Brolic
High Value Poster
Let us now praise single moms | CNN
Advantages of being raised by a single mother outweigh expectations and outlast childhood embarrassment.
www.cnn.com
For the majority of my 12 years of Catholic school, I was the only student who lived with one parent. And for that reason, I was also, demonstratively, the poorest kid in my school. We lived off one paycheck, or paychecks when my mom held multiple jobs at once. The modest child support went to school tuition.
Like most kids, I didn't want to be different. I wanted to be "normal." "Why can't we just be normal?" I'd often lament to my mom.
I was embarrassed by our car, which broke down; embarrassed that we didn't seem to go anywhere for vacation; that I didn't have brand-name clothes; or video games; or cable TV; or anything else that my classmates had. I was embarrassed that my dad, who lived in a neighboring state, never came to any school events.
And I was teased for it. "Why don't you get a new car?" "Your gym shoes are fake Nikes." "Do you even have a dad?" I was often angry.
Of course, my mother, like all parents, only added to that embarrassment.
The kids are all right
There has been a lot of research over the decades that has shown children of single parents report more family distress and conflict and live at a lower socioeconomic status compared to those growing up in two-parent households. Two-parent families usually have more income and are generally able to provide more emotional resources to children, and that's also a reflection of how little the United States in general does to support working mothers with parental paid leave and access to more health services and quality education.For many, a single mom can create a much safer or more stable environment than living with an abusive parent and spouse. Just growing up in an unhappy marriage has an effect on children.
A 2017 study, however, looked at the long-term effects of single parenthood on kids and found that it had nearly no impact on their general life satisfaction. The authors also found no evidence "supporting the widely held notion from popular science that boys are more affected than girls by the absence of their fathers." What mattered most in terms of thriving, they concluded, was the quality and strength of the relationship between children and parents.
A separate 10-year study on single parentingthat collected data from 40,000 households in the UK came to a similar conclusion last year. "There is no evidence of a negative impact of living in a single parent household on children's wellbeing, with regard to self-reported life satisfaction, quality of peer relationships, or positivity about family life," the report states. "Children who are living or have lived in single parent families score as highly, or higher, against each measure of wellbeing than those who have always lived in two parent families"
Speaking for myself, I'd go further and say there were benefits to being raised by a single mother, that it was foundational to becoming the adult I am now.
Being raised by a single parent required an Emersonian amount of self-reliance. I got myself to school in the morning, figured out how to apply to college, paid my way through that education and embarked on a career with no shortcuts or introductions. Our poverty made me class-conscious even as I earned my way into the middle class myself. My role model for what women are and should be was smart, strong, independent and deserving of all respect.
Even my childhood embarrassment was character-building, giving me a deeper sense of self-worth that is dependent neither on material things nor the opinion of those I don't admire.
I'm not embarrassed now. Being raised by a single mother means the opposite to me today: I have a pride in her for enduring so much (including the indignity of a son perpetually embarrassed by our situation).
But even as a kid, I thought of her as a role model of resilience and resourcefulness. She imparted integrity, a love of the arts and a sense of occasion . And her exuberant creativity meant she was also a lot of fun growing up.
Nothing about the financial and logistical stress of our years together kept her from raising a responsible, decent, curious, creative and accomplished son with very high life satisfaction.
Let us now praise single mothers. All of them.
Stop getting these bytches pregnant. It's really that simple. You can't get mad at single mothers and not get mad at yourself. Choose the woman you lay down with wisely.
