The article, Beyond Family Structure: Family Process Studies Help to Reframe Debates About What’s Good for Children, talks about the topic of issues that are brought up when it comes to what is best for children. Topics like, should single parenthood be discouraged and marriage encouraged? Should marriage between same-sex partners be legalized or forbidden? Should divorce be made more difficult or easier to obtain? Should poor families receive income supplements or tax breaks? These are all questions that are brought up and debated in the article.
When it comes to the impact of single parenthood on children, it becomes controversial because some researchers argue that the correlation between single parenthood and negative outcomes for children reflects a selection
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The article states that a number of books and articles state that for except for situations of domestic violence or abuse, parents in unhappy marriages should attempt to stay together to avoid the negative impact of divorce on their children. But this becomes controversial because almost all the research these articles and books refer to adopts a family structure perspective that simply following children of divorce over time or comparing them with similar samples of children whose parents did not divorce. The researchers from these books and article argue that children who have long-term distress from their parents’ divorce would not being having these problems if only the parents had stayed together. But studies of families in which the parents are unhappy indicate that keeping the family structure intact without regard to the quality of the key family relationships dos not guarantee children’s well-being, and that data from a second comparison group is necessary to support the fact that children wouldn’t have problems if their parents had stayed married (P. Cowan and C. Cowan