Single Parenting
By Raymond L. Shi
ENG 1300
People become single-parent for many reasons. If you ask any of those single-parents “do you want your children growing up in a single-parent family?” Most of them will answer no and they wish their children can grow up in a normal and health family. But we need to face the reality that the world is not perfect and can’t be expect all the time. Many children are forced to grow up in a single-parent family, and that will have many different effects in their life.
In children’s eyes adults have a better life than them all the time. Adults can do anything they want. They don’t have their parents to boss them around, telling them to clean their room and have so many rules to limit their “good life” and have some fun. But they never understand it is hard to be an adult today. There are way too many things to worry about in life, and a single parent will face double the problem since he or she is really alone. The biggest problem in life is money. The problem that will affect most people in the world will become twice as big to let a single parent to struggle. They need to work very hard to keep their life balanced, to earn enough money to pay off the rent for the house, to pay off all the bills that will come every single week, also all the needs they require for living such as food and cloth. As the same time as the single parent spend most of his or her time working and figure out how to spend the limit money he or she has. The child is left alone in his or her little world. Some of them will be taken cared of by grandparents or a nanny. Some of them will live in a boarding school for a long time where they met their parents once or twice a week. The problem is a lot of these children don’t understand the situation, some of them think their parent doesn’t love them and want get away from them so they leave them to his or her grandparents or send to a boarding school. And it will create a huge gap between the parent and the child. The worst case will be the child doesn’t even know the parent when they see them, some of them will even be confused by “why is there a man living in my home who walks out the door every morning and I never see him come back at night?”
Another problem is growing with a single parent will affect their personality. Since the single parent needs to play both mother and father, they need to teach the children to build a personality based only by him or her. Which will shape the children to think and act just like him or her. Since the children are growing up with a single parent, they will most likely being closer to the people with same sex as his or her parent. Just like a boy will try to play with girls more often if he only has a mom, and he will think things softer than other boys. Moreover when the children are growing up, some other children will notice his or her family is different than theirs because one important family member is missing from the family. They might use it to mentally attack the child in a child way by calling him different things such as “child without father.” That usually will hurt the child’s feelings and make him or her angry with his or her parent. “Why I don’t have a father, why must I be different?” The missed understanding will increase the gap between the parent and the child and will hurt the relationship between them. That problem will become worse when the child is turning into a teenager. The confusion about the other sex and stress in life is not easy to explain in a single sentence. It will become a problem when a mom is trying to explain how to deal with girls to her son and it is not easy for a dad to comfort his crying daughter about that boy she liked is dating another girl. At those times those single parents will really wish the teenager has a mom or dad who can really have a talk with him or her.
Living with a single parent is not easy. Because the lack of caring from the busy working single parent, some children didn’t grow up as well as other children. Some of them joined gangs and wasted their life instead become doctors or engineers. And they hated their parents after all, both his father and mother even though he never saw one of them. But they brought him or her to this world; they also brought pains to him or her at the same time. But most of the single parent children turn out to be fine. They become successful and have a good life because once they stop struggling with all the confusion and start to understand those problems his or her single parent can’t mention to them. They will feel grateful to having a parent who has the courage to raise him or her alone and they will try to succeed. Also most of the children from a single-parent family will try one thing very hard: that he or she will have a great marriage and never let the same thing happen again to his or her children.