These effects are most pronounced for White girls. However, in a study designed to test Hetherington's findings among Black and White college girls, no differences were found between girls with resident fathers and those with nonresident fathers in sex-role attitudes, romantic love, and relations with males. However, loss of the father before age five was associated with greater approval seeking. Father availability tends to have an attenuating effect on boys' aggressive tendencies, suggesting that aggression is the indirect effect of inconsistent contact with the father. The Single Parent Paradigm Children living in mother-only families almost inevitably experience financial challenges as a result of father absence.
Economic marginality creates numerous challenges for parenting.
For the benefit of their children, many single mothers must struggle to maintain consistent child support and parenting relations with nonresident fathers. Empirically, the challenge for researchers is to distinguish the effects of poverty itself from the effects of living in a particular family structure. Children from single-mother families often suffer from poor academic performance, lower educational attainment, and early pregnancy, typically due to the loss of income that accompanies the absence of the father from the household. Single mothers have the highest poverty rates of any group in the United, and African-American single mothers are more than twice as poor as White single mothers. Although the relationship between divorced fathers and their children may be considered a special case of the single parent paradigm, it is critical to view divorce as a process rather than an isolated event in the life of the child.