Lindsay Mitchell: Wrong to blame poverty for our high infant mortality

COMMENT

The overwhelming majority of single parents with dependent children rely on a benefit - 83 per cent at the last Census. Their children form most of the group that are regularly described as "children living in poverty".

The newly appointed Commissioner for Children, Cindy Kiro, has reiterated the reduction of child poverty as a major goal. She is an admirer of Scandinavia because, she said, in a radio interview, Scandinavia doesn't tolerate child poverty.

This is largely right, but does alleviating poverty among single parent families actually improve their children's outcomes?

A Swedish study tracked one million children for a decade and found that the children with single parents were twice as likely to develop a psychiatric illness such as severe depression or schizophrenia, to kill themselves or attempt suicide, and to develop an alcohol-related disease.

Girls were three times more likely to become drug addicts if they lived with a sole parent, and boys four times more likely.

Although the researchers concluded that financial hardship, which they defined as renting rather than owning a home, and being on welfare, made a difference, other experts questioned the financial influence because Swedish single mothers are not poor when compared with those in other countries.

The conclusions section of the study, which was published in the Lancet on January 25 this year, found: "Growing up in a single-parent family has disadvantages to the health of the child. Lack of household resources plays a major part in increased risks. However, even when a wide range of demographic and socioeconomic circumstances are included in multivariate models, children of single parents still have increased risks of mortality, severe morbidity, and injury."

And from the discussion: "From an international perspective, the socioeconomic situation of a single parent in Sweden is quite favourable, mainly because of opportunities for state-subsidised day-care and financial support. In a comparison of self-perceived health between single mothers and mothers with partners in Britain and Sweden, the increased relative risk was the same in both countries, despite the more favourable social policy in Sweden."

Sweden's social policies have not prevented the increased risks to children or improved the health of their parents, so why hold them up as a model to emulate?

Indeed, it would seem that, in general, the problems of single parents and their families cannot be alleviated by social policy. The problems are most probably associated with the difficulty of parenting alone, the stresses of being the main caregiver and breadwinner, and the single parent characteristics and behaviour which might be associated with the very reasons they are separated or divorced.

Dr Stephen Scott, a child health and behaviour researcher at the Institute of Psychiatry in London, says, "More irritable people are more likely to become separated but they are also more likely to have, separated or not, more irritable children."

So, the most important challenge is to discourage people from becoming single parents in the first place, especially if they are highly unsuited to parenthood or parenting alone.

Yet international research and policy papers consistently discuss how to improve the lot of single-parent families - never how to arrest their growth.

The only way this is going to happen is for government to do less - not more. Whatever government pays for it will get more of.

Whatever it incentivises, whatever it puts a price tag on, you can be sure demand for it will grow.

Government created an avalanche with the introduction of the DPB. Now it has a responsibility to wean people off welfare and stop new ones coming on.

* Lindsay Mitchell is a research fellow for the Institute for Liberal Values and specialises in issues relating to welfare policy.