Single moms- A simple guide...

In the course of this short life I have lived so far, I have come across about a handful of single moms, and I can tell you it’s not easy…I was going to write an article that will help single mothers raise their child(ren) but then I stumbled upon two articles online that said it all. So I’ll juss edit and paste em here but I’ll still keep the original authors info intact. And I wanna dedicate this blog post to Magda Kossakowska, she inspired me to do this, and a whole lot of other things.

How to Raise a Well-Balanced Child on Your Own, BY Mikki Morrissette.

The following is an excerpt from Mikki Morrissette's "Choosing Single Motherhood: the Thinking Woman's Guide" (BE-MONDO PUBLISHING)

It is a daunting task for any couple to raise a healthy, well-balanced child. It can be even more challenging for a single parent, since there is no solid partner available to help alleviate stress, play "good cop, bad cop" in matters of discipline and enforcement, and provide a child with two different sets of skills, perspectives, and networks of family and friends.

Growing up in a single-parent home, without a biological father, can affect a child. But as we also read, good parenting requires skills and supplements that are not exclusive to married couples.
The challenge of any parent is to find the time to create and implement a vision-a strategy for molding a confident, hopeful and happy moral character out of the little personality you have been given. After that baby enters the house, parenting can easily dissolve into a daily struggle to earn, nurture, enjoy, discipline and stress.

On the front end, we are consumed asking ourselves if we're prepared to be mothers. The middle years of parenthood involve an even longer list of questions. Is this the right child care provider? Why won't he sleep? Shouldn't she be talking more by now? Why won't he eat? Am I letting her watch too much TV?

A mother loves her child like no one else, yet in the end, after the child is grown and we breathe a heavy sigh as the door closes and they eagerly depart for college and family and friends of their own making, what will our years of questions and hard work have added up to? How will our child turn out? Will we have raised a well-balanced person?

One of the basic needs of any individual is to feel connected to a larger universe. Our well-being depends on it. And our children will increasingly look to this wider universe for their lifetime of meaningful experiences and relationships. How will they do, when they are navigating on their own? How will we have prepared them? Will they embrace their future with hope and optimism? Will they be able to commit to intimate relationships? Will they achieve goals, respect others, act responsibly?

This, after all, ends up being what the stuff of successful parenting is. More than whether they were breastfed or bottle-fed, cared for in a daycare center or a home, out the door on time with hair combed and teeth brushed, it is the quality of the connections they will make-how they fit into the larger community-that will determine if they are the happy and healthy individuals we want them to be.

Developing a child's inner core is the most important thing a parent can do, yet it is often lost when the juggling act begins. Michael Gurian, one of the experts we talk with in this chapter, has said, "Most of us are too busy to think of our children as being anything other than 'boys' or 'girls.' This, like thinking of them as 'kids,' is worthy and important, but how little we think of them as souls."

In this chapter, we will hear from nationally respected child development experts I consulted for this book. We will boil down their theories, and other things we have learned throughout this book, into a definition of what children need in order to become well-balanced individuals. Then we will turn these concepts into a game plan that any mother can use as a guide until her guiding days are done.

In a nutshell, I propose that the plan we develop in this ambitious chapter is the minimum requirement for any parent.

Concept #1: The Basics

Children do not need perfect lives in order to grow up whole. They learn from mistakes (yes, even mom's) and can develop strength from bad times. What they do need are a few essentials designed to make them feel secure, connected, accepted and hopeful.

Richard Weissbourd suggests in The Vulnerable Child that a well-balanced child needs:

·      Order and consistency;

·      A continuous relationship with a caring adult who sees the child as special;

·      Interaction with an adult who stimulates, engages, challenges and provides a compass for meeting social and moral expectations;

·      Strong friendships and community ties;

·      Protection from exploitation and discrimination, as well as a sense of justice and opportunity for achievement;

·      Attention to any special health, social and educational needs.

"When children have these ingredients," he writes, "they are likely to have trust in themselves and in the world, inner vitality and resourcefulness, and the capacity in adulthood for zestful play and for gratifying work and love, even if they suffer hardships and abrasions. Children who grow up without these ingredients are clearly not African-American children or underclass children or children in single-parent families only. Looking at children in this way forces policy makers and the public to see the many vulnerable children in this country who are not poor."

Concept #2: Understanding the Child

Michael Gurian, Mary Sheedy Kurcinka and others talk a great deal about 'nature-based parenting.' Rather than attempt to mold children to a parents' vision of who they should be, the attentive parent reaches in to understand a child's strengths and weaknesses, and teaches that child how to recognize and handle their own feelings. The more "emotional intelligence" a child develops in this way, the more able he or she is to make connections, tackle challenges with confidence, negotiate differences, maintain self-esteem, cope with ups and downs-and cooperate with Mom.

