Single moms often experience the cliché of unhappy, financially unstable women who have difficulties of all kinds. This old stereotype is gone nowadays, since more and more women focus on their career before getting married and especially choose to educate their children, alone. It seems that they can be happier than their married counterparts ...
According to a survey, women are between 1.5 and 2 million to raise their children alone and 85% of single-parent families are composed of single mothers. Certainly, one in three mothers is struggling to ensure its basic expenses, according to a survey of the Ipsos Institute for the French popular relief. Especially since the wage inequality between men and women is still relevant, which does not solve the precarious situation of these women. They are often either without diplomas or unemployed, or isolated women who do not enjoy a family environment allowing them to enjoy emotional and financial support. However, the fragile situation of these women is not general to all single mothers.
Single mother and emancipation
During the 1950s, women married to be model wives and have children. Today, women fight for equal pay, run for office and choose when to have children with or without a partner to share their life. Women have become more autonomous and the status of single mothers is no longer a taboo. The days when the single mother aroused pity are over. Society, in general, has changed the way it perceives single and unmarried women. It encourages women to realize their dreams and build their careers before starting a family. On the other hand, having a child at a late age has become a choice for the woman. Better still, she chooses to have it, with or without a partner, by speaking for example to a sperm donor.
According to Your Tango, a personal development site, more and more women between the ages of 35 and 39 choose to be single mothers. In return, new research has shown that children born to single older mothers have the same chance of being happy as those born to married parents.
According to Time, a 2016 study of 1.5 million men and women in Sweden states that children born to single mothers are less likely to have behavioral problems, are older and older intelligent.
Single mother and child's happiness
In a second study, Susan Golombok, Professor of Family Research and Director of the Family Research Center at the University of Cambridge, found that a child's happiness does not depend on the number of parents he or she grows up with. She also adds that single mothers have a more complicit and harmonious relationship with their children than married mothers. They have more fun raising their children and have less anger towards them.
In addition, according to CNN, these mothers tend to be healthier and to gain less weight or consume alcohol than married mothers. This is possibly due to the fact that these moms can have an open and fulfilling social life, especially as many sites and organizations allow them to help them in their various initiatives. Thus, all of their attention is focused solely on their children who are at the heart of their lives and many important decisions are made more responsibly for the sake of the child.
The Huffington Post corroborated this thesis by stating that maternity makes single mothers more fulfilling and more autonomous and tends to increase their protection vis-à-vis children by escaping pathological environments and especially toxic relationships, harmful both for they only for their children.
Whatever the context in which this mother finds herself single, it is never easy to raise her child alone, for fear of being too close, too authoritarian or still too flexible. This situation is not always tinged with pink, since only the single mother must overcome all the difficulties that arise and provide a good education for her child.
Single moms are not always perfect but what is important today is that society gives merit and respect to all these mothers, whether married or not, for their courage and determination, in a world where women still have to fight for a place in the sun.