>>I have a male friend from high school who got married to another man, and they adopted a little boy who just turned 5. They are loving and responsible parents and both men have supportive families.

Yep, there's lots of positive recent anecdote. Compared to a few centuries of evidence about mom and pop bringing up kids and a few decades re kibbutzes and other experiments. In fact if you look at any organized society in history, dad off rampaging while moms stay home with kids was a fairly popular model. ;-)

>>There are many women (and some men) who wind up being single parents (due to death, divorce, etc.) I feel great sympathy for those "super-moms" and "super-dads", because it is damn hard to raise a kid alone.

Agreed, and in living memory when it was normal for European and Asian nations to lose millions of men to world wars, solo mothers could and did bring up fine citizens. But society saw war widows in a different light and supported them, which seems to support Tamar's point about society's role.

>>The one thing I question is someone who seeks out to be a single parent without a good support system. I realize there can be exceptions, but I do wonder if the person seeking out to become a single parent has the best interests of the child in mind.

"Seek" is a loaded word IMHO. In more generous social welfare states, I believe women do seek to become solo mothers and in some wealthy European states the unmarried mother is the norm. But in the generational poverty situation, it seems that nobody really thinks it through and it just happens because that's how it goes. Makes little sense, but that's the truth of it. IMHO the way to break the pattern is to educate the women and give them hope that there's a way out. Which is why current 1% policies are so destructive: they've left few opportunities to rise from poverty unless you're one in a million and now they've started on the middle class too. But lets not go there. ;-)