Posted on 05/30/2016 12:44:44 AM PDT by Olog-hai
Children whose parents are married have significantly higher self-esteem, according to research unveiled yesterday.
Teenagers of married couples were more confident than those in single-parent families or youngsters whose parents lived together in a stable long-term relationship, it found.
Overall, boys with married parents had the highest self-esteem, while girls with cohabiting parents had the lowest. […]
The study, from the Marriage Foundation, was based on data from 3,822 children polled in British Household Panel Survey. Harry Benson, research director at the foundation, said: “Conventional wisdom has it that child outcomes depend on parents staying together rather than marital status. This new finding shows that assumption to be false. In terms of self-esteem, teenagers living with parents who are together but not married are no better off than children living with lone parents. Family income makes no difference. Marriage alone provides the boost. A number of studies have shown that self-esteem is closely related to how secure people feel in their relationships.” …
(Excerpt) Read more at dailymail.co.uk ...
Now it's one-out-of-four in the white community; Latinos two-out-of-three, Blacks, three-out-of-four.
What was disastrous then, is, today, catastrophic.
It is catastrophic for taxpayers (individual & corporate) who are required to feed, clothe, house, and school the “golden ticket welfare bastards”, but a windfall for the “poverty sector” (cops, teachers, social workers, bodegas, Section 8 landlords, etc.) that receive that redistributed income...
How nice to see, that a study confirms what so many of us instinctively feel, that children and families do best, when children are raised by their own biological parents, within intact families.
Article claiming this “disadvantages” children of unmarried parents in 10 . . . 9 . . . 8
bump
No sh!t, Sherlock.
My mother was an alchoholic and ended up in a sanitarium twice, the first time when I was three years old. My smashed lumbar vertabra (which did not knit back together normally) occurred at that time and no one knows how it happened. BUT when I tried to talk to mom about it, her face expressed the look she was lying.
I'm very fortunate to have had good parents.
My experience with circumstances like yours comes second handedly from my career as a psychiatrist.
Now that I'm retired and ordained a permanent Catholic deacon I see similar situations doing expert witness evaluations for annulments in the marriage tribunal.
Your post strikes home as I provided an opinion in a situation reminiscent of what you described just this morning.
God bless you. I hope you have had the opportunity for healing or reconciliation.
I must agree. But then, I was born so long ago that many social values and practices may have changed. Self-esteem was not a big priority for parents before the 60s. The word "parenting" rarely, if ever, was used. There was widespread use of the terms "mother", "father", "mothering" and "fathering", however.
With co-habiting parents, the underlying example to children is not only that one or both parents does not value the idea of commitment, but that one or both view the other as inherently unworthy. Yet, both are part of the child; hence, the parts that child identifies with in one or both "unworthy" parents are also ipso facto unworthy of love and commitment.
Mom is dead. I am 64 years old. To be totally on the level, I started reading books on psychology when I was 11-years old and determined, on my own, that my mother’s mental problems were not caused by myself but stemmed from her childhood.
This was later verified by my dad when he told me that mom’s childhood was a miserable one. Her mother had been given to a convent at a very young age and the French nuns beat her. Poor woman grew to adulthood believing herself to be of no value, basically worthless and treated all her children the same.
I forgave my mother everything when she rejected alcohol. On her deathbed she said I had been a good daughter but there was no expression of love. THAT is the toughest thing to overcome: I was a national award winning artist before I graduated high school; poetry I wrote in college is included in a volume of the Best Twentieth Century Poetry; I’m a Navy vet; I worked in nuclear engineering; but none of it mattered to my folks. What is tough on a person is overcoming the feelings of being worthless in the eyes of your parents.
I believe that we, all of us, are what we strive to be. Blaming someone else for the way we are is a detour from reality - we make it happen for ourselves and no one else.
Thanks for you comments; I truly appreciated the wisdom.
I will be 63 in August and served in the Navy as well. Naval Hospital Portsmouth, Virginia 1979-83 and again 1986-1987 and Naval Hospital Roosevelt Roads, Puerto Rico 1983-1986. Fair winds and following seas to you, as they say.
I identify in my own life with much of what you’ve said...very well said, in multiple areas.
Absolutely agree.
There were people praising him for being "honest".
I said he was a jerk.
There is no way you can not keep your promise of fidelity. It is not like catching a cold.
He was surprised a few years later when his shack up honey decided that since he was not willing to commit she was going to leave.
He was also surprised to find out that in law she was considered his common law wife and therefore was entitled to alimony and child support.
IIRC he decided that maybe he should marry her after all.
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