Parents Can Protect Their Children From The Negative Effects Of Single Parenting

The Effects of Single Parenting are usually not good. Single parents can make a positive difference for their children and reduce these negative effects in a powerful and meaningful way.

Being a single parent is a complicated and stressful proposition.

Many single parents have to deal with Child Support and Child Custody issues, especially if there was a divorce or legal separation involved.

The Effects of Single Parenting are also complicated due to the guilt a single parent often feels over the breakup of the family, over too much work and not enough time spent with the children, and over other difficult aspects of being a single parent.

There are many websites and experts who will tell us that the Effects of Single Parenting are very often positive. These include the notion that children of single parents:

• Are happy not to see their parents fighting all of the time
• Will form a closer bond with the custodial single parent
• Become independent sooner
• Learn to handle difficult situations better
• Will one day be more understanding of their future spouse and children

Alas, I am not one of those who view the Effects of Single Parenting as a positive event in a child's life. Instead, it is a bad situation; yet a wise and loving single parent can and should do all in their power to make the best of it for themselves and their children.

As a quick reply to the “positive effects” listed above:

1. Children prefer living with both a mother and a father, and hope that their parents can work out their differences and stop arguing yet stay together

2. Closer bonds are more readily formed when there is less stress and more time for parent/child interactions

3. This childhood independence is often a necessity of the new single parent reality, and comes at too early an age and at too high of a price

4. Parents should not be the ones creating difficult situations for their children to have to deal with

5. Children of single parents often fear creating current or future emotional bonds and even learn to fear marriage itself

These and similar viewpoints are formed in large part due to the fact that the Parenting Statistics are very clear in that the Effects of Single Parenting are predominantly hard and negative on the children of single parents.

It is good to make the best of a bad situation, but that is very different from trying to say that a bad situation is actually a good one.

You come to this Parenting Action Guide to read the truth about parenting. I am simply being honest here, as you must always be yourself, and especially with your own children.

Girls waiting for ride_0752c - © Hoyasmeg

The message of this website is one of hope.

It must simply be understood that children fare better in stable, two parent homes where they are exposed to both male AND female role models in their everyday family living.

Girls learn to be women, and boys learn to be men, through observation of these role models within the home.

Children learn essential life skills from mothers as well as from fathers, and the facts are clear that both sexes play vital roles in the normal development and formation of growing children into responsible adults.

Men can’t replace the special something that a woman brings to the life of impressionable children, and women can’t replace the functions of a positive male role model.

Understanding this is essential to our work of reducing the negative Effects of Single Parenting.

One of the most important things a single parent can do for the welfare of their children is to identify positive, safe role models of the opposite sex with whom your children can occasionally spend some quality time.

I emphasize the words safe and occasionally.

If the child’s other parent is an on-going part of your child’s life, and if that ‘other parent’ is a quality influence in your child’s life, then this aspect is largely being done for you and your child already.

If you are a single mom who has never been married, then you need to identify positive and safe male role models with whom your child can safely spend an hour or two engaged in healthy and normal activities, a few times a month.

Once again, I emphasize the words safely and occasionally.

We can also control the Effects of Single Parenting by being honest and open with our children about the realities of our single parent status.

Allow your children to ask all the questions they want to about why you are single, about why “mom and dad are no longer together”, or about anything else your child is curious about.

If you are not happy about some of the decisions you have made, then tell your children as much. Help your children want to make better decisions in their own lives and help them to know HOW to do that.

Show your children the good AND the bad in your current family reality. Help them to see that it’s not all bad, and help them to see where and how it could be better and why that is so.

It’s normal and healthy to feel sad or angry at times. Allow your children to feel these same emotions when they come up and help them to make sense of it all.

Also, if there is a budding romance in your personal life, don’t make your children a part of it. Wait and wait some more until it becomes obvious that this relationship is going to be a permanent and lasting one.

Many relationships go nowhere, and that is the point of responsible dating. Shelter your children from the ups and downs in your dating relationships.

Young children WANT two parents back in their lives, so they will latch onto a boyfriend or girlfriend in unhealthy ways if permitted to do so.

Protect your children from this.

Make sure that YOU ARE SURE about the romantic interest in your life before anything else occurs.

Remember that the logical conclusion to such a romance is the addition of a new person into your family unit. Make sure it is someone who will love and protect your children; not hurt or abuse them.

Ladies, if a man seems overly interested in your children: Danger Is At Your Door!

As a single parent, EVERYTHING you do is going to somehow affect your children, so choose your actions very carefully.

And lastly, you can never predict exactly how the Effects of Single Parenting will affect your particular children, either now or in the future. So keep open your lines of honest communication with your children so that you have a way to help your children when new needs or dangers arise within your single parent family reality.

Always have the best interests of your children at heart. Act with wisdom and set a good example for them at all times, and somehow everything will work out for the best.

When you do all that you can do in the best way you can do it, things just seem to fall into their proper place, and the same will happen to you.

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