Sophomore Katy Thomas arrives home at 3:30 p.m after picking up her younger sister, Rachel, from school. She hurries down a hall to her room, shrugs her backpack onto the floor and kneels down to pet her dog who has been excitedly waiting all day for her to return home from school. She then leaves her room and heads back to the living room to talk with her mom for a little while about each of their days before she has to get started on her homework for the day. Later that night, Katy and the rest of the family sit down for a family dinner.
Thomas, like a current 66 percent of children in Texas, lives with both her mother and father. The number of children who live in such a household have steadily decreased within the last 50 years. The decline in that number sometimes gets attributed to the imposing of no-fault divorce laws which allow couples to divorce even if their situation does not appear as serious as it would have needed to be before no-fault laws were put into place. However, even with no-fault laws in place, Thomas continues to live with their married, biological parents.
“I really like that my mom is available if I need help with homework after school,” Thomas said. “Whenever I get home, I am welcomed by someone there who cares about me and can help me immediately if I need help or need someone to talk to.”
Fathers in two-parent households spend more time, on average, with their children than fathers in other types of families do. Since paternal figures head only seven percent of single-parent households in Texas and eight percent of single-parent households in the United States, fathers rarely have custody of their child and therefore do not have the ability to see their children as often as fathers in two-parent households might.
“Just emotionally, you have support from both sides of the family,” Thomas said. “You have a positive male role model in your life and you have a positive female role model in your life. [Parents] are the two people who created you; they gave you life. Living with them is something I think can’t be replaced.” Just emotionally, you have support from both sides of the family. — Thomas
*Two-parent family, in this case, refers only to straight, married couples
Divorced Parents
Sophomore Kayleigh Gerlach daily routine differs. She picks up her phone to respond to a text. When she sees the sender, she smiles excitedly and calls her father to FaceTime. She silently worries that she’s taking up too much of his time, he’s a busy man after all, but she continues conversation anyway, always happy to talk with him since she doesn’t see him much in person anymore. They chat for a short while about simple things such what’s happening at her school or his work before ending the call to continue with their semi-separate lives.
Gerlach’s parents divorced when she was six years old. For a while, she saw her dad every other week, then every other weekend. Then, he moved to Missouri. Now, she sees him for about two weeks during the summer and enjoys each call and FaceTime. Generally, they try to talk at least once or twice a week, however each of their busy schedules sometimes get in the way.
“When I see that he calls, I get excited because I love talking to him, but I still get a little nervous because I never want him to feel obligated to call me.” Gerlach said.
In 2001, the divorce rate was only 41 percent, not the commonly stated one in two marriages, and it has been slowly decreasing each year. Couples do get divorced though, and because 72 percent of divorces happen within the first 14 years of marriage, divorce often affects students like Gerlach at a young age.
“It put me through a lot of stress, and I blamed myself for a really long time about the whole thing just because of my dad starting a new life with a new family,” Gerlach said. “When you’re young like that, it hits you pretty hard. It put a lot of unneeded weight on me. You literally just blame yourself for him leaving. I thought it was my fault, I thought it was something I did. I thought of my mom being alone, I was always too much for her to handle.”
It put a lot of unneeded weight on me.
— Gerlach
Divorce can have a lasting psychological effect on children. Some students retract emotionally from their parents and others or have difficulty trusting people, even those they’ve been friends with for an extended period of time. On the other hand, however, divorce can have a positive effect, causing children to learn how to be responsible and mature even at a young age.
“I don’t think it hurt me. I think for a long time it made me struggle, but I think that made me stronger. It made me mature faster because I had to step up for my mom,” Gerlach said. “I had to be there for her and be as good as I could be so [the divorce] wasn’t too hard on her. I learned to cope more and to be more understanding from an early age.”
Single Parents
A study conducted in 2000 showed that about 29 percent of children in Texas lived in single-parent households. By 2014, that percentage had risen to about 34 percent, and from 1.69 million to approximately 2.38 million children. Legacy graduate Mikal Reed, who has lived in a home with only his mother since he was three, fits within this large group.
“I always saw how all my other friends would have both parents so I kind of thought I was weird, or like I didn’t really have a normal life,” Reed said. “But it didn’t really affect me when I got older. Most of my friends started turning to only have one parent so it just kind of became the new norm.”
Not having two incomes in a family can be difficult. To make it worse, women, who headed about 79 percent of Texas single-parent homes in 2014, often make seventy-nine cents or less to each dollar a man makes. Despite economic issues that often follow children in single parent families, they still seem to do well in adult life. In their youth, they learn to be more responsible, learn how they want to parent their own children and learn how to better handle conflicts.
“I think [living with one parent] has helped me. It kind of changed my goals in trying to be a better parent.” Reed said. “I can make it all on my own and be more mature.”
