ows that the foremost negative influences on children are conflicts between parents before the divorce and the loss of the fathers income after the divorce, rather than absence of the father. A child is not better off with a father that is for example abusive or is a drug user, or an alcoholic. The child is better off with someone who is going to give the best care that that child needs and deserves. In some cases this could mean no father at all or no mother. Studies also show that children of divorced parents who live with their mothers have found no significant improvements in school and no improvements in behavior when the childrens father visits more often. Another example of how the media completely deceived Americans is in the case of a woman from South Carolina named Susan Smith. Susan Smith was the woman who had strapped her two children in their car seats and let the car roll in the lake. The first week the story came out reporters were tricked along with the rest of the world that Susan Smith had been carjacked by a black man who took her kids. The following week when the truth came out all the pleasant comments given by the reporters instantly vanished. All the loving remarks and descriptions that journalists had been printing about her classmates voting her friendliest senior of the class of 1989, and her teachers portraying her as a good kid, or the neighbor who said, I saw the love that they had for these children, were no longer discussed. The words and phrases that were published before America realized the truth were very deceiving and misleading. The media really swindled the opinions of many Americans. Donna Shalala proclaimed in 1996 that the number of children abused and neglected by their parents had doubled during a seven-year period. She said that the numbers rose from 1.4 million to 2.8 million, and the number of seriously abused children had quadrupled from about 143,000 to nearly 570,000. Shala...
