Andrea Engber
Midland, North Carolina
author of "The
Complete Single Mother"
It's no surprise to me that the numbers of children living with single parents is on the
rise.
I founded the National Organization of Single Mothers
ten years ago when I became aware that the numbers were out there but the needs of this
huge group were not being met.
What's important to note is that like other segments of
our society, single parent families come in all shapes, sizes, colors--most are doing an
excellent job raising children with the resources they have. However, when we take raw
figures, we tend to lump this diverse group into one stereotype: that children living in a
single parent household are doomed to failure. This is grossly untrue.
When you look at the violence that has erupted in our
schools and across the nation over the past few years, most of these children came from
middle class, two-parent families. Moreover, a number of studies show advantages to being
raised in single parent homes. For starters, these children get more one on one with their
parent because there isn't the distraction of another adult. Studies of preschoolers in
child care showed that the children of single parents had better communication skills. In
a 1995 landmark study, The Hite Report on the Family, the researcher found that men raised
in healthy, mother only households had stronger relationships with women in later life.
Girls reported that their mothers were role models (unlike those of previous generations
who often felt that their mothers were "door mats" in traditional two-parent
households). Additionally, boys also reported that they didn't feel the need to
"choose sides" in order to mature into manhood whereas boys from those earlier
generations felt they had to side with dad and reject mom. Unfortunately, the research
that points to positive aspects of being raised by a single parent rarely gets published
in the mainstream media.
More single men are raising strong, resilient children;
divorce has always been here and will remain; more women are opting for motherhood sans
marriage (in fact, in 1998, the majority of first births were to single women!). These new
MOMs (Mothers Outside of Marriage) are actually older and wiser than some believe. The
fastest growing group of MOMs--the rate of births for these women have doubled in the past
decade--are educated women with professional careers.
Let's focus on what these numbers mean in a positive
light rather than hold on to the same old thinking. Let's stop pining for that false
nostalgia of the '50s and '60s when we were force-fed models of happy marriages and
families when in truth, the highest sales of tranquilizers were to housewives and men were
rarely called upon to participate in the child rearing process other than to occasionally
discipline as in "wait 'till your father gets home," and were pressured to be
the only breadwinners.
The face of the new American family has changed. Let's
do more than recognize it. Let's embrace these families and stop alienating groups who
don't fit the two-parent picture that never was the ideal scenario to begin with.
Andrea Engber is co-author of The Complete Single Mother: Reassuring Answers to
Your Most Challenging Concerns; editor of Single Mother; the founder of the National
Organization of Single Mothers; and a syndicated columnist of the weekly, Single...With
Children. She has been a frequent guest on national radio and television talk shows and
has raised her terrific son, Spencer, alone for nearly half of his fifteen years.
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