Let us now praise single mothers

CNN
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About 24 million, or a third of all American children under the age of 18, live with a single parent, according to a 2018 study. Pew Research Center Analysis from the US Census Bureau data and 81% of those single-parent households are headed by a mother.

This has been a growing trend since the late 1960s. The number of children being raised mostly by single mothers has more than doubled between 1968 and 2017.

However, despite growing up amid this trend, in the 1970s and 1980s, when divorce was becoming more common and “Kramer vs. Kramer” felt like the documentary of our childhood, and despite being Part of a generation of latchkey kids who came from school while my parents were still at work, I confess, I was ashamed of being raised by a single mother growing up.

For most of my 12 years in Catholic school, I was the only student who lived with a parent. And for that reason I was also, demonstratively, the poorest kid in my school. We lived on a paycheck, or paychecks when my mom worked multiple jobs at once. The modest child support went towards school tuition.

Like most kids, he didn’t want to be different. She wanted to be “normal”. “Why can’t we just be normal?” I often lamented with my mom.

I was embarrassed by our car, which broke down; embarrassed that we didn’t seem to be going anywhere on vacation; that he didn’t have designer clothes (thank goodness for school uniforms that leveled the playing field a lot); or video games; or cable television; or whatever else my classmates had. I was embarrassed that my dad, who lived in a neighboring state, never attended any school events.

And I was teased for it. “Why don’t you buy a new car?” “Your gym shoes are fake Nikes.” “Do you have a dad?” He was often angry. I got into a lot of fights. When the principal’s office called home because I had a fight with another kid, it was always my mom who had to come.

Of course, my mother, like all parents, only added to that shame. She was, and still is, artistically inclined and health conscious. We went to museums and art stores instead of amusement parks and toy stores. I went to a summer camp run by cloistered monks… in heavy brown robes. My mom used to perform in the community theater and sometimes she would make me do bit parts. We went to clown school… together. At Christmas, I often received books and clothes. And my mom shopped for groceries at health food stores, which was much more unusual back then and involved lots of bulk foods, homegrown sprouts, and warm, freshly ground peanut butter. I had a carob Easter one year. I was embarrassed by my non-negotiable school lunches and embarrassed by meals when friends were over.

Sitting under a framed poster of the Richard Attenborough film “Gandhi,” my friend stared at an unappetizing breakfast bowl of “natural” cereal served to him from a bulk food bag. His breath would blow a few rice balls out of the bowl and onto the table. “We can drizzle honey on it!” I would say, as if that would solve everything. And then he would go to his house to eat his Honeycomb or Count Chocula or whatever.

“Why can’t we just be normal?”

There has been a large body of research over the decades that has shown that children of single parents report more family distress and conflict and live at a lower socioeconomic level compared to those who grow up in two-parent households. Two-parent families generally have more income and are generally able to provide more emotional resources for children, and that’s also a reflection of how little the United States does overall to support working mothers with paid parental leave and access to more quality health and education services.

And, of course, it’s hard to compare the results of single parenting with hypothetical alternatives. For many, a single mother can create a much safer or more stable environment than living with an abusive father and spouse. Simply growing up in an unhappy marriage has an effect on children.

a 2017 study, however, analyzed the long-term effects of single parenthood on children and found that it had almost no impact on his overall satisfaction with life. The authors also found no evidence “to support the widespread notion in popular science that boys are more affected than girls by the absence of their parents.” What mattered most in terms of prosperity, they concluded, was the quality and strength of the parent-child relationship.

10 years apart study on single parenting which collected data from 40,000 UK households 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 well-being, with respect to self-reported life satisfaction, quality of peer relationships, or positivity about family life,” states the report. “Children who live or have lived in single-parent families score as high or higher on every measure of well-being than those who have always lived in two-parent families”

Speaking for myself, I would go further and say that being raised by a single mother had its benefits, that it was instrumental in becoming the adult I am today.

Being raised by a single parent required an Emersonian amount of self-sufficiency. I got to school in the morning, figured out how to apply to college, paid for my education, and embarked on a career with no shortcuts or introductions. Our poverty made me class conscious even as I worked my way into the middle class myself. My role model of what women are and should be was smart, strong, independent and worthy of all respect.

Even the shame of my childhood forged my character, giving me a deeper sense of self-esteem that does not depend on material things or the opinion of those I do not admire.

I’m not embarrassed now. Being raised by a single mom means the opposite to me today: I’m proud of her for putting up with so much from her (including the indignity of a son perpetually embarrassed by our situation).

But even as a child, I thought of her as a role model of resilience and resourcefulness. She instilled in me integrity, a love of the arts, and a sense of timing for the things she loved, like “Star Wars” and Orioles baseball. Before the age of 10, I was exposed to classical music, classic movies, anti-nuclear activism, boxing (as a participant), and yoga (long before it was something people did in gyms). And her exuberant creativity meant she was also a lot of fun growing up. We once invented a board game about the holidays of the world’s religions. On weekend mornings, we would go to a park near a music conservatory to listen to the musicians practice while eating our granola breakfast.

Nothing about the financial and logistical stress of our years together stopped him raising a responsible, decent, curious, creative and accomplished child with very high life satisfaction. She gets more credit for that than anyone else, except maybe me. I’m not ashamed, I’m grateful.

Let us now praise single mothers. All of them. The rare”. Those who fight The motivated ones who choose to be single parents. The widow, who did not. The brave ones who divorced for the well-being of their children and/or themselves. They’re all raising some 19 million kids right now and they need all the support they can get.

This story was originally published in October 2019. It has been updated.