I've met some great people from single family homes, but it's just harder for one parent to do it all.
The admiration that we have for single moms who still manage to keep things together and raise the children on her own is understandable and admirable, but ... that doesn't mean that we want more single moms. It seems like anytime this discussion is started, it is taken as a personal attack against single moms. Can't we admire and praise the single-moms who are doing all that they can while simultaneously saying that it would be better to have fewer single-parent homes? Politicians won't touch this with a 10-foot pole because they'll be branded as heartless, mean, etc. It brings to mind Jack Nicholson in
A Few Good Men: We can't handle the truth.
The broken homes raising broken children is usually mutually exclusive to trauma history.
There is a generational slope towards brokenness that is general, and it can have a chicken-or-the-egg quality to it. What I've seen in my lifetime in rural South Dakota had already happened in inner-city Chicago, and is starting to happen everywhere else. Someone without the means of raising a child ends up pregnant, and then is either abandoned, divorced, or never deeply connected to the father of the child. The kid grows up with an observable lack of self-control, anger issues, and an innate defiance towards authority, and usually starts getting into more serious trouble around late elementary and the start of middle school. Unless something happens to break that cycle--a teacher, pastor, coach, uncle, someone!--that kid is infinitely more likely to not graduate, get in trouble with the law, and have children out of wedlock on his own. If Mom shacks up with another loser while the kid is still in the home, he is much more likely to be abused by that man.
When does the abuse start and when does the generational transfer of violence and fatherlessness take hold? It's hard to parse that out, but this would be a good time to point out that anyone reading this (and especially since the majority will be male) can probably think of at least one or more boys in your extended family or neighborhood or in friends' families who is growing up without a positive male role model. You can't "fix" his situation, but you can take him fishing and show him how to mow the lawn and talk to him about the importance of education. If you can get him plugged into a sports team with a good male coach, all the better for helping him with valuing and respecting authority.
Incidentally, for most national statistics, the various U.S. bureaus who keep track of such statistics have decided to count a live-in boyfriend in a home with a single mother of children who are not biologically his own children as being a "2-parent home." Meanwhile, a traditional nuclear family--married mom and dad with their own biological children--is statistically the safest environment both for women and children to live, while the unmarried live-in boyfriend is the most dangerous for both women and children to live. Yet we group those two groups together and pretend that they're the same.