STATISTICS OF SINGLE PARENTS

What do you think of when you read of mothers raising children without fathers? Does it incite you to indignation? Rage? And if so, against whom? The mothers who so ruthlessly exploit the benefits system with serial offspring by multiple fathers? The feckless fathers who abandon them? Or the systematic onslaught of successive governments who have dismantled the best-known building block for the stability of society: marriage and the family unit?

Whilst we are (rightly) concerned with such matters, we appear to have allowed the other end of the spectrum to have slipped from our sights. In fact, I’d go further. I’d say we have deliberately obliterated it from public scrutiny. I refer, of course, to divorce. And the fact that the legal dissolution of marriage almost invariably results in children being raised without fathers.