Dr. Sarah Buckland "God's design for the family"

And just a reminder as a little disclaimer here is that for those of you here in zoom we ask that you keep your microphones and cameras off during Sarah's presentation. And then if you have questions you can post them into the into the comments, and that also goes for Facebook Live, you can post your comments, any questions into the comments and chat there on Facebook as well.

And I believe that we're, we're ready that maybe we don't even need to tell a joke tonight. Is that, is that right, Robin. Are we good to go.

Well you'll see you'll see a joke on my screen, unless you want to.

We're good. Okay, we're good so I'm going to go ahead and introduce I'm Terry cameras out here with creation fellowship, Santy and we're a group of friends bound by our common agreement that the creation account as told in Genesis is a true depiction of how God created the universe and all life from nothing in just six days a few thousand years ago, we've been meeting most Thursday nights here on zoom since June of 2020.

We've been blessed with presentations by pastors teachers doctors cartoonists scientists apologists and all around smarty pants people who love the Lord and have a message to share. You can find most of our past videos by searching creation fellowship Santy, that's SANTEE on YouTube.

We also have a bit shoot channel of creation fellowship no spaces, and you can find us on rumble by searching for CFS 2020. Follow us on our creation fellowship Santee Facebook page and sign up for our email list by emailing creation fellowship Santee at gmail .com, so you don't miss any of our upcoming speakers tonight we're blessed to have with us, Sarah Sarah Buckland from Jamaica, Sarah Buckland is a Christian Jamaican interdisciplinary researcher and author, with a background spanning Bible evidences Spanish language studies and the environmental and social sciences, Sarah accepted the Lord at the young age of eight and has been a Christian for nearly 20 years.

Sarah is also presently a PhD candidate in the Department of Geography and Geology at the University of the West Indies Mona campus, and is also a past student of creation apologetics Teachers College by the creation training initiative in 2018.

Sarah's drive for Christian advocacy has also led her to produce her own ministry called chosen to glow ministries, aimed at reaching youth with by with the Bible in the Caribbean and beyond. Sarah also actively participates in Christian writing ministry and has had over a dozen of her articles and book chapters published in Jamaica, the United States, Trinidad and Guyana.

She is also a member of the International Association for creation and a student member of the creation research society. Since 2016, Sarah's academic work has also received recognition through the Jamaican Prime Minister's National Youth Award for Excellence in academics and the University of the West Indies postgraduate wall of excellence.

Sarah's ministry initiatives and research work may be followed at her website, Sarah Faye Buckland calm, and I'll put that into the comments on Facebook and here on zoom. And with that, we're happy to turn it over to you, Sarah, go ahead.

The Wisdom and God's Design for the Family

Thank you so much, Terry thanks everyone. I really appreciate the invitation, and this opportunity to just present a few findings and information from the scriptures on the wisdom and God's design for the family and I'll be taking a social science perspective.

Before we go into my presentation, I just wanted to share a little humor. Before we begin, this is a video that had been actually going around Facebook, which you might, you might have seen before, but it actually has an important message that we could all, we could all learn from.

So the video apparently is not playing. Um, let's see. I wonder if I should describe it, or if I don't know home art, let me see I don't want to break the presentation but anyway the scenario is that this professor.

It's set in Africa and this secular professor sees a family, um, you know, eating and he was saying that okay, I see your success in the, they had a YouTube, a YouTube video thing going on and apparently they won an award and so they were congratulating them, and then this child said that.

Well, it's God though, it's not us, it's God. And then he was saying, God, where is your God. And then the girl said, our God is in heaven, and I said, can you see your God, and then she said no. Can you touch your God, he said no.

And then he said, according to science what you can't see or touch cannot doesn't exist so God doesn't exist. And then he was about to go, but the girl called him back and said, process of, like, do you have, like, how did she say it again.

That's why I wanted the video, but I'm saying, do, can you see your sense. And he said, do you have, do you have sense, and he said, um, oh no so how do you know that there is a God. There is no God and then he said I use my sense.

And then she said, um, can you see your sense, he said no, can you touch your sense and he said, and then said no, and she said, according to science, what you can't see or touch doesn't exist. That means you have no sense.

So, right.

So what I just wanted to really take away from that wait. This thing did not come up. I had a little. Oh, I don't know what's going on with this. Anyway, I had two takeaways from this video basically.

Number one is that you have to use honest logic, when it comes on to science because you have, you have claimed people who claim and appeal to science, but they're actually not being logical and you can't know everything from what we call science, you have to know how to separate the interpretations from reality, and from facts.

