1

Annotated Bibliography

The Effects of a Fatherless Household on Children

Andre WorleySturt

Professor Malcolm Campbell

UWRT 1104

23 October 2018
 2

Annotated Bibliography

Brady, David, et al. “Single Mothers Are Not the Problem.” The New York Times, 10 Feb. 2018,

www.nytimes.com/2018/02/10/opinion/sunday/single-mothers-poverty.html. Accessed

20 Oct. 2018

This source is a New York Times article in which the authors believe that single mother

households do not pose a problem within the USA. The authors cite sources that state

that reducing single mother households will not reduce poverty. They also state that

generous social policies do not encourage single motherhood.

The authors of this article are all sociologists and researchers; they also work for the

‘Opinion’ section of the New York Times. This article appears to be extremely biased,

dare I say, towards the left. But they do use quite a few resources and, if their facts check

out, this article may change my original perspective on the topic of single mothers. This

article will require careful evaluation before I can use anything contained within it;

journalists are notorious for taking things out of context to support their own opinions

and this article appears to have a bad case of bully-thesis syndrome.

However, if the authors’ sources support the idea that single mother households are not a

problem, then I will most likely integrate it into my project; though, this wouldn’t change

the idea that fatherless homes are at a disadvantage, it would only mean that fatherless

homes are less common and less of a detriment to society than I originally believed.

Harris, Judith Rich. “The Outcome of Parenting: What Do We Really Know?” Journal of

Personality, vol. 68, no. 3, June 2000, pp. 625–637. EBSCOhost,

librarylink.uncc.edu/login?url=http://search.ebscohost.com.librarylink.uncc.edu/login.asp
 3

x?direct=true&db=a9h&AN=3154355&site=ehost-live&scope=site. Accessed 23 Oct.

2018

This source is an academic journal in which Harris scrutinizes David Lykenn’s belief that

an increase in crime is largely due to an increase in fatherless homes. Harris does not

believe this, and instead discusses two other possibilities to the increase in crime:

violence in movies and the loss of a common enemy (i.e. the Cold War). However,

Harris does believe that fatherless homes can have significant negative effects on children

and uses many different resources to back up her claims. The author is skeptical as to

whether there is such a thing as good parents. She does believe that bad parents, such as

those who are abusive, can have an impact on a child’s future, but she states that there

isn’t enough evidence to support the idea that a child with “very, very good” parents will

be better off than a child with “pretty good” parents.

Harris is a psychology researcher and author. She is known for challenging the idea that

adults’ personalities are determined by how they were raised by their parents. This

academic journal doesn’t appear to be biased at first, but after learning about Harris’s

beliefs and past, it is quite evident that she biased. However, that doesn’t completely take

away her credibility. This journal is well written, and even if all the ideas she believes

end up being proven wrong, she still brings up some very interesting questions.

Harris talks about how there are other factors involved, besides parents, that effect what

kind of person a child will become, and I completely agree with that, but I don’t think she

is giving enough credit to the parents. I most likely will not use this source in my project,

but it does point me in the direction of other sources and has given me some things to

think about.
 4

Lee, Dawn. Single Mother Guide. singlemotherguide.com/. Accessed 21 Oct. 2018

I wanted to find a website that had a bunch of statistics pertaining to households and this

was the best one I could find. This website is designed to offer support and resources for

single mothers, but also has a quite a bit of statistics referring to single mother

households. Besides that, there isn’t much more information, but all the statistics have

references which could become new sources of information for me.

The only information I could find about Dawn Lee is that she is a single mother and she

wants to help other single mothers. The fact that I cannot find any more information

about her would normally cause her to lose credibility, but I think I can use this website

as a good source of information since it is only filled with facts that can be easily

verified. This website is clearly designed for single mothers but compared to the other

statistic-based websites I’ve looked at, this one is high quality.

I’m going to need facts to support my research, and this website is going to help me find

them. There is a long reference list on this website that will very useful for me. Even if

only half of the statistics mentioned on this website are true, I will still save a lot of time.

Now I won’t have to spend countless hours searching through Google and Academic

Search Complete just find a few statistics, Lee has already done that.