Heffer: Underclass of single parents lead to criminality

Simon Heffer in today’s Telegraph (“The underserving poor will be Cameron’s biggest headache”) repeats the myth of:

“an underclass of single parents that sociological surveys since Charles Murray have shown lead to poverty, criminality and underachievement by their children.”

In fact, research published last week by the OECD found that there was little or no evidence to link social problems with single parenthood, and that children in single parent families are thriving, concluding that:

“If there is a causal effect on child well-being of being brought up in a singleparent family, it is likely to be small.”

Our guest writer is Kate Bell, Director of Policy, Advice and Communications at Gingerbread

1. Tom Miller says:

   September 16, 2009 at 1:47 pm

   RT @leftfootfwd Single parents to blame, says Simon Heffer, but OECD prove he’s wrong http://bit.ly/1424v1
2. Matthew Pallas says:

   September 16, 2009 at 1:54 pm

   RT @tom_miller85 @leftfootfwd Single parents to blame, says Telegraph’s Simon Heffer, but OECD data prove he’s wrong http://bit.ly/1424v1
3. Derrin Zikks says:

   September 17, 2009 at 4:16 pm

   this would seem less head-in-the-sand and counterintuitive if you maybe posited a reason or two for these difficult “social problems”. if you acknowledge that these exist, and say that “children in single parent families are thriving” (a somewhat general statement, one might think), then perhaps the problem is… two-parent families? or what?