Single Parent

I've had it.
I'm fed up.
I wish I could think of a way to make my voice heard.  Of course people would laugh.  People always seem to laugh when I express my opinion.  Or wrinkle their forehead.

If I hear the words "single parent" one more time, I think I will scream.  Since when did being a single  parent become a badge of honor?  Bluh!

Now as a disclaimer,  being a widow or widower is not where I'm going with this rant.  Period.  Nobody can help that.  And let me just add here that I have a brother who is a single father and a sister-in-law who used to be a single mom.  They neither one tout their experience as the ideal or want accolades.

But.

Being a single parent isn't something to be proud of.  It isn't an accomplishment.  It doesn't qualify someone for special attention or benefit.  Okay, it's harder,  so what.

People are single parents by choice.  They either weren't committed to anyone when the child was conceived or their commitment was so weak that it didn't last.  Men and women both make horrible choices in who they sleep with and create children.  They pick cheaters and abusers and deadbeats and nuts.  Does that somehow make them more worthy if they continue to parent alone? 

Here's a good example from an article in the New York Times. 

Amber Strader, 27, was in an on-and-off relationship with a clerk at Sears a few years ago when she found herself pregnant. A former nursing student who now tends bar, Ms. Strader said her boyfriend was so dependent that she had to buy his cigarettes. Marrying him never entered her mind. “It was like living with another kid,” she said.

When a second child, with a new boyfriend, followed three years later — her birth control failed, she said — her boyfriend, a part-time house painter, was reluctant to wed.

Ms. Strader likes the idea of marriage; she keeps her parents’ wedding photo on her kitchen wall and says her boyfriend is a good father. But for now marriage is beyond her reach.

“I’d like to do it, but I just don’t see it happening right now,” she said. “Most of my friends say it’s just a piece of paper, and it doesn’t work out anyway.”

Does she sound like someone who we should revere for being a single parent?  I remember the stories old men told about being raised by their mothers alone because their fathers went off to war and didn't come home--different entirely.

Here's another quote from the same article:

Almost all of the rise in nonmarital births has occurred among couples living together. While in some countries such relationships endure at rates that resemble marriages, in the United States they are more than twice as likely to dissolve than marriages. In a summary of research, Pamela Smock and Fiona Rose Greenland, both of the University of Michigan, reported that two-thirds of couples living together split up by the time their child turned 10.

When is it going to sink in to selfish adults that it's stronger and braver and smarter to find the right person to be with;  commit to them--legally and on paper;  and then fight to stay together. 

My profession--stay-at-home mom-- is losing respect.*  It's a target for jokes and labeled by all kinds of so-called experts as "less-than," while the whirlwind of single parenting is elevated and aggrandized. 

The rest of the article goes into education and racial/ethnic breakdowns for the statistics.  It also talks about the age of the mothers--which indicates that it may get a lot worse before we have a chance of it getting better.  Check it out.


*That's a whole other post that's on my list to write following the comments about Mrs. Romney and the fodder that followed.