Lone parents: the figures being bandied about don’t tell full story

NEVER mind the views of a self-important pundit. And let’s avoid political correctness, too. Is there really a big issue around this business of single parents?

Is it really the crisis that some commentators would have us believe?

It was Dr Ed Walsh who started it. His original speech on the subject (made in UCC) was, shall we say, blunt and to the point. In the press release issued by UCC, the question is posed directly: "What is the relationship between the rise of violence, anti-social behaviour and lone-parent families in Ireland, and should the form of state subsidies for such families be reviewed and modified?"

Dr Walsh asked in that speech if it could be the case that "layers of political correctness are now combining to produce bad results, that they are, in fact, serving to over-protect certain individuals and groups whose selfish or boorish behaviour is damaging to Irish society as a whole?"

He goes on to say that "the state could make a start by removing the incentives it has put in place that tend to accentuate the problem. One of them is the active encouragement of single parent households."

In the newspaper reports of his speech, Dr Walsh is quoted as saying that "many of the social ills we face in Ireland can be traced to the growth of lone parent families." And he went on to say that in the US "much research has been conducted on the cause of social breakdown, and while it may be politically incorrect to highlight it, many studies associate high levels of substance abuse, rape, child abuse and other unpleasant social phenomena with the growth of lone parent families."

In the aftermath of the fury generated by Kevin Myers' disgusting article, Dr Walsh returned to the theme in last Sunday's Sunday Business Post, under the heading 'Let's have a new debate.'

A much more gentle side was in evidence on this occasion, however, as he listed a number of things we should be concerned about, and then said "The rapid rate of growth in the formation of lone parent families represents perhaps one of the most significant social changes taking place in Ireland."

The statistics, he added, are significant, and listed them as follows: "There are now more than 150,000 lone parent families. The numbers receiving the lone parent allowance has grown from some 3,000 to 80,000. A quarter of all children (24%) do not live in a household containing both their biological parents. Ninety-four percent of lone parents are women.

"Half of lone parents have only primary-level education and two-thirds of first-time applicants for the lone parent allowance are living with their parents. The waiting lists for local authority housing is increasingly composed of requests from lone parent families. The proportion is 43% nationally and rises to 60% in Dublin city."

These are, indeed, disturbing statistics. I'm not sure where they all come from I certainly haven't been able to track down these figures anywhere, but I presume Dr Walsh has some basis for his assertions, no matter how tenuous. But, assuming they're all correct, are they the whole picture?

And if they're not, why aren't we being shown the whole picture? Could it possibly be that by showing us a simple, if incomplete, picture, it is also being suggested that solutions are simple, too? Cut access to services and money, and the problem will disappear.

In Dr Walsh's earlier words (apparently not safe to repeat after Kevin Myers), cut out the "active encouragement" of lone parent families.

Let's look at the whole picture, or at least a bit more of it. No more than Dr Walsh, I'm no sociologist. But I know how easy it is to use figures selectively to pander to fear and prejudice. One classic device, for example, is to put words like rape, substance abuse, and lone parent families in the same sentence.

But let's look at some additional facts.

The latest figures available from the Central Statistics Office cover 2002, and offer some surprising answers to some of the questions that have occurred to all of us who have been drawn into this controversy over the past week or so.

Just as a simple matter of fact, the total number of births in 2002 went up, to the highest annual figure in 14 years. The number of teenage births outside marriage went down. And more than a quarter of births outside marriage were to mothers over the age of 30.

AS a matter of interest, what is the average age at which women have their first baby? 16, 18, 21? No, actually, it's just under 28. And how many babies altogether were born outside marriage in 2002? 18,900 is the answer, or 31% of all babies born that year. And the vast majority of those babies were born to couples, even if they weren't married couples.

How many babies were born to unmarried teenagers? 10,000, 12,000, 15,000? No again. It was 2,700, down a couple of hundred from the previous year. A serious problem, no doubt, but there might just be time to address it before the floodgates break and overwhelm us all. And how many of those teenage unmarried mums were under the age of sixteen? 62. Not 6,200, or even 620. Sixty-two girls under 16 gave birth to babies outside marriage in 2002.

These girls are kids themselves. Your heart would go out to them, wouldn't it, when you think about the trauma of a pregnancy at that age and the likelihood of a life that is never going to be easy.

But do you really think it's appropriate to jump to conclusions about them, to assume that they're in it for the money, or that they are less likely than any of the rest of us to love their kids and to try to do their best by them?

Isn't that the conclusion, or part of it, that we're being invited to draw? And do you really think it's right to paint a picture of a society in danger of decline on the back of figures like these?

Or to seek to demonise every woman who gets pregnant outside marriage? Surely that's something we grew out of a long time ago? Many will argue that two parents are better than one. I don't know the answer to that. Some of the best parents I know are single mums, and some of the happiest kids I know are their children.

This might seem like I'm trying to minimise a genuine problem. I'm not. I just want to try to get it into some perspective. I believe the real truth is that rather than incentivising young women to have babies, we create a lot of traps for them if it happens.

Poverty-stricken mums, struggling in a life without choices, seem less likely to be happy mums, and perhaps less likely as a result to have happy kids. It seems to me that the logic of that assertion is that we ought to be creating more choices and fewer traps. If kids really matter most, as they must, we need to begin by not making scapegoats of their mothers.