The struggles of a single parent

Regardless of family structure, the quality of parenting is one of the best forecasters of children's emotional and social well-being. Many single parents, however, find it difficult to function effectively as parents. Compared with continuously married parents, they tend to be less emotionally supportive of their children, have fewer rules, dispense harsher discipline, are more inconsistent in bestowing discipline, provide less supervision, and engage in more conflict with their children. Many of these shortfalls in parenting presumably result from struggling to make ends meet with limited financial resources and trying to raise children without the help of the other biological parent. Many studies link incompetent parenting by single parents with a variety of negative outcomes among children, including poor academic achievement, emotional problems, behavior problems, low self-esteem, and problems forming and maintaining social relationships.

**Today, one-third of American children – a total of 15 million – are being raised without a father. Nearly five million more children live without a mother.

According to the Single Parent Success Foundation, a national nonprofit that encourages educational opportunities for single parents:

• 63 percent of suicides nationwide are individuals from single-parent families.

• 75 percent of children in chemical dependency hospitals are from single-parent families.

• More than half of all youths incarcerated in the U.S. lived in one-parent families as a child.