Single Family Life

28 Pages 7027 Words

to be poor. Even worse, children of single parents are more likely than their counterparts in intact families to have emotional and behavioral problems, to abuse drugs, to get pregnant as teenagers, to drop out of high school and to run afoul of the law.
You might therefore think that a compassionate response to single parenthood would be to help people avoid it. The political left's response has been to accommodate it. In the name of compassion, left-leaning governments have helped to create a society that facilitates, condones and even celebrates illegitimacy and divorce. No longer need anyone fear social disapproval for producing children out of wedlock or breaking up marriages. On the contrary, the political left considers the single-parent households that result from these activities to be alternative living arrangements equal to two-parent families. Governments, in fact, subsidize single-parent households. Little wonder that there are more of them than there used to be.
Welfare dependency, particularly if long-term, is associated with well-documented social pathologies, including alcoholism, drug abuse, family breakdown, and violence and poor school performance. Anyone who doubts the human costs of prolonged dependence on government need look no further than our once self-reliant aboriginal communities to see how devastating it can be.
As with single parenthood, you would think that a compassionate response to welfare dependency would be to bend every effort to eliminate it. In the name of compassion, however, left-leaning politicians have helped to create communities in which long-term government handouts have become a major source of local income. Besides aboriginal communities, these have included rural Newfoundland and such low-income urban neighborhoods as East Vancouver and East Montreal. But where the rewards of labor seem less than the benefits of welfare, in terms of money, in-kind compensation, tax concessions and le...