Comment by jonahx
2 years ago
Fair point in theory and I'm not familiar with the literature, but I'd guess at least some researchers have studied ways of controlling for this: eg, looking at cases where father dies early and mother does not remarry, single mothers who adopt or do artificial insemination, etc.
Yes, my (limited) understanding of the literature is that this is exactly what they do. You don’t see the same single-fatherhood effects when looking at the children of widows, for example.