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Single, still sane, with kids

February 13, 2004

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The end of a marriage doesn't mean the end of good parenting, writes Lauren Martin.

In the recent bestseller I Don't Know How She Does It, the investment banker Kate Reddy - a sort of working mother's Bridget Jones - discovers a party invitation way past its RSVP date and does "what I always do on such occasions: I blame Richard", her husband. Reddy feels solely responsible for her kids - "I have to remember everything, every single thing" - but, in fact, she has a partner, a nanny, choices and money.

"The number of times I hear partnered women say, 'If I'm going to be doing everything like a single mother, I may as well be a single mother,"' says the president of the Sole Parents Union, Kathleen Swinbourne. "But these women have housing, income - the sort of stability that single mothers simply can't take for granted."

Swinbourne is not unsympathetic to the Reddys of the world. She sees a society pushing them to quit work for their children's sake, "but if anything should happen to their marriage - whether he walks out or whatever - then she becomes a single mother who is bludging. It's such a contradiction."

In the five years to 2001, the number of one-parent families in Australia increased by 53 per cent, mainly due to the growing number of divorced people. This differs from the United States, where single mothers tend to be young, unmarried and non-Anglo.

In Australia, about one in four kids will experience divorce. Right now, nearly one million Australian children live with just one parent - overwhelmingly (87 per cent) with their mothers. In America, single fathers make up an increasing slice of lone-parent families (one-sixth), but here the relative numbers have stayed about the same over the past 15 years. Lone mothers usually have younger children, while lone fathers tend to have their older children with them.

"What's your star sign?" asks a cartoon woman on one of the growing number of single-parent support websites. "Forget that," the man says. "What's your custody schedule?" (The websites also almost invariably offer dating match services.)

It shows that fathers, too, are taking a more active role in parenting after divorce. Still, 97 per cent of children whose parents have divorced are in what's called a sole-care arrangement: living with one parent more than 70 per cent of the time. Almost half (42 per cent) spend time with the other parent at least fortnightly, but a third (36 per cent) saw the other parent once a year or less, some never.

This fatherlessness is what's worrying many parents and policymakers, including the Prime Minister, John Howard. He commissioned a six-month - yet thorough - inquiry into how the family law system might give these children and their parents a better deal. The parliamentary committee looked specifically at "a rebuttable presumption" of equal time with each parent but, after volumes of testimony that society just wasn't set up for this yet, rejected the idea.

Still, the new system envisioned by the committee report, delivered late last year and due to be considered in cabinet in March, would be geared towards getting parents to get past their own conflict for the children's sake. Conflict - in or out of a relationship - hurts children.

"Research confirms that children develop best in families formed by both biological parents in a low-conflict marriage. Both parts of this equation are important," a US nonpartisan research centre, Child Trends, says.

When a marriage breaks down, things do not necessarily go badly for children. The head of psychology at Edith Cowan University, Lisbeth Pike, has compared children from different family structures and concluded that single-parent children are not at risk in development of competence or self-esteem.

At the Australian National University, Dr Bryan Rodgers surveyed more than 1000 studies and concluded that children of divorced parents were almost twice as likely to have behavioural problems, perform less well in school, use drugs and suffer from depression and lower incomes in adulthood. But the amount of time living in a single-parent family versus a two-parent family does not seem to affect these child outcomes, Rodger's analysis found. The risks come not from being a single parent's child, but from being in a family that separated - and therefore a family more likely to have had conflict, financial problems, mental health or abuse issues, and poor relationships, both before and after separation.

In a coming book, Men and Women Apart: The Decline of Partnering, the Monash University researcher Bob Birrell shows that the most significant drop in partnering levels is among women without degrees. Moreover, a strong minority of single mothers with young children are poor.

"This means there is an increasing divide where kids from married families have a double advantage: they come from an intact family plus they have a higher family income," Birrell says.

In the past 20 years, coupled women have increased their full-time and part-time employment rates, ensuring higher family incomes and, possibly, a growing number of stressed-out Kate Reddys out in Australian society.

"The Government's response to this is to pay them money to stay at home," says Swinbourne. "But if they get divorced, they can no longer assume there is somebody there looking after the kids while they work, or helping with the bills and tidying up and everything else. They have to do the lot."

The level of full-time employment for single mothers has stayed about the same, but there has been strong growth in part-time work, the Australian Institute of Family Studies says.

Swinbourne says: "They are less well educated, and so less likely to get a decent job; [they are] less secure, less well paid, and if they do start to get ahead they lose child support payments [and] government assistance."

Swinbourne says the more Reddys who are out there, the more the Government will pay attention to balancing work and family issues - and that can benefit all working parents, including the 49 per cent of lone mothers who work. But most of them would take Reddy's stresses any day. "That's glamour stress," says Swinbourne. "It's not single-mother stress."


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