Also another social factor would be fatherlessness; Dennis and Halsey believe that if you grow up in a household with no father it would result in you being under achieving in education, anti-social behavior achievement and related social problems in greater proportion than their peers who are brought up in two-parent households.
It was said that although they are right in saying that children of one-parent families are at a disadvantage but they a wrong to not expand their argument to cover the effects of poverty.
They have also been criticized because they overlook the low-level of income lone parent families may have so this may result in the children being anti-social etc.
The family's relationship to the use of development assistance is modelled in different ways for different purposes. Until now, the analysis of intra-household factors has been constrained by the expense of collecting detailed and highly accurate information.
Household unified preference function for aggregate policy
The unified preference function, according to which household members (e.g. parents) are assumed to allocate resources as if they have common preferences, remains useful for determining the effects of price changes on demand for basic commodities (i.e. foods or nutrients). This information is essential to permit governments to use such means as tariffs, support prices, or export prices to modify the price structure in ways that protect poor families. For macro or regional policy purposes, a price subsidy to increase food consumption of a population or a segment of the population can be implemented with the assumption that households will re-allocate this food to their members. This is the least expensive approach because household-level income and consumption data are sufficient.
Health reduced-form relation function
The household unified preference function, however, offers little information regarding to what extent changes in food prices affect individual family members (Rosenzweig 1990); for this purpose, individual food intake or other commodity consumption is needed. Collecting individual food intake data is difficult and costly (Behrman 1990). In place of food consumption data, Rosenzweig (1990) and Behrman (1990) suggest using individual biological outcomes (health or nutritional status) to analyse, for example, how changes in exogenous factors such as the prices of food or medical services result in changes in the health of individuals. This is called the "health reduced-form relation." If policy makers need to know the person-specific demand equations to analyse the consequences of government policy regarding the welfare of the individual, this framework can be used.
Household health production function: Household health/outcome technology
While the reduced-form relation permits policy makers to estimate the effects of aggregate policy on individuals, it does not reveal how programme interventions affect household allocations of inputs to family members. Decisions regarding which services are most productive with respect to health, or how food supplementation programmes can improve child nutrition, may require information obtained by using a framework that investigates household allocation among members. This framework, according to Behrman (1990), is an attempt to "peek into the black box" of the family.
This is a household production function whose outcomes are determined by various inputs. Unlike the "reduced-form" relation, in which outcomes are determined by exogenous factors (factors that cannot be controlled by the family), some inputs in this framework are under the control of household members. This framework is called the "technological/biological relationship between inputs and outcome indicators" (Rosenzweig and Schultz 1983; Behrman 1990; Rosenzweig 1990).
Estimations using this framework are very sensitive to factors that are known to family members but unknown to the researchers (Rosenzweig and Schultz 1983). Household allocation among family members is influenced by across-household and individual-specific endowments. Researchers should be aware of the existence of these factors to reach an accurate estimate: for example, a household with better sanitary conditions will inherently use less health services; if this factor is ignored, the estimated effect of the health services would be underestimated. In another example, if a child's perceived intelligence (endowment) influences the allocation of educational resources, unbiased anticipated resource effects on the child's schooling will be difficult to obtain.
A two-stage estimation procedure is commonly used in the attempt to overcome this problem. The first stage describes the household's "demand" for the inputs to welfare outcomes such as child health. The second stage estimates the production functions using predicted allocation based on the demand estimates. This procedure is very useful for better anticipating how the allocation of resources within the household will respond to outside changes induced by government programmes, and how foods and other inputs will directly affect health outcomes (Rosenzweig 1990). As an example of this two-stage procedure, Berman, Kendall, and Bhattacharyya (1994) cite the work of Popkin (1980), who applied this type of model to nutrition in the Philippines to demonstrate the effects of employment opportunities, for mothers outside the home, on child care and nutrition.
Such knowledge is important not only for a better understanding of the ways in which families allocate their resources but also for the design of family life education and home economics programmes to help families to allocate their resources better. It requires, however, large quantities of carefully collected data at both the family and the individual level. These data are expensive to gather, thereby hindering widespread use of the methods, especially in large surveys.
