Experiences And Challenges Of Single Parents Across Socio Economic Groups And Gender

The first and foremost challenge that most single parents across socio economic groups and gender face is the feeling of loneliness as they have just lost the person they thought that they will spend their rest of the life with, they feel lonely as they might not know who to share their burdens with or happiness with someone else, if they are lucky they do have a good social support system but that still mostly fails to make up for the gap of a partner.

Single parents are at a higher risk of mood disorders compared to their married counter parts another shows that single parents have a high risk for substances use as they move towards using substances as a method of coping with high stress. Being a single parent the individual might need to start becoming organized as they now have not only run the household but anticipate most events and prepare for them in advance.

Time management is also an essential part of organizational skills that the individual will require because not only will they mostly likely be the single earning member of the family they will also have to ensure that they take out a certain portion of their time to spend with their children. Single parents would encounter more stressful life events in comparison to their married counterparts.

Single parents are also the one talking the full responsibility of their child which means they are responsible for all decisions a lot of times single parents land up doubting their parenting styles and this can increase anxiety. There is also exhaustion because there is no holiday from being a parent or they don’t have a partner who they can tag in to help them out when they are not well or are falling short in taking adequate care of their children this also increases their load.

One of the major stress for any single parent is being able to accept that their family is not the family they imagined and learning to be okay with this new family structure can be tough. Furthermore to reduce their loneliness the single parents often try to date but don’t have sufficient time to give to their parents in between of taking care of their children and their jobs. Most partners also have a problem accepting that they are not the priority in their life and children are. When we talk about single households it often means that there is one person who is earing for the child which means added stress there is often a gap between the income of households with two parents and single parents, the median income of families with a single parent household is way lesser.