Second thing is also the importance of training of our children. So, be able to counteract and understand when there is truth or error, being fed to them, so it's important that we ground our children as a family, so that they are not led astray by what even more educated persons bring to them that they're rooted and grounded in their knowledge of God and their knowledge of scripture so that's what I wanted to actually show you here.

But that didn't work. Hopefully the other slides work. But before I go into this, I just wanted to let you know well some of this was already said, but right I just completed the PhD and the presentation content includes work that was presented at various conferences locally as well as on the International Day of Families.

This year at the UN. So, some of this content is found elsewhere but that's just a disclaimer that it's there. So my presentation will really actually take five main sections. The first I'll be speaking about the relevance of the topic to both creation science and evangelism, I'll then be going briefly into the objectives of the presentation and defining the key terms.

Then I'll be just briefly going through the methods and the sources of my materials, I'll be mostly focusing on three studies that I did, and also comparing secondary data. In my main part of my presentation I'll be just presenting five key takeaways from the research, and then finally I'll be just presenting implications for faith and outreach, what does, what do these findings actually mean for us.

Creation Science, Social Sciences, and Evangelism

So since we are a family in creation, let me just begin there. I'm not sure why I'm seeing like the top part of my screen is being blocked and so I'm not seeing the top of my heading. But anyway, let's begin in creation.

So, yeah, creation is a reflection of God's greatness, as we are in creation fellowship we are familiar with most of our creation scientists being focusing on the biological aspects, chemical aspects, geology, physics, all of these that provide glimpses of the divine order.

But what I'll be presenting to you today is another aspect that I have not been seeing very much focused on in creation science, which deals with the behaviors of human beings, social sciences, and so I hope that this actually fills a gap and lets us understand more about the wisdom of God's laws.

But most of God's laws really govern our behavior patterns and so social sciences actually has a key that is very vital for us to really look at. So, just a little on the importance of social sciences in evangelism, we can discover the value of God's laws looking at social sciences, just as we discover useful patterns through natural law, we can find the secrets of optimal societal function to be evident when God's laws on behavior are followed.

So, I just have two examples on the screen here. So, if you look at psychology, many psychologists have found the benefits on our health by just following, being forgiving, and showing gratitude. It's excellent for emotional health and joy also has an impact, a positive impact on our health.

So, social sciences like psychology can be used to actually get insights on why God tells us or what are some of the secondary benefits beyond the spiritual law on why God could have given us these commands in our lives.

Another importance of social sciences in evangelism is to combat secular ideology because if we look around in our world, we actually see that we are bombarded with an assault against God's design and the families, families are actually at the center of modern spiritual warfare.

And so, if you even just look at things like fornication and LGBT and abortion, all of these are social issues, and it's really something that people might take for granted, but God's laws, the violation of God's laws have more consequences than just merely the spiritual consequences that are outlined in the Bible.

God knowing and having things, setting out his laws for our good actually will have physical benefits for following his laws, and that can be, insights into these can actually be seen through social sciences.

Another importance is in policymaking. If we actually, as Christians, go out and actually look and do conduct research, we can help to shape the policies. One of the biggest problems I'm seeing is that the dominant view that is out there in the literature is not Christian based, even though you can use secular methods like social sciences and actually see insights into why God says what he says.

So unfortunately, our governments are using wrong evidences that are really based on political motives. But I believe that more Christians need to step into the field of social sciences so that we can have more of a pool of evidence that is out there for Christian based policy.

So that being said, I'm going to be just giving you the aim and scope of my presentation. My main aim here tonight is to explore the relevance of God's design for families in modern society using social science research as a tool.

My scope of focus, I'll be mostly focusing on three primary research studies that I conducted in Jamaica, and I'll also be complementing my discussion by case studies globally. And specifically, as I had mentioned, I'm looking at the impact of family structure and family interpersonal relationships on children.

Defining Social Sciences and the Family Design Standard

So now that we've gone through the introduction, let me define a few of the key terms that I've been mentioning and that will be core to our discussion tonight. So firstly, what is social sciences? Social sciences really is just a branch of science that deals with the functioning of human society and its interpersonal relationships among individuals and also institutions, as the word social would suggest in the science.

So social sciences, though, is a really different approach than natural sciences. There are some precautions to consider because human behavior is really complex. So it's called soft science because it's not usually studied in a controlled environment.

