’s terms). (I am not pretending that such influences are in fact easy to measure and exclude, but they are prima facie very important.)

Ancona and Bedard have written an interesting piece of research. But in light of her citation of this study without reference to its flaws and its authors’ own caution about their results, de Waal’s railing against ‘the politicisation of academic research funding’ rings hollow indeed.