Is there an even greater threat to children than lone parents?

Panics grip the nation with such ease. When the Office of National Statistics published a bundle of figures last week, it set all the usual Cassandras wailing. The figure that had the doomsters at full throttle was the rise and rise of single parenthood.

The family is dead! Children are done for! The next generation of fatherless hoodies will take Britain to hell in a handcart! The BBC led the way with a headline proclaiming "One-parent families on the rise". Here's the figure that frightened them: "Children in Britain are three times more likely to live in one-parent households than they were in 1972."

This is absolutely true. Nearly a quarter of children (24%) now live with one parent - thought that still means 76% live with two parents. Most people's ideal is to bring up children with two happy parents, but many fail.

So who are the single parents? Most have been married: 55% are divorced, separated or widowed. Most of the other 45% were cohabiting when their children were born.

Seventy-four per cent are over the age of 30 and only 12% are under 25, so we are not talking about teen pregnancy (which has fallen). Nor is it a permanent state: on average people stay single parents for only five and a half years.

What causes panic is the idea that bad things are "on the rise", to use the BBC's words, raising spectres of ineluctable moral decline.

"On the rise" suggests an ever-upward graph where soon no child will live with two parents. Where will it all end?

Yet the rise the Office of National Statistics reported was minute. In 10 years, the number of children living in single-parent families has gone up by just 3%. A steeper rise happened in the 1980s and 1990s.

Why? The moralists blame the pernicious influence of the 1960s "me" generation, without self-restraint or duty to others. Another reason might be the explosion of unemployment in the 1980s that fractured so many lives.

The poorest are most likely to part, due to financial pressure. It leads to rows about men spending children's money on a drink or a bet. Research shows that when mothers control the cash, more is spent on children and housekeeping. Hard-pressed mothers may turn out men who not only can't provide but also drain the household budget.

It is not that, as the right claims, the state gives more to single mothers: it doesn't. Now tax credits are paid to the main childcarer, usually the mother, but the money is often paid into a joint account.

Anyway, tight money is a major cause of rows, especially in those families where 27% of children live below the poverty line.

One of David Cameron's few pledges is to give a marriage bonus.

Although it is a myth that single parents get more benefits and credits, frequent articles claim it is so - such as a recent Times offering: "You're breaking up families, Gordon." The right always says that welfare causes Britain's high rate of lone parenthood. (Remember Peter Lilley's repugnant Little List song at Tory conference?)

But as Harriet Harman wrote here last week, the Cameron marriage bonus is shot through with holes. Couples already do better. Department for Work and Pensions research finds less deprivation in couple households, even on the lowest incomes, than in one-parent families. (They have more resources to draw on, with two sets of families backing them up.) By any measure you use, children of lone parents are already the poorest of the poor.

Why should a marriage bonus work when couples breaking up already face financial cataclysm. Yet people still walk away, losing homes, pensions and small fortunes, rather than stay together. Mothers' incomes drop by an average 17%.

Whatever piffling incentive Cameron has in mind would be peanuts compared with this. But he wants the state to deliver electric-shock treatment to the nation's moral fibre. Unless he plans some unimaginably eye-catching sum, that seems, to put it mildly, far fetched.

How would a marriage bonus work? The Tories think the problem is that when a couple marry their credits and benefits are assessed together and pay out less. (It's the same with pensioner couples, though that doesn't seem to cause mass divorce at 65.)

The only alternative is to give each adult separate credit and benefit entitlements, as with separate taxation. But stop and consider: that means the non-working wife of a top chief executive or the Duke of Westminster draws the same support as a single unemployed man.

Why is there this perennial hand-wringing over one-parent families? Because the statistics show their children are in danger of doing worse.

But the figures also suggest that once you control for poverty, the difference fades. There are happy and unhappy homes, married or not. Mothers often leave marriages if they fear fathers are doing their children damage: crime runs in families, as do drugs, drink, violence and bullying. Walking away can be the right thing to do.

Look carefully again at the devastating recent Unicef report that put Britain near the bottom for children's wellbeing. Commentators rushed to say that single parenthood is the cause. But the charity One Parent Families points to evidence suggesting that it is nothing of the kind.

In those same Unicef tables, who comes top for children's wellbeing? Sweden, Norway, Finland and Denmark took the top four places. Yet they are all in the top ranks too for the highest number of children brought up by lone parents. They are not rearing generations of sociopaths. On the contrary, they rank high in adult happiness charts too.

These are countries whose social democratic policies over many decades have virtually eliminated child poverty. Imagine the difference that makes. With married parents or not, nearly all Nordic children grow up in a world where they live approximately the same kind of lives.

Unlike in Britain, there are not some arriving at school to find themselves outsiders in a class where most others have holidays, birthday parties, outings, treats, smart clothes and nice homes. Poor children in unequal Britain - and lone-parent children are the poorest - live in a world apart, and it often damages them.

Since ancient times, the right has tried to remoralise the poor with punishment and prayer instead of higher wages. Cameron's promise to make children of single parents even more disadvantaged by giving cash to everyone else springs from that same fine old Conservative tradition.

Guardian