So many different things you'll have to consider as a scientist to see, how can I reduce bias in this? How can I actually isolate and attribute causation in social sciences? So it is more complex because we are not deterministic.

We have free will and we don't always act rationally. So usually social scientists use what's called a correlational research design. I know this is not a science research method, so I'm not going to be going into that.

But we usually use statistics to control factors. So as I mentioned, the design of the research is very important. And I'm just mentioning this because a part of my presentation, I'm going to be briefly giving us some tips for how to discern, you know, why some studies don't agree with others.

So we can actually discern what we hear as a basis that might seem to contradict God's laws. There must be something wrong when something contradicts God's laws based on evidence, right? So there are special technical requirements in social sciences.

You need informed consent. There's ethical board approvals, etc. So there is no wonder that the focus is not on social science in creation research. But hopefully, we will get there as a community. So next key term is design.

What is design? So firstly, many definitions exist, but the one that I actually chose here, actually, I believe, covers four main features of design. So firstly, let me just read it here. So I'm going to just break this down so that we don't get lost in all of this that was just said.

All right, so it mentions specification and components. That really points to structure. It mentions intent to accomplish goals, that points to purpose. It points to, it says a particular environment that points to contextual considerations, and the set of requirements and constraints, we can look at that as the functionality conditions.

So I'm going to take these components of design and apply it to the family and look at scripture, at what scripture says about each of these, particularly structure, purpose, and functionality. And look at, compare what I found in my data and what the scripture says the family's design should be in terms of its structure, its purpose, and its functionality.

So I'm going to be just going through that before I look at my results. So is there a blueprint standard that we can use to compare and measure what are God's intended outcomes for families? So as I mentioned, let's look at the three of them.

I have some scriptures. So in terms of the structure, we see in Genesis 1 verse 27 that God made male and female at the beginning. So we see the structure is heterosexual. God also mentioned that a man should leave his father and his mother and keep to his wife.

And in, definitely in the New Testament, monogamy is designed in the marital, in the relationship of, in the family of the parents. Finally, I will just be highlighting about marital union, that that is the context in which families are actually designed originally by God.

So that's structure. And we will be going into each of these in my presentation and seeing what are the benefits that we can actually see in terms of children's outcomes when people follow these, these conditions versus when they are violated.

Next is the purposes of family. I have just selected two scriptures about God's purposes for family. One is to raise God with children as Malachi 2 verse 15 says. And the next is companionship where God says it's not good for man to be alone.

And finally, functionality. What does scripture say about family's functionalities? Firstly, spiritual support and evangelism, Deuteronomy 6 speaks about parents, when they're rising, when they're going to bed, we should always teach our children to follow God and to seek Him.

Physically providing is also mentioned in the Bible. In 1 Timothy 5 verse 8, for example, it says that if you don't look after your family, you're worse than an unbeliever. And in Colossians 3 verse 19, it speaks about mutual support where husbands should not be bitter with their wives, etc.

We're supposed to be supportive in a family unit. So the hypothesis then is that if one of these biblical hallmarks is broken, there will likely eventually be measurable externalizing adverse outcomes evidence.

So just to quickly go through how I went about finding out or testing these hypotheses, I'm going to just briefly tell you about my data sets and how I analyze them before I go into the results. So my primary data sets, as I mentioned, there are three.

There was one that I did across Kingston, Jamaica, which is the capital of our country. There's one that was done among college age students, and there was a larger one that I did from secondary data available at my university, which was reanalyzed by me.

All right, so for the high school data, it's targeted boys and girls from ages 11 to 19, and I also conducted separate interviews with guidance counselors. There was a preliminary sample size of 70, but I added that with other data and compared.

So with the sampling methods, I used actually a blind experimental design. So students were not aware of who was going to be, they were just given the questionnaire. However, they were chosen by their teachers with codes on the questionnaire without the students actually knowing that they were being categorized into badly behaved or well behaved students.

So what the teachers based on their students' normal behaviors in their classes, whether they were rowdy or fight, fought a lot, etc. They were given specific questionnaires, all had the same questions, but I did not rely on the students telling me if they've gotten detentions or if they had fights, etc.

So that was a control that I had. I also sampled from each grade level with a mixture of all girls, all boys, and four educational schools. For the college age students, there were 16 to 25 years old, and there was an equal sample of males and females.

For the reanalysis data, there were 3 ,365 students sampled, and similar age group at the other high school sampled from Kingston. And as I mentioned, the methodology is very important. I used random sampling for the bias.

