Critical Thinking Draft and self-evaluation
December 25, 2013

One of the arguments in my paper states that “when both parents are in the home with the child every day, that child has more stability.” According to Professor Paul Amato of Pennsylvania State University, who recently conducted a research, he wanted to know the difference between children raises in two parent house hold verses one parent house hold. His research proved that “Children from single parent families have “more behavioral problems, more emotional problems, and lower levels of school engagement (that is, caring about school and doing homework).”
This argument is informal http://www.families.com/blog/children-benefit-from-two-parent-families Then my next argument stated that “when single mothers are raising children without the father in the home children are being disciplined less.”
Therefore I done some research and found that according to (Campbell, 1993) “Not only do fathers enforce gender norms more than mothers, they do so more strongly on boys than girls. For “most men…an effeminate son is far more worrying than a tomboy daughter. The father places heavy emphasis on the avoidance of feminine behaviors, rather than on the active encouragement of masculine ones.” Fathers’ own “masculinity” influences boys’ development in ways that are unclear at best.”166 Even though I have some evidence that proves my argument, this is still an informal fallacy because not all children of single mother behave in this manner.
Campbell 1993, enforce-toddlers 20-21; Snow, Jacklin, and Maccoby 1983, dolls 229; Archer and Lloyd 1985, 213-2
This then led my into my leading argument which states that Child behavior is worst today than it was ten years ago, because mothers are having children at a younger age.
It is true children are being born to young mothers today, because In 2012, there were 29.4 births for every 1,000 adolescent females ages 15-19, or 305,420 babies born to females in this age group. However not all children are being born to young mothers only SOME not all. This is also an informal fallacy.
Also research shows that “lack of maturity, life experience and social supports hinder a teenage mother’s ability to appropriately shape her child’s behavior and activities.” Therefore this statement can be true also, however not all mother are this way, so this is an informal fallacy as well.
To conclude “After controlling for material characteristic and year of birth, Hofferth & Reid (2002) found that children of teen mothers had more behavior problems than children born to mothers aged 20 and older. Also, the two found higher levels of fighting among children born to mothers aged 18 and younger compared with mothers aged 22 and older. Therefore, these are good evidence however, there is no proof that this happens to all mothers. This is an informal fallacy.