© Anne Else; 27 March 1999

A terrible weariness descended on me recently, when the media reported that the ACT Party was mounting a major election campaign against - guess who - solo mothers. I should have known. Who else could possibly be to blame for the economic and moral plight of the nation, and by extension, the entire Western world, but solo mothers?

The ACT leader's statements are increasingly coming to resemble a kind of Weightwatchers diet for media audiences: they sound like real food for thought, but they are almost entirely fact-free. Anecdotes about the stupidity of bureaucrats and the perfidy of beneficiaries abound. But when somebody takes the trouble to check one out - as Minister of Justice Tony Ryall did last week, attempting to confirm a story about an order to destroy a burglar-attacking dog - the evidence is strangely lacking (Dominion, 27/3/99, p.17).

And so it proves with ACT's indignant splutterings about beneficiaries in general, and solo mothers in particular. The obligatory, if increasingly tedious, recital of the facts, as opposed to the rhetoric, shows that the nation is not after all swarming with irresponsible teenage mothers, living the high life on the DPB. In 1998 teenage girls made up just 2.6 percent of all DPB recipients. This is a drop since 1991, when it was 3 percent.

Between 1976 and 1991 the numbers of people on the DPB rose by only about 6 percent a year. It must be obvious to anyone who can read statistics that the increase in (a) the overall numbers of parents, mainly women, parenting alone for long enough to figure in the statistics, and (b) the proportion of sole parents resorting to the DPB, in most cases for a few years only, are linked primarily to the massive increases in unemployment which took place in the 1980s, and are now threatening to recur. Between 1988 and 1991 alone, registered unemployment went up by 84 percent. So it's hardly surprising that many more sole parents have had to go on the DPB, and stay on it for longer, and that most get off it not by finding a job that covers all their costs, including childcare, and leaves enough over to live on (since this is almost impossible to do), but by finding a new partner.

Of 105,447 sole parents receiving the DPB in 1998, over one in three (36 percent) were aged between 30 and 39. There were almost as many over 50 (2.3 percent) as there were under 20. The major immediate reason for becoming a sole parent is "relationship breakdown" - but no one knows how many such breakdowns represent the true trickle-down effects of New Right policies, i.e. unemployment, lower wages and dramatically worse working conditions, because there is no official interest in finding out.

Thanks to researchers at the New Zealand Council for Educational Research (Wylie, Thompson & Hendricks 1996; Wylie & Thompson 1998), funded by the Ministry of Education, we do have some solid evidence on how family type affects children's educational development. At age 5, 13 percent of the children studied were living in sole-parent households, and another 3 percent with sole parents in an extended family household. Three-quarters of the sole-parent households had annual incomes of $20,000 or less, compared with only 7 percent of the two-parent households; and 38 percent of all households in this low income bracket spent half or more of their gross income on housing. Though 53 percent of sole parents had paid work, and 23 percent worked full-time, only 5 (that's right, 5) sole-parent families earned more than $30,000 a year.

Overwhelmingly, the factor most clearly affecting children's levels of competency in a range of educational areas was not family type, but family income. Mother's level of education was also very important. Once these two factors were taken into account, whether families were sole-parent or two-parent had almost no association with their competency scores.

The only competency which did show a difference related to family type was Social Skills with Peers. "Aha," I can hear ACT saying. "We told you so." (What their Great Leader actually said, according to the press, was that "One fact is clear from current social research - fatherless children, regardless of socio-economic background or race, are more likely to commit violent crime." I think I know which research this statement is (very loosely) based on, and it is not a reliable source, but running this particular fox to ground will take some time, and life is short.) In families getting less than $20,000 a year where mothers had School Certificate or UE as their highest qualification, Wylie et al found that children from two-parent families scored better (5 percentage points) on Social Skills with Peers.

But looking at the most disadvantaged group - families with less than $20,000 a year, where mothers had no formal qualification at all - they found that the opposite, with bells on. Children from the sole-parent families in this category had a competency score of, on average, 18 percentage points more than their peers in two-parent families. The researchers conclude this may be because "sole parents in this income bracket are particularly resourceful, and...formal qualification is not the only indication of such personal strengths and skills".

Then they repeat the main point: for children's overall competency in early schooling, it is family income that counts, not family type. Their later research, following the children at 6 (and, soon to be published, at 8) confirms this. The older the children get, the more they appear to be disadvantaged at school from living in families with a total household income of under $20,000 a year. In particular, "low family income levels while children are preschoolers appear to have enduring as well as current impacts on children's competency levels...The low income families had available to them a third to a quarter of the incomes available to families in the highest income bracket. If such gaps in income remain, or widen still further, it will be difficult to close the related gaps which are evident in children's competency levels even from an early age." (Wylie & Thompson 1998 p.118)

So if we want to ensure that a particular group of children grow up severely disadvantaged from the outset, we should certainly do exactly what ACT's Great Leader advocates: as well as denying the DPB to anyone under 18, we should deny it to anyone under 20, or better still, abolish it altogether (which is what ACT really, really wants, but is rather coy about saying too often in public). Then we should bring in the other leg of the ACT-Business Roundtable double, and abolish the minimum wage as well. To complete the trifecta, we should then (again) cut marginal taxes for the rich and raise them for the poor.

It won't make a blind bit of difference to the sole-parent statistics, of course, because as ACT's nineteenth century doppelgangers discovered, the absence of any means of alternative support for partners and children does not prevent men leaving or beating up their wives; nor does it automatically transform intolerably miserable marriages into happy ones, or magically conjure up the jobs/wages/childcare needed to sustain families of any type.

But it will certainly ensure that the children of the poor remain poor, enabling ACT adherents and other closet Social Darwinists to congratulate each other on the magnificent fit between their policies, the free market, and the survival of the fittest.

Wylie, C., Thompson, J. & Hendricks, A.K., Competent Children at 5: Families and Early Childhood Education, New Zealand Council for Educational Research, Wellington, 1996

Wylie, C., & Thompson, J. Competent Children at 6: Families, Early Education and Schools, New Zealand Council for Educational Research, Wellington, 1998

Competent Children at 8 will be published in mid-1999.

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