Growth and Success of Children Within Different Family Structures

When reviewing FamilyStructureStudies.com, I have come across nearly all types of parenting and studied how there are different results from each.

I would like to explain a few. The first is divorced parents or future joint custody. This means that the parents were together until the child turned 18, and then got divorced after. The next is a single parent household, where the children lived primarily with one parents who did not remarry. The last is an intact biological family. This type of family included the married parents in the home for all of the childrens' lives, and never got divorced.

The first issue that I studied was unemployment. Of the families that were divorced in the future, 15% of the children became unemployed. For the single parent homes, 13% were unemployed. Lastly, 8% of the intact family children were unemployed. As you can see, the children of the intact family were the most employed, opposed to other family types. In fact, the most unemployed children were from the children who had a mother with a lesbian relationship. Elder Oaks, in his CES Fireside talk, "Truth and Tolerance," he states, "we live in a world where more and more persons of influence are teaching and acting out a belief that there is no absolute right and wrong, that all authority and all rules of behavior are man-made choices that can prevail over the commandments of God." It is widely known among the religious community that same sex marriage leads to unhealthy homes and negative consequences for the children, while the worldly views are different.

The next subject I studied about the outcomes of children was depression. I discovered that out of 4, 1 being the lowest amount of depression, divorced later families' children were at a 2.01, single parents were at a 1.91, and intact families were at a 1.83, which was the lowest of all family types. The highest amount of depression came from those children who were raised by mothers with same sex relationships, and the next being fathers in same sex relationships. It seems relevant to mention that Oaks states, "in this troubled circumstance we who believe in God and the corollary truth of absolute right and wrong have the challenge of living in a godless and increasingly amoral world."

I know that we should all take a step back and figure out what is best for our children and what we want within a family before we get married and before we make life long decisions. I know that Heavenly Father's Plan of Happiness involves us having children and forming families, and raising them to make it back to Heavenly Father some day.


http://www.mormonnewsroom.org/article/-truth-and-tolerance-elder-dallin-h-oaks
http://www.familystructurestudies.com/