So what were we interested to know from the surveys? Specifically, I asked, I didn't ask it in that way, but I found out from my analysis, how family structure influenced students' behavior. Particularly, their likelihood to be fighting at school, to skip school, to smoke, steal, and whether or not they received specific school disciplinary actions like detentions, demerit suspensions.

And also how family structure influenced students' emotional health, namely their feelings of being loved, their feelings of safety, being provided for, understood, and not feeling abandoned. I also looked at how family structure influenced students' academic attainment.

I did the same thing with family involvement, or its influence on all of the above. But specifically, family involvement was gauged by five different variables. Parents' knowledge of where the student was after school hours and on weekends.

Parents' general knowledge of where the student is wherever, whenever. Parents' attention to their schoolwork, their control of their time, their coming at night, how well they knew their close friends.

So those were the five main family involvement proxies. And I compared the findings from Jamaica with those internationally. So just to be a little bit more specific, I wanted to find out if there were significant differences in behavioral tendencies and academic performances based on marital status.

So some of the surveys actually went into great detail. So we looked at single fathers versus single mothers. We didn't group single parents all the time. And there was also looking at widowed and blended family types.

So we tried to be as detailed as possible. We also looked at cohabiting. So whether they lived with both parents or not. And all of these attention proxies, as I mentioned before. And we also did some demographic controls to look at what are the most significant family related or demographic factors that affect students' behavioral tendencies and academic performance.

So regression techniques, I won't be going into that. But just to clarify, it's a statistical method to infer causation. So those were some of the methods that I employed in my study. So as I mentioned, some of the controls were demographic in nature.

So I kept gender, age constant when comparing the impact of family design on behavior to try and see how can I attribute what I'm seeing. Is this actually pointing to this versus that? As I mentioned before, I used several sources to also retest the same phenomenon.

And I also used qualitative data to get actually more depth in understanding what was going on so I could actually probe further. Alright, so now that we're done with the preliminaries, let's go into the real thing.

So I'm going to be just focusing on five key areas in which God's design for family show optimal outcomes for children. So how I'm actually going to do this, I'm going to be having before each one, there's a scripture that pertains to a specific aspect that I would be looking at with the results.

So I'm going to look at what God's prescription and then I compare what I found in the field. So the first aspect is family structure. I chose a scripture, Matthew 19, verse four to five to speak about what the Bible says about family structure.

I use that instead of Genesis because many persons, some persons claim that Jesus never spoke about what family structure should be. Some persons say that Jesus never said you can't be LGBT. So let me just get it from Jesus' mouth.

So this is God's biblical specification for family design in terms of structure. What does research practice show? Alright, so this is an overview of my sample from Kingston, where the teachers identified the behavioral group.

So based on just looking at who the teachers identified as being well behaved, what these students said their family structure was. 45 of those who were well behaved were from nuclear families, 38 were from single parent families, 17 were from extended.

We basically see a mirror opposite image with the badly behaved students where 45 were single parent, 24 were nuclear, 17 were extended and 14 were blended. One point, even though 45 to 38 does not seem like a large margin, just to give you a context of the Jamaican society, it's actually estimated that 90 of all families in Jamaica are single parent.

Well, they're born out of wedlock. But over 50%, I think it was about 70%, were actually single parent families. And so to find that percentage of being nuclear, being well behaved, is actually something that was significant.

However, I must hastily say though, that this does not, this shows that it's not that all single parent families cannot have some well behaved outcomes. And I'll be going into that a little bit further in the presentation.

So just to clarify my stance on what I believe the data is saying. So the first main finding that I'll be showing is that more positive behavioral and academic outcomes were found in families with structures following the biblical design.

So other than about what the teachers identified in terms of their behaviors, you'd see the similar thing with student leaders, there were nearly two thirds of all student leaders were from nuclear or extended families.

While 38 of student leaders were from single parent households. And when you look at the detention cohorts, 80 of those were actually from single parent homes and only 20 were from nuclear families.

So that was from the Kingston survey and a similar pattern was found in my college sample. In the college sample, students from single mother homes in particular actually recorded higher rates of smoking, truancy and school dropouts than other family structure types.

Interestingly, however, proportional tendencies of the students from single father home did not display these tendencies. In wider society, there was a study done by our police force, Jamaican Constabulary Force of prison inmates, and they actually found similarly that two thirds of prison inmates came from family backgrounds other than nuclear.

So that all of that points to that the optimal environment of bringing up children in terms of their likelihood, their likelihood of coming out good, it's not that it's absolute, because it's more than a family that takes a child to become a leader or to especially, you know, become a Christian.

