Solo Mother

Who you gonna blame? Single mothers… or absent fathers?

by christina on December 10th, 2006

When I first began to write Solomother, oh these two months ago, I touched on the fact that there’s more than one way to become a single mother: divorce isn’t the only way. More and more women are choosing to be single mothers, through known or unknown donors. But the old fashioned way still works… knock a girl up and then leave her to decide what to do with the sudden responsibility. There’s abortion, there’s adoption, and then there’s going it alone.I came across an interesting article in the Observer about poverty in England – the family featured was headed by a single mother, and revolves around a ‘where are they now’ piece on two girls photographed in 1993. One girl has got a job as an assistant in a nursing home; the other one is pregnant with a child of her own, and hadn’t managed to stick through beauty school. What the article dances around, though, are these interwoven issues of poverty, single mothers, and the statistical likelyhood that children in single mother households are less likely to succeed than children from two parent families. I’ve got some questions to ask: why aren’t more men taking responsibility for their children? I know it must be hard as hell to keep in touch with children who don’t live with you anymore but come on, dads, what gives, here? The stigma of single motherhood seems to imply that mothers are failing their children, though I don’t know a single, single mom out there who doesn’t break her back trying to do what’s best for her kids. Granted, that’s my circle of friends. I’m sure we could all pop over to Parents Behaving Badly and find plenty of deadbeat moms.

But I digress. What struck me in this article is this quote:

The party leader, David Cameron, is at pains to emphasise that his party’s war on single mothers is over and that they should not be stigmatised. Nonetheless, he still believes marriage as an institution should be promoted by tax breaks.

So when former leader Duncan Smith arrives tomorrow at the Eastside Young Leaders Academy in east London - a voluntary project that helps young black boys to develop leadership skills - to launch his landmark report on poverty, he has a delicate balancing act to perform.

He is likely to do it not by blaming single mothers, but absent fathers. Duncan Smith, a father of four himself, has told friends that a new generation of young men is emerging who sire children but feel no responsibility for them: rather than being civilised by forming stable relationships with women, he argues they are essentially running wild and becoming a threat to social order. Meanwhile the sons they leave behind, raised without proper male role models, grow up with little chance of forming stable relationships in turn.

There are those schools of thought who would have you believe women are getting themselves knocked up to go on the dole. There are some who would paint a picture of men pining for their children and coldhearted women who would bar access. But the political climate these days isn’t even whispering about the men who father children and walk away.

Don’t lose sight of the fact that it takes two to make a child, and a village to raise him or her. Make sure the single mothers you know don’t to do it alone.