The One Thing People Say That Drives Single Parents Mad
A couple of years ago at Christmastime, my now-5-year-old daughter started crying on the way home from school. “I only got to make ONE Christmas gift at school and I gave it to Daddy! Now I don’t have one for you!” My eyes teared up as well. I hated that my daughter felt different for being the child of divorce. She was the only child in her church-based preschool whose parents weren’t married. In the school directory we were the only set of parents with different last names. And, as I’ve become accustomed to, she was the only child who would need to make two gifts for her parents at Christmas.
I think of this situation often when I’m hanging out with a married mom and they describe their spouse’s temporary absence as leaving them a solo parent:
“Kevin worked so much when we were first married; I was basically a married single mom.”
“Well, Kristin’s out of town. I’m a married single mom this weekend!”
“Damien is so busy studying for his boards that I’m pretty much a married single mom!”
As a single mom who studies communication in families, these statements strike me as both oxymoronic and pretty insensitive. These moms don’t feel different because of their lack of a partner. Their kids don’t question why the families in the books they read don’t look like their family. These moms experience stress because the person they are used to having alongside them is temporarily out of commission.
I’ve been a single mom since my daughter was weeks old; single parenting is a lifestyle, not a situation to weather until my spouse comes home or passes the bar exam. Unless we marry someone who wants to co-parent (and the research shows that many do not), single moms live each day knowing that we will parent for the next 24 hours on our own. And the next week on our own. And the next year.
And while single parenting is challenging in obvious ways—there’s no one to pass your kid off to when you’ve just had too much, you do all of the transportation and logistics yourself, there’s no divide-and-conquer at bedtime—legit single parenting differs in ways most temporary solo parents might not recognize.
As single moms, we are bombarded by (often inaccurate) messaging that our kids will have poorer outcomes than their friends with married parents. I’m a researcher who studies families, and when I take a quick dive into the family communication, psychology, or sociology literature, I see an endless list of disadvantages associated with having a single mom. Research shows that kids of single moms can have poorer academic outcomes. Some have trouble with romantic relationships, starting in adolescence. These outcomes can result from father absence: Kids whose fathers aren’t significantly involved might experience threats to their well-being as a young adult. Other negative outcomes are tied specifically to divorce. Some research shows that parental divorce among minor children has consequences for both parent–child relationships and health across the life course, a primary reason why divorce is considered an adverse childhood experience (ACE) when predicting lifelong health and opportunity. The messaging around these findings is especially pointed if single moms are Black. Media, especially conservative media, exploits this research and uses it to argue for the inferiority of Black parenting. Much of this inaccurate messaging has origins in late-20th-century “welfare queen” imagery and carries forward into current media.
As a mom of a 5-year-old who seems well-adjusted, this constant messaging weighs on me. As a scientist, I know that these studies show association, not causation. But decades of internalizing negative messaging about single parenting still causes me to fear for my child’s health and well-being. As a result, I overcompensate so that she doesn’t become a statistic. I don’t hire babysitters and go out at night. I don’t date during my parenting time. She will enter kindergarten this year never having been enrolled in full-time daycare, a choice I might have weighed differently if I were still married to her father.
But while my fears aren’t completely unfounded, more recent research suggests that children of all racial and ethnic groups who have experienced divorce do just as well as children from intact families, achieving similar scores on measures of academic success and subjective well-being. In other words, kids who live with their divorced single mom do just as well in school and are just as happy as kids whose parents are married. Single parenthood does not appear to affect kids’ educational achievement, and a childhood with a supportive parent (mom or dad) who maintains a controlled environment at home can lead to happier kids.
This uncertainty is something “married single moms” don’t experience. They might have other fears about their children’s development, but those fears don’t revolve around their family composition. They might even be more likely to work hard at their marriage for fear that their kids will face similar challenges. But as married parents, they don’t have to confront the reality that their kids are perceived as already disadvantaged.
