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Children of one-parent families are at risk for psychiatric illness
According to an article published today in Lancet, children who grow up in single-parent families are twice as likely to develop some serious psychiatric illness or addictive disorder later in life than their counterparts in two-parent families.
Swedish researchers, Weitoft, Hjem, Haglund, and Rosén, studied 65,085 children with single parents and 921,257 children with two parents between 1991 and 1999. They point out that “children with single parents showed increased risks of psychiatric disease, suicide or suicide attempt, injury, and addiction. After adjustment for confounding factors, such as socioeconomic status and parents' addiction or mental disease, children in single-parent households had increased risks compared with those in two-parent households for psychiatric disease in childhood. Boys in single-parent families were more likely to develop psychiatric disease and narcotics-related disease than were girls, and they also had a raised risk of all-cause mortality.” One of the conclusions of the investigators was that lack of household resources played a major part in accounting for the increased risks.
Lancet Commentary
In the Commentary section of Lancet , Whitehead and Holland point out "what such studies highlight more generally is the need for a deeper understanding of the policy context in the various societies under study, and the need to question the meaning of what is being measured". They continue that “The findings still leave major questions about why and how… And are these pathways necessarily the same in different countries? The possibility of different social pathways to ill-health in contrasting policy contexts has recently been raised by the findings of cross-country comparisons. Take, for example, the hypothesised pathway that financial hardship of lone parents causes heightened anxiety, depression, and social isolation, which in turn leads not only to psychiatric disease but also to strategies for coping with hardship which include excess use of tobacco and other health-damaging substances. Evidence to support these psychological and social mechanisms has been found in relation to lone mothers in the UK."
Lancet article (registration required but free)
NY Times (API) article
1:28:08 PM 
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