But the likelihood is far greater from this data to actually have positive outcomes. When we look at academic achievement, a similar finding was actually emerging from the data that high school students to married parents were 1 .3 times more likely to have more positive outcomes in academic performance than those with unmarried parents.

Whether those unmarried parents were cohabiting, whether they were single, whether they were divorced, separated, or widowed. And to me, that is also very significant, especially with the fact that it's not just having both parents around cohabiting.

There's actually a difference in outcomes that were actually found among persons who had married parents than cohabiting parents. Moving on a little bit quickly, similar findings were actually emerging in international literature that I looked at.

Even in Jamaica, let me just start with another Jamaican study that was done about 28, 30 years ago, 29 years ago. Jamaican girls from father absent homes were actually 300 more likely to end up pregnant in their teens than girls from homes with the father present.

So that again points to the importance of father, homes with the father present as well. There was another study that was significant that was done in Texas. It was a longitudinal study. And there were differences actually found between cohabiting and married couples where adolescents from cohabiting families were more likely to engage in nonviolent delinquency, like stealing, for example, than compared with those from two biological married families, parents, their married parents.

There was another study that was done on Haitian immigrants in the US, and they found that sexual activity was less likely among respondents who lived with both parents than those who lived with either a parent or with friends.

And there were also higher levels of mental distress and aggression among participants who were sexually active in the sample. And the last example of an international study on the structural impact of families on youth delinquency was this one done by Maharaj, Nunez, and Renwick.

This one was one of the largest studies that were done in the Caribbean. Over 25 years studying 17 countries, and they found that single parent households, especially fatherless ones again, were found to be at risk in engaging in early sexual activity and teen pregnancies.

Parental Involvement and Children's Academic and Behavioral Outcomes

So beyond the structure, another hallmark of God's design is parental involvement. So I have two scriptures on the screen here, one from Proverbs 1 verses 8 to 9, tear my son your father's instruction and forsake not your mother's teaching for they are a grateful garland for your head and pendants for your neck.

Another one is in Proverbs 23 verse 22, hearken unto thy father that begot thee and despise not thy mother when she is old. So the Bible speaks to complementarity and efficiency in parenting with both parents being involved in instructing their children and that the children should listen.

So when families follow this specification, and when they don't, is there a difference? So I found that children with married parents, let me go back, have more sustained involvement in their child's daily life than unmarried parents.

So that's the first part of this. So in the high school survey across Jamaica, the likelihood of parental involvement was actually found to increase by 160 among students whose parents were married compared with those with unmarried parents.

Specifically, children whose parents were married or who lived with both parents were 1 .3 times more likely to have paid very close attention to their schoolwork. They were more likely to know about their whereabouts after school and on weekends.

I should note, though, that the effect was stronger among females in the sample. They were three times more likely, parents were three times more likely to know where their female, their girl was than the boy.

And it was also significantly varied based on age. So the parents were more likely to know where their children who were aged 15 and under than those who are older. In terms of the impact of quality time on the question as to whether family members spent more time with them, 69 of those who stated their family spent quality time with them were also from nuclear families.

So again, you see the efficiency that married parents actually have on their ability to be more involved in the child's life as the Bible has specified. But beyond this, does parental involvement really matter in a child's life?

So we did test that. And the main finding here is that yes, higher parental involvement was significantly linked with less delinquency and better academic performance in school. So from the reanalysis data set in Jamaica, across Jamaica, children with families with high parental involvement, including having a set curfew for their child, knowing their child's friendships and their whereabouts outside of school hours were 220 less likely.

To skip school, they were 160 less likely to have behavioral problems, and they were 170 also more likely to display more positive outcomes in school behavior, particularly less disciplinary problems and better academic performance than students whose parents did not.

The two most important parental control variables from this study was parental, parents' control of students' nighttime behavior or where they are. So that was significant for both less likelihood of them skipping school and improved academic performance.

The second most important variable was their knowledge, parents' knowledge of the student's friends. That was found to be significant for student academic performance in particular. And when I saw this, I thought of 1 Corinthians 15, verse 33, where God said that bad companions bring good character.

And so, you know, that was another design tip. So parents who actually thought about, okay, who's my friend, who's my child spending time with, actually help their child in other areas of their life, just by following that design tip.

So looking at other studies internationally, I think this is just one example here that I'm going to point to. This was in the United Kingdom. The sample was 13 ,221 children and preteens. They found that there were higher likelihoods for antisocial tendencies among respondents with weak parental closeness and disadvantaged family backgrounds.

