Overcoming the drawbacks of growing up with a single parent, black children do as well, both academically and socially, as blacks in two-parent homes, a study by Cornell University and University of Utah researchers indicates. Research has shown that the opposite is true for white children, who seem to fare better when they live in married-couple homes.

The new study finds that black children in single-parent households do just as well as they would in two-parent homes in terms of math scores and delinquency problems.

"These race differences may reflect the nature of the social support networks available to single parents in the African-American community, which, in turn, could help relieve parental stress and economic strain and improve mental health," says Cornell social policy expert Rachel Dunifon.

The results of the study, she says, are particularly relevant in light of welfare reform legislation passed by the U.S. House of Representatives, now pending in the Senate, that would allocate $200 million a year to promote marriages.

"Whereas marriage is better for Caucasian children, we find that the math scores and delinquency measures of African-American children in single-parent homes are not significantly different than for black kids who live with married parents," says Dunifon, an assistant professor of policy analysis in the New York State College of Human Ecology at Cornell. She is the first author of a recent study in the journal Child Development (July/August 2002, vol. 73, No. 4, 1249-1264).

With co-author Lori Kowaleski-Jones of the University of Utah, Dunifon tracked a nationally representative sample of 1,560 children, ages 10-14, for more than a decade to determine how family structure, including cohabitation (living together out of marriage), and racial differences affect delinquency and math scores.

In 2000, 22 percent of children in the United States lived with a single mother: 17 percent of white children lived with a single mother, compared with 49 percent of black children. Because children are increasingly living with cohabiting parents as well, it is important to get a better understanding of the impact on child welfare of single parenthood and cohabitation vs. marriage, says Dunifon.

"We suspect that policies that lead to an increase in cohabitation could have detrimental impacts on children, which are likely to vary widely by racial groups," says Dunifon. "Our study suggests that while policies that promote marriage may benefit white children, they are likely to have little to no effect on black children."

Among the two researchers' other findings:

• Delinquency rates among black children, but not white children, decrease when mothers have more warm and supportive interactions with their children.
• White children who live in homes in which the adults aren't married (cohabitate) tend to have lower math scores than those children with married parents. Black children living with unmarried adults, however, have higher math scores but also a higher rate of delinquency than children with married parents. However, the sample of children in cohabitating homes was relatively small.

The research was supported, in part, by the National Institute of Child Health and Development.