Single moms and our kids also encounter stigma and stereotyping in media. It’s rare to read a children’s book to my daughter that doesn’t include a family with both a mom and a dad (this is also frustrating for queer parents). When my daughter was a baby, I gravitated toward Anna Dewdney’s Llama Llama series because Llama Llama lives with only his mom. In the Llama Llama Valentine’s Day book, the UPS buffalo arrives with flowers for Mama Llama, at which point I (still) exclaim “WHO DO YOU THINK THE FLOWERS ARE FROM?! MAYBE MAMA’S BOYFRIEND OR GIRLFRIEND?!” (Or maybe the hot UPS buffalo?) Sure, I overdo it, but I always choose to capitalize on the rare occasion that there is a single mom in a book.
Much of the stigma and stereotyping in media comes from the (often substantiated) belief that single moms are more likely to be poor (and Black) than married moms. Research shows that perceptions of single parents are most strongly shaped by beliefs about economic resources. In short, single moms are seen as less-than because people perceive them as struggling financially. In fact, in one experiment, participants in a phone survey described single parents as less likely to be able to provide for their children’s basic needs than other types of “different” parents (adoptive or gay/lesbian couples). And other studies show that research participants blame single moms for their circumstances because their kids are perceived as being born out of wedlock or raised without a father figure.
This stigma perpetuates with media rated well beyond PG. I turned on Tyler Perry’s movie The Single Moms Club the other day, only to encounter yet another story about single moms who can’t handle their kids. Of the five moms, two are Black: one lives in the projects, has an older child in jail, and struggles to make ends meet. The other Black mom’s ex-husband has a drug problem and is an absent father. Of the two white women, one is a lawyer who is a single mother by choice, and the other white mother struggles to cope with the “rough” consequences of divorce: She can no longer employ the nanny. The remaining Latina mom is afraid to tell her ex-husband about her new boyfriend; her main conflict in the movie stereotypically revolves around her divorce-imposed sexual repression. The moms spend the movie trying to redeem themselves in the eyes of the school for their kids’ poor behavior, finally becoming closer to their kids in the process.
The problematic trope of the single mom with an unruly child seems even more trite when framed by the tired racial tropes Perry employs in the movie. These are not messages that moms whose partners are out of town for the weekend or enrolled in an evening MBA program internalize. Media doesn’t root their kids’ behavior problems in their romantic relationships. And when their kids do exhibit problematic behavior, they don’t fear that this behavior will be attributed to their “broken home.”
Finally, as a single mom, I don’t have the joy of experiencing my child’s growth alongside another adult. This is perhaps the starkest difference between my permanent single motherhood and my friends’ temporary lack of a co-parent. My daughter’s first step, her first words, the first time she wrote her name—these types of milestones are often witnessed only by me. Similarly, when it comes to concerns I have about her social, physical, or emotional development, there’s no one to share with. Sure, I have loads of friends and family, and I do share with them, probably a little too much. But this is not a substitute for the feedback loop provided by co-parenting.
Even when married moms are left alone to parent for a weekend or longer, another person exists who is inextricably linked to both the mom and her child. That person is not going to be annoyed or inconvenienced by a text or a call with a funny or concerning anecdote. Married moms became parents alongside their partner and there is someone else who has a similar experience of their kid in real time.
To be sure, there are degrees of single parenthood. I have it easier than many of my single-mom peers. I live close to my child’s father, and although he has much less parenting time than me, he’s consistently involved. Me having a good job provides my daughter an advantage, because research shows that for middle-class single moms, it is less important that my ex is involved in my daughter’s life and her schooling than it would be if we were poor. And as a white woman, my child’s behavior may be attributed to our family arrangement, but it will never be attributed to my race and our family arrangement.
And married-parent involvement varies. Moms married to first responders, long-haul truckers, or spouses struggling with addiction may not feel that they are in a partnership.
Some spouses just aren’t attentive or helpful regardless of their occupation. And sadly, married women with children and a husband actually perform more housework than single moms.
The following Christmas, my daughter came home from her new, more diverse preschool with two gifts, one for me and one for her dad. As I effusively thanked her teachers for this very important act, they downplayed my gratitude. For them, our family composition did not make my daughter an outlier. Uncoincidentally, they are both single mothers. And they are both women of color. I will never know what it’s like to have my status as a single mom scrutinized alongside my race. But I realized then that while I can’t choose what the news or children’s books suggest about our family, I can choose schools and organizations that acknowledge the strength that comes from single parenting, and the blessing of our small but loving family.