Summary: The Importance Of Parenting

One of the questions people ask about parenting is, if the father is important to children’s well- being. Through research I found the father is actually very important to the child(ren’s) life. Maryland University researchers did a study on many children that lived in single-parent-homes, and two parent homes. It also showed that the single-parent homes were 73 percent ran by mothers, 22 percent by two parents, and only five percent by fathers. In this study it revealed that the households that did not have a father present, the children were more likely to have more social, emotional, and behavioral problems. All though the researchers thought that the father had to be living in the home for better results, it actually showed that just the

Because of the single parent having to work more, than if there were two incomes by two people, they are gone more often to makeup for the other income, and this leads to less attention on the child(ren). This is also a possibility as to why, the crime, drug abuse, abortions, and school dropout rates are higher in the children whose fathers aren’t in their lives. In this study the University of Maryland researchers said that the fathers play an important role in the balancing of the child(ren) being a contributing citizen later in life. With all these statistics taken, the researchers had to keep in mind that each family, and each child could be a little different, due to several factors such as, social class, economic/marital circumstances, gender, and birth

If they can co-parent well, they could set a great example about how parents don’t have to be together to make the family happy and that the child can see that each parent is better off than being together. But on the other hand if they are not good co-parents they could also set the child up for some very confusing/ controversial time in their lives. “It's generally accepted that children learn both good and dysfunctional patterns and behaviors from their parents. As reported by Anderson Cooper in a "360 Degrees" interview in 2005, Professor Constance Ahrons conducted a 20-year longitudinal study, interviewing parents three times over five years, then interviewing their adult children 20 years later. Her study showed that 80 percent of the children came through divorce as emotionally healthy adults." (Sheri Stritof, Research on Staying Together vs. Divorce, 2017). According to Joseph Nowinski said that some children not only went through the hard time, but also came out stronger than what they were before. In 2005 the amount of parents that had low- conflict problems actually did stay together for the children because they were able to talk through the marriage or they could ignore the problem enough to make it