The Psycho Social Issues For Individuals Who Are Growing Up In Single Parent Families

If the parent has so many challenges it is obvious that the children of single parent households would have an effect on them to.

First and for most children miss the other parental figure, if it was a divorce they miss the relationship gap that they would experience after the divorce, if a parent passes away they would miss the relationship again and if they never had a second parental figure they would miss the functioning of an ideal family when they realize how families around are.

It is seen that children in single parent households are at a high risk at displaying problem behaviors and they have a decreased attachment to their parent. There might be feelings of resentment towards one parent or both the parents as the child might felt their needs aren’t met adequately. As mentioned earlier single parents have a high change of different psychological disorders and to misuse substances which many times leads to parentification of the child. This means that the adult in question is unable to hold their responsibilities and the child needs to step in to take care of his basic needs and meet the needs of his siblings. It parentification it can instrumental or emotional the latter being more harmful to the child.

Most parentified children have adverse effects such as internalizing depression, anxiety and somatic symptoms, aggressive acting out behaviors, substance abuse, self-harm and ADHD. This is also correlated with low grades and high absenteeism in school. Children from single parent household generally have low opportunity generally because of lack of funds. The adverse childhood experience questionnaire also includes children who come from a single parent household get a minimum of one ACE by the virtue of them belonging to a single parent household they are also more likely to get a higher score in the ACE questionnaire. Only 26% of children meet an ACE score of 1. It is also seen that younger children get more affected with single parented households as compared to a slightly older children. In young children single parent households foster independence because a child’s world is dependent on the parents where as in the case of an adolescent it fosters independence because the adolescent world is based more being independent form their parents.

Children might tend to get the parents came together however the adolescent might try to punish their parents and try to get back at them. However all the effects of single household parent is not entirely negative firstly children learn take some amount of responsibility which makes them independent to.