Montreal's international conference on single parenthood

   This March Montreal hosted an international conference on poverty and single parenthood. It's a particularly relevant issue here, being a world capital of parental separation. The province wants to research this issue, and is willing to fork out up to $360,000 to researchers to get to the bottom of this.
   I spent some time looking at the site and found many thoughtful thoughts from thoughtful people, including a very long speech by a Sir something or other from Britain who argues that the government should simply give more money to single parent families.
   That's logical because there are charts and graphs that show that single parent families are very much poorer than double parent families.
   But I didn't see much discussion on what causes families to become single parent families. Back at Bell Canada it would drive me nuts when colleagues would explain that they broke up because they were arguing too much and didn't want their kids to see the quarreling.
   Ideally the government could fund a program to discourage single parenthood but that might hurt our fragile birth rate. The lower birthrate could be alleviated through a special program where we reward immigration application points to those who already have a bunch of small children.
   We used to think that since people from the third world tend to have a lot of children, we could just let some in and they'd all go and have 8 kids each, so they could pay the boomers pension in 20 years from now. But that doesn't work because once here they don't have kids either.
   Anyway, I'm getting off track here.
   Children in single parent families suffer not just poverty but are often subject to other problems, including neglect. Although, it's true that sometimes kids with both biological parents also suffer a lot. Here, for example, is a recent case of a kid who is very smart but whose mother is retarded and whose dad thinks he's a pregnant hermaphrodite.
   But often the absence of parental surveillance - something that logistically goes hand in hand with single parenthood - can lead to serious problems.
   Here's a dramatic true-life tale of an 8 year old boy in Montreal North whose sister had a husband, aged 20. This man would come over and sexually molest the boy, this was back in 1972. The victim suffered as an adult, became a prostitute, went on drugs, straightened himself out, got counselling and now has a regular life and job. But he still struggles with the abuse, so he sued his brother in law for $305,000. On January 15, a court awarded him a $195,000 settlement.
   These are emotionally-packed and complicated problems but if you get a chance to be part of the solution, take it.