There is a strong correlation between success for children and fathers being present. Whereas children raised by mothers only face many additional challenges, children raised primarily by fathers are only minimally disadvantaged compared to children in nuclear families.
So, JP aside, there may be some truth to that analysis.
Hmm. Some of the studies I looked at took income into account, so I’m not sure if I follow your line of reasoning. I don’t doubt that there are external factors that advantage male parents, but income doesn’t seem to be the smoking gun. Children raised by single mothers have more problems in society regardless of their financial security. Especially when it comes to criminality. I’m going to go out on a limb here , but I would wager that the “criminality “ is mostly centered around substance abuse and adjacent factors.
I would be interested in seeing the studies you're referencing. I have not seen any studies that correlate single mothers to increased criminality over single fathers when eliminating economic factors.
This is apparently a narrative that the Right seems to love, built on faulty correlation from the 70s, when divorce rates were increasing along with crime, but was disproven given the later-to-current decrease in violent crime, with no decrease in single motherhood.
Could also be correspondent with reductions in prosecution for minor drug charges, eg marijuana “offenses”. That’s my guess, since as you said, those studies are older. The substance abuse rate is higher for single mother raised children, so a shift in drug use penalization alone could dramatically shift “criminality”.
Anecdotally, I’ve been living in a place for the last 2 decades where single motherhood is the rule rather than the exception, in a matriarchal society. The infantilisation of men is, for my Western European sensibilities, pretty extreme. The men that are accountable and present are definitely the exception to the rule.
The difference in the treatment of children in families with men involved is so dramatically distinct that it is extremely easy to tell if a person comes from a family environment that was heavily influenced by male presence. It’s not a scientific observation, but it is an interesting insight. It’s like there are essentially two parallel cultures. Even the speech patterns are so different as to be easily discernible.