As Kurcinka explains, if a parent realizes her child is introverted, for example, she will understand that he needs time alone in order to feel energized after a long day at school. When he starts to get surly, she will help him recognize that he needs alone-time, and enable him to get it until he's recharged-rather than push him to talk about his day and get upset when he grunts.

Extroverted children provide a special challenge to the single parent. They are at their best when they can be engaged in activities and need regular feedback. "There is no way one parent, especially an introverted parent, can keep up with the interaction needs of an extraverted spirited child," Kurcinka says. This kind of child needs to be taught to ask for attention and encouragement from grandparents, mentors, friends and neighbors, rather than simply have mom yell "Give me a break!"

It is easy to agree with this philosophy. It is more difficult to implement. But understanding how the brains of boys and girls are wired differently helps (see Gurian's books). Understanding the innate temperamental styles of children-which you can't yell out of them-helps (see Kurcinka's books). And letting the child know that mom is attempting to understand helps tremendously.

Concept #3: Community, Community

There are so many reasons community is vital to a child that it has appeared in many chapters of this book already-and every child development expert I talked to brought it up as an essential component of successful parenting.

Research indicates that children grow up best when they have a balance of influences that single parents will struggle with alone. One of the (stereotypical perhaps) benefits of having a father in the home, for example, is generally to serve as the rule-driven parent of authority, compared to mom's flexible stature as nurturer.

This is one reason why Kyle Pruett and others recommend that a team of secondary caregivers-at least one of them male-be in place at the earliest age to help Mom:

• Encourage both connection to others and independence;
• Instill a sense of personal safety as well as assertiveness;
• Offer predictability and flexibility;
• Have respect for relationships and rules;
• Be duty-bound as well as empathetic;
• Provide an environment that is demanding and responsive.

Michael Gurian talks about the importance of community to help form character in an even larger sense. "Mentors and intimate role models rarely exist to show in any long-term and consistent way how both to serve a group and flourish as an independent self," he wrote in The Wonder of Boys. With busy parents and little emphasis today on cultivating the soul, celebrities too often become the heroes, peers the role models.

The typical single mother is considering what family and friends can help her get through the first few years-but community is so much more than that. And the sooner she develops a creative list of outlets, the better able she will head off the often predictable stages of loneliness and isolation that can occur in single parenthood.

Kurcinka advises that community organizations and individuals be found early to give parents predictable breaks from their child. "That way you know your child is with other good, healthy adults and you can have time to pursue some of your own interests and needs," she told me. "The more you can set up a predictable routine that includes time together, time with others as family, and time apart, the smoother things will go. When you're feeling tired, for example, you'll know that Tuesday night is YOURS while your child is with his 'big sister' or at Scouts."

This benefits more than Mom's sanity. As Weissbourd points out, "Children of all ages should have a variety of opportunities for exploring their environment and talking with adults."

That means communities, not just parents, need to offer meaningful activities for children that build trust, self-confidence and a sense of hopefulness and excitement about the future. "Decent environments not only provide clear discipline and encourage children to absorb basic social expectations and norms," he says, "they also give children the knowledge and skills, the practical strokes-such as how to ask for directions or for change-that will enable them to swim in the mainstream."

This emphasis on community means you need to identify adults in your neighborhood whom children respect, who look out for their safety as if they were their own. You need to generate or find informal networks and events that support kids. You need to help build communities that believe that all adults are responsible for all children-not just their own. And it means, even as a busy single parent, you eventually need to get out of the house and the workplace and participate in that community. A dedicated mother will volunteer to coach or teach a skill at the community center or church where her child grows.

Concept #4: Establish Mutual Respect

Some believe a child without two loving parents in the home miss out on the lessons of seeing adults work out conflicts in a healthy way and relate to each other with love, trust, and respect. However, many of the children I talked to didn’t agree with this concern, indicating that the strong relationship they have with Mom (for those who did) was example enough.

What I did see, with those kids who had loving connections with their Choice Moms, was a great deal of mutual respect. And this, I believe, is the key ingredient to building healthy relationships with anyone. It also ties directly to the other concepts we've discussed.

When a child has a mother who attempts to understand the innate personality within, and helps him or her find words to express frustration as well as appropriate outlets for energy and emotion, that child grows up not only with self-respect, but with respect for the authority and the nurturer that is mom. And when that child and mother have several others in the community to turn to for support and encouragement, the parent-child relationship doesn't get overburdened and overwhelmed.

Wendy and her teenage son are one of several parent-child teams I interviewed who I greatly admire for their strength in this area. Wendy was married when she conceived using a donor, but divorced soon after. She was relieved that her son wouldn't grow up in an atmosphere of hostility, but was intimidated by the awesome responsibility of nurturing "this little human being alone. "Any mistakes that are made, it's all me. I would get the glory, but also all the blame."

Like most women who actively choose to raise a child without a partner, Wendy embraced her role as "the most important job I would ever have in my life. I worked on my own issues so they wouldn't be passed along. I knew I couldn't be a perