Contexte théorique de
Golombok (2010)
Research has consistently shown that children in single-parent
families are at greater risk for emotional and behavioural problems,
and for poor academic achievement, than are children from traditional
two-parent homes (for reviews see Amato, 2000; Pryor and Rodgers,
2001; Coleman and Glenn, in press). However, these studies have
largely focused on single-mother families that have resulted from
parental separation or divorce. In an examination of four nationally
representative samples in the USA, McLanahan and Sandefur (1994)
showed that adolescents raised by single mothers during some
period of their childhood were twice as likely to drop out of high
school, twice as likely to have a baby before the age of 20 and one
and a half times more likely to be out of work in their late teens or
early twenties than those from a similar background who grew up
with two parents at home. Similarly, the National Child Development
Study in the UK, which has followed up a large general population
sample of children born in 1958, found that children from singleparent
families were at greater risk for psychological problems than
a matched group of children from intact families not only in childhood
(Ferri, 1976) but also in early adulthood (Chase-Lansdale et al., 1995)
and middle age (Elliot and Vaitilingam, 2008). Most recently, an investigation
of single-mother families from the Avon Longitudinal Study of
Pregnancy and Childhood (ALSPAC), a representative community
study of 14 000 mothers and their children born in the 1990s in
the UK, also found that children from single-parent families showed
higher levels of psychological disorder than their counterparts from
two-parent homes (Dunn et al., 1998). Although most epidemiological
studies of father-absent families have focused on children’s psychological
adjustment, children’s gender development has also been investigated
using the ALSPAC sample, with no differences in gender role
behaviour identified between children in single-mother families and
children in traditional families for either boys or girls (Stevens et al.,
2002).
