Recently I came across an interesting article from the May 2003 issue of Psychology Today.
According to the article, researchers at the University of Washington studied data related to 600 children of single mothers. The information was taken from a national survey that’s been compiling data on family life for nearly 40 years.
The researchers noticed a couple of things about these single Moms. First, an unwed mother is 42% more likely to eventually marry her child’s father if the child is a boy than if the child is a girl. Second, even when there’s no biological relation, single Moms with boys are 11% more likely to marry than are single Moms with girls.
Why should this be? The researchers speculated that a number of factors may be at work:
- fathers may prefer sons
- single mothers may seek male role models for their sons
- unrelated boyfriends may join the family partly because of a boy’s need for a father figure
Another researcher suggested that mothers of boys may be more motivated to seek marriage because they need more help, especially when it comes to things like discipline, with boys than with girls.
I’m really not sure what to make of this study.
On the one hand, as a female, it disturbs me that female children may be viewed as less “desirable” by some men. On the other hand, as a mother of a boy, I like the idea that some men recognize and are willing to be a boy’s father figure. And on the third hand, I can certainly appreciate the need for help with raising a boy! (As I’ve always said, I’m not a guy; how am I supposed to know about guy stuff?)
There’s really not enough to this study to reach any valid conclusions. The number of people studied was small. In addition, other than guessing about why they got the results they got, the researchers apparently didn’t do any serious digging into the factors that may have actually led to their findings.
So I don’t think we should give too much weight to one small unscientific study. Still, I found the results to be thought-provoking and thought you might too.