Mothers: What It Means To Have a Live-In Boyfriend

To those of us in the Right-thinking vein, this gets applied under the "common sense and logic" category; to some strata of overeducated white people and some Liberals, there will be a severe intake of breath and perhaps even an attempt to push a very important study to the side.

Go here to see the abstract of a referenced study from the November 2005 issue of the journal Pediatrics. Go here if you wish to see the full text of the article.

The point of the article is this: young children who live with their mothers' boyfriends or other unrelated adults are 48 times more likely to die from child abuse.

Not twice as likely; not ten times as likely. Almost 50 times as likely.

Please first note what isn't here: not likely to die from fathers.

Also: single parenthood is not the culprit, mother or father.

It is the "presence in the household of unrelated adults, usually a male boyfriend, that dramatically increases the risk."

The core of their paper:

The purpose of this study was to evaluate household composition as an independent risk factor for fatal inflicted injuries among young children. We analyzed 8 years of the Missouri CFRP data to test 2 hypotheses: (1) that children residing in households with adults unrelated to them are at higher risk of inflicted-injury death than children residing in households with 2 parents and no other adults; and (2) that children living with a single parent were at no greater risk of inflicted-injury death than children living with 2 parents as long as no other adults lived in the home. Secondary objectives included conducting a descriptive analysis of perpetrator characteristics including gender, relationship to decedent child, and whether the perpetrator was a member of the decedent's household at the time of the child's death.

Two important factors the authors discovered:

• There was no increased risk to children in households with step or foster parents or with a single parent and no other adults.
• It is a misconception that children in single-parent households are more likely to die from inflicted injury.

I repeat (and will continue to believe, as will many of my fellow bloggers): there is no other ideal for a child other than a full and complete traditional family to include one biological mother, one biological father, and a strong, lasting relationship between the two.

On one level: a very important study. On another: so very sad.