What Are the Negative Effects of Being a Single Parent?

Being a single parent is on the rise worldwide. Though opted for by few, most are associated with traumatic experiences of marital disharmony or death of the partner.

Children share the trauma. Memories of custody related court proceedings leave them bewildered. Their home is suddenly disrupted and their beliefs and bearings are injured. Lifestyle changes that follow are mingled with pain, gloom and depression.

Incomplete family unit

The family is incomplete without both the parents. Emotional turmoil swallows all. Guilt feeling haunts the separated parent and children. Both strive to keep each other happy. The commitments mount.

A single parent feels torn between the demands at work place and responsibilities of home. In trying to meet these ends the fun is forgotten. Parents struggling single-handed to provide all the children's needs, smilingly shun away personal desires.

Psycho-social effects on children

Childhood is lost in the midst of efforts and obligations. Children mature out prematurely. Their ability to integrate the precious inputs for healthy childhood development is masked.

In spite of the single parent's best intentions, children feel deprived of positive stimulus. "Make-do" attitude takes better of them and their education suffers.

Single parent family is an accepted norm in modern society, yet a social bias prevails and children fall victim to it. The urge to prove themselves often turns them towards dangerous sports, bad company and substance abuse.

Being a single parent is a fight against the rules of nature

Children need both the parents. Each parent's parenting style differs. Fathers help children to face challenges successfully and mothers give them care and emotional stability.

Moreover, parenting is a combination of instinct and art developed subconsciously over years of being parented. A single parent, even with best of efforts, often fails to compensate for the missing partner's influence.

Single parenting goes through swings of ambivalence, and fluctuates from indulgent and protective parenting to corrosive and stringent disciplining. Either way, affectionate democratic parenting gets concealed by conspicuous duty bound parenting.

A single parent finally succumbs to the mounting stress. Loneliness hovers. Desire for new relationship is aroused.

Child abuse

Child abuse is most frequently seen in single parent families. Parents handling responsibilities single-handed get more and more insecure emotionally, socially and economically. Unable to withstand the strain, in fit of emotional upheaval, they happen to ill treat children, the core of their struggle.

Child abuse has many faces; inability to provide for the needs of a child to over indulgence into child's demands. Whatever the form of abuse may be, children are snatched away by the law and put in foster care; supposed to be better for their upbringing!

Emotional trauma

Hardly able to endure the pain of one missing parent, they are snatched away from the other as well. The image of their parents, the basis of their very existence, is blemished. Their self-concept and self-esteem are battered.

Accepting a step parent was hard enough and now foster parents; total strangers in another new surroundings. Can this be home? Someone else in place of own parents! How can these strangers be better than my parents? What did my parents lack, that they have?

Children defy the system and the authorities. Emotionally and psychologically shattered they often land up in reform homes.

Children need secure upbringing in nurturing care of both parents. Single parenting is leading us towards a lame society of disturbed youths.

Could the endurance that we exhibit as a single parent be used more constructively rather than destructively? There is a lot to ponder!