Chuck,
I'm glad you turned out ok although I'm still unclear on why you bought the pontoon boat. I'll just have to chalk that up to the fact that you can only take the boy out of WVa, not the WVa out of the boy. (g) I spent a good part of my youth in a single parent home as well and while I feel I came out ok I am painfully aware of the effect it had on some of my siblings, in one case, irreversible effects.
There is no other single indicator as strongly linked to poverty as the single parent household. I doubt that you're advocating poverty as a precursor to educational achievement.
The quality time versus quantity of time argument in child-rearing has been effectively debunked, I'm surprised you raise it. First off, there needs to be quantity of time for quality to even be an issue. Single parents working long hours to just support their children does not facilitate that parent having ample time with each child on matters other than basic nutrition and hygiene. And what more recent studies have shown, backed by ample parental experience, is that the quality time had with children tends to be very much based upon their needs of the moment. Quality time is not something that can be scheduled, a fact discovered by many parents who swallowed the quality/quantity argument of the 60's. The child tends to dictate when the quality moment will occur. In single parent households those moments are likely to occur during day-care with strangers, while the parent is absent, or when the parent is home but either too busy or too tired to take advantage of it.
I'll not bother with your notions on spermatozoa and so forth as I feel they're frivolous.
You cite many social ills that you feel that children of single parent households have overcome and the only two parent household you cite is one where the biological father is absent. None of these items are anything more than exceptions or excuses and do not serve to address the fundamental point; what is the best parental situation for the raising of children? We know what can be sometimes overcome, we know what on average does not work-single parenting, so how hard should it be to say what is most desirable and productive.
We know empirically that the two biological parent household is the most effective child-rearing atmosphere. We even know that having one of those parents in the home makes for a better child-rearing atmosphere. We also know that children of single parents are not only less successful in school and socially, they are also more likely to become single parents themselves. We even know that children from divorced family's are much more likely to end up divorced themselves. So people can rant and rave all they want about biology and the efficacy of condom use, and nothing will change for the better in terms of out of wedlock birthes and the harm caused by them. Morality serves to keep biology in check; it's what makes us human and not mere animals. And marriage is what
harnesses the biological imperative and converts it into the nurturing two parent home. Why would society adopt a sliding standard that results in self-replicating failure when the optimum is known?