So parents, families whose parents weren't involved well in their, you know, supervising them and disciplining their children had more antisocial tendencies. Now I'm just going to briefly just move away from my data now and look at the implications of this particular design feature in society.

So the Bible and the social sciences evidences overwhelmingly defend more parental involvement. But we actually see that society is moving away from parental involvement. I'm going to just show you two articles that I came across.

One is in the AMA Journal of Ethics, where the headline is limiting parental rights in medical decision making. It says that, you know, just to highlight a little section that if a child is not of an age where he or she cannot contribute to a process, the decision of a physically or mentally competent parent might not be in the best interest of the child.

And they say parents have a legal obligation to refrain from actions that may harm their child. I'm going to just pause here a little bit, because we have to be vigilant about the words that they're putting into these, the definitions.

What do they mean by harm? Would a parent in their right mind, because they just said the parent is competent, want to harm their child? So when you look at the main context of what's going on now, especially in medical decision making, we actually have cases where parents have lost custody of their children because they refused them to do transgender surgery.

They refused for them to do conduct an abortion. And just those things, and the literature starts to define these as harming the children. But when we actually see, because here at the end, if people might not believe what I'm saying, it speaks about religious objections to treatment having a long history of acceptance.

So it is talking about religious objections to what they define as treatment. So these are some things that we have to think about. Why is it that when parents are involved with their child, based on religious premises, that the society, despite the evidence of parental involvement, having a good impact on a child's overall life, emotional health, academic performance, even physical health, why is it that we're moving away from more parental involvement?

This other case here was in Germany, that a couple lost custody of their children for, you see it here, because they were homeschooling their children according to the Christian faith. In Germany, it is forbidden, despite the country having signed several international agreements that guarantees parents the right to decide their direct education of their children.

So as we can see here, society is moving one way, the Bible and the science says no, parental involvement is good, but that's why we need more Christians involved to actually lobby on evidence-based policies on good science.

So just wanted to get that in here before I move on. So now my third point is the design feature of families being the hub of physical and emotional support. So the scripture here, 1 Timothy 5 verse 8, which is, if any do not take care of their relatives, especially the members of their own family, they have denied the faith and are worse than an unbeliever.

So why is this so important? Is there a difference as well, based on other design features that will make an environment more conducive to fulfill this other design feature? So yes, as you can see on the screen, children who are from married, children of married parents, I just did that, had higher levels of emotional health than those from single parent homes.

So in the Kingston High School sample, children who live with married parents had better emotional health than from other structures. In particular, they mentioned feeling more of a sense of security, having higher self-esteem and getting more appreciation than those with single parent households.

You see two graphs here, and they're almost mirror images having the opposite. One was asked, do you have negative feelings due to being from a single parent family? And 63 of those respondents said yes, who were from a single parent family, that they do have negative feelings.

Some of these negative feelings included feeling unloved, feeling neglected and abandoned, unprovided for, unimportant, misunderstood, inferior. And we actually had this as an open-ended question. So we allowed the children to express themselves, how they felt, right?

And it was anonymous. So they were free to, they didn't feel intimidated to express themselves. So when we asked, what do you do to cope with this? And they mentioned fighting, lying, cursing, not trusting anyone, locking themselves in a room for a few minutes.

I know that, you know, it's not, this is not to, you know, bash, you know, single parent households, because as I will mention later in the presentation, many times, unfortunately, because of our broken world, this is unfortunately a state that we have to live with, because not because of your own fault, many times, especially mothers are left with that responsibility.

So what we are really advocating for is the drive to accept and make it seem like this is the best way to live. So we do have to support those who are in need. You know, if any of our church sisters are struggling, we do have to help them because they do have more of a challenge in juggling everything.

And that's why, you know, that's how we have to approach this. But I just want to put that disclaimer there. Okay, so in contrast, the students from nuclear families were overwhelmingly expressing that they felt that being in that structure having both of their parents affected them in positive ways.

And one quote that I have here is a student saying, they feel that way because the parents ensure they do the right thing. So there was a security that the students tended to feel when they had both parents around.

Next, so just a few other studies, consequences of deviating from God's design. This is in the USA, Dr. Popenoe and Sarah McClannan. They indicated that children from single parent homes manifested a number of emotional problems, including sadness and depression, sexual difficulties, early initiation of sexual activity and teen pregnancy, as well as poor social and adaptive functioning and low self-esteem.