The most serious threat

Our good friend Liz who blogs at The White Trash Republican often observes "There's nothing more dangerous to a child than Mommy's new boyfriend." It seems that the AP has reached the same, or nearly the same, conclusion:

NEW YORK — Six-year-old Oscar Jimenez Jr. was beaten to death in California, then buried under fertilizer and cement. Two-year-old Devon Shackleford was drowned in an Arizona swimming pool. Jayden Cangro, also 2, died after being thrown across a room in Utah.

In each case, as in many others every year, the alleged or convicted perpetrator had been the boyfriend of the child's mother — men thrust into father-like roles which they failed to embrace.
[. . .]

Every case is different, every family is different. Some single mothers bring men into their lives who lovingly help raise children when the biological father is gone for good.

Nonetheless, many scholars and front-line caseworkers who monitor America's families see the abusive-boyfriend syndrome as part of a worrisome trend. These experts and observers note an ever-increasing share of America's children grow up in homes without both biological parents, and say the risk of child abuse is markedly higher in the non-traditional family structures.

"This is the dark underbelly of cohabitation," said Brad Wilcox, a sociology professor at the University of Virginia. "Cohabitation has become quite common, and most people think, 'What's the harm?' The harm is we're increasing a pattern of relationships that's not good for children."

[. . .]

• Children living in households with unrelated adults are nearly 50 times as likely to die of inflicted injuries as children living with two biological parents, according to a study of Missouri abuse reports published in the journal of the American Academy of Pediatrics in 2005.

• Children living in stepfamilies or with single parents are at higher risk of physical or sexual assault than children living with two biological or adoptive parents, according to several studies co-authored by David Finkelhor, director of the University of New Hampshire's Crimes Against Children Research Center.

• Girls whose parents divorce are at significantly higher risk of sexual assault, whether they live with their mother or their father, according to research by Robin Wilson, a family law professor at Washington and Lee University.

"All the emphasis on family autonomy and privacy shields the families from investigators, so we don't respond until it's too late," Wilson said. "I hate the fact that something dangerous for children doesn't get responded to because we're afraid of judging someone's lifestyle."

Census data leaves no doubt that family patterns have changed dramatically in recent decades as cohabitation and single-parenthood became common. Thirty years ago, nearly 80% of America's children lived with both parents. Now, only two-thirds of them do. Of all families with children, nearly 29% are now one-parent families, up from 17% in 1977.

The net result is a sharp increase in households with a potential for instability, and the likelihood that adults and children will reside in them who have no biological tie to each other.
"I've seen many cases of physical and sexual abuse that come up with boyfriends, stepparents," said Eliana Gil, clinical director for the national abuse-prevention group Childhelp.

"It comes down to the fact they don't have a relationship established with these kids," she said. "Their primary interest is really the adult partner, and they may find themselves more irritated when there's a problem with the children."

The AP story goes on, in fact goes out of its way, to point out that "there's no going back" meaning that there is no way to recover the past in which single parent families were a tiny percentage of the whole and where cohabitation was virtually unheard of outside of the very lowest strata of society.

But how true is that statement? Societies change, people's attitudes change and what seems lost at one time can be recovered. After the fall of the Roman Empire Christianity waned in its influence throughout Europe. Many people noted that the Empire did not fall until it became Christian and blamed Christianity for the decline and dissolution of the Empire.

During the period known as the Dark Ages (some politically correct historians have begun calling it the Early Medieval Period now) a parade of pagan barbarian tribes overran much of the old Empire and Christian England seemed on the verge of being overwhelmed by the pagan Danes. The impartial observer of the time could have been forgiven for concluding that Christianity, at least as far as the West was concerned, was a failed experiment destined to take it's place alongside the worship of Zeus and Baal in the pantheon of failed and forgotten faiths.

Yet we all know that is not how history played out. The Church survived and prospered. The barbarians, from the Danes to the Magyars (modern Hungarians), became Christians and today there are 2.1 billion people in the world who identify themselves as "Christian".

It seems to me that those who insist the most stridently that the "clock can't be turned back" are simply the people who least desire any kind of return to more traditional attitudes for their own lives. The most recent statistics indicate that the abortion rate as well as the rate of teen pregnancy is falling as is the divorce rate. Given that the trends which lead to children living with step-parents or mom's live-in boyfriend are all headed down it could very well be that we, as a culture, have gotten the message.