Celebrating Single Motherhood
I was out on a study date with one of my coworkers when we started talking about our high school teachers. I didn’t know her in high school, and we didn’t even graduate the same year, but I did have a lot of the same teachers, one of which was a feisty economics teacher who was accused of bullying her students on multiple occasions. Despite that, I personally loved that teacher— she had an attitude, was outspoken, ungraceful in all the best ways, and an icon if she actually liked you, because she never left room for other people’s opinions about her— but some of the things she had said to other people were kind of misguided. One of the people whom she clashed with was my coworker. There was a budgeting exercise the class had to do for a theoretical future. My coworker said she wanted kids but did not want to get married and planned her budget accordingly. Thus started the debate— how could a woman possibly want to be a single mother?
My coworker explained to the teacher that she did not actually want to be a single mother, that she wanted a father present for her children, but that she did not want the legal obligations that come with marriage. The teacher was allegedly unwilling to hear the reasoning my coworker had for that, but rather proceeded to go on a long-winded tangent about how single mothers are inefficient parents alone and cannot do well enough by their kids, since they are having to make the sole income then cannot be present to care for their children. This flawed logic infuriated my coworker and another girl in the classroom who had both grown up with single mothers. Of course the moms of both girls were upset too.
What frustrated me about this story was that the blame of single motherhood seemed to go on the mothers rather than the absent fathers, and that women who wanted to be mothers, but did not feel the need to have a man involved, were demonized. Single motherhood has dramatically increased over the years, and many take it as an indicator of failed ability to connect and to resolve issues amongst younger generations, rather than a sign that people now know what serves them without shame.
There are three factors particularly significant when it comes to understanding the increase in single motherhood. The first is that economic independence is now possible for women. Women before were not able to leave bad marriages because they could not work all the same jobs as men, if employment was even an opportunity they had been given. Now they can be more picky when it comes to marriage and they can support a child on their own because they have more economic independence. The second is the payoff of marriage slimmed as the wage gap decreased between men and women. Of course there still is a wage gap, but it narrowed dramatically around the 1980s-1990s, making men somewhat lose their previous role within a family as the breadwinner. A third reason is that there was a shift in social norms that made it more acceptable for women to have children out of wedlock and to raise them alone.
Single motherhood is not necessarily a result of a declining society, but rather women’s empowerment, so why should the shame of single parenthood fall on mothers who are trying to provide and care for their children alone because they know that a marriage dynamic would likely not serve them or their children?
Another thing that people fail to consider here is that not all single mothers raise their children alone, so blame does not even need to be assigned to anyone. The statistics of single mothers often neglect out of wedlock relationships in which the father is still present, just not married to the mother; excluding this notion that people can have healthy relationships without the legal bind of marriage is not the most conducive to younger generations that do not value marriage as much as prior generations. Society’s concept of what it means to have a healthy family needs to shift to include alternative family dynamics.
And in cases where there is blame to go around, so often the finger gets pointed at the present mother rather than the absent father, which is sexist at its roots. Again, one of the main reasons that single motherhood rates increased was that women could now leave bad marriages. If the marriage was bad, it was not going to be a healthy environment to raise a child in, and while psychologically in some (not all) cases it may not be great for a child to grow up without two parents (this is more common in cases of divorce than of a dead parent), it may be even worse for them to grow up within a dysfunctional family. Another pattern that began to happen as the wage gap narrowed, was that men who were no longer able to be the breadmakers of the family began to abandon their family, and this idea of a man just abandoning the family has unfortunately been something that has persisted. In these cases, the discussion should be about why men are leaving their families or creating toxic home environments rather than really stepping up and being fathers, rather than if it is mothers’ faults that single motherhood is increasing.
Society seems to just ask the wrong questions when discussing single motherhood, on top of dismissing it as unsuccessful and a failure on the mother’s part, rather than actually celebrating these mothers. We should be celebrating the parents that stick around to really care for their children, not judging whether or not they have to do it alone
Sources;
https://prospect.org/health/consequences-single-motherhood/
https://www.pewresearch.org/social-trends/2018/04/25/the-changing-profile-of-unmarried-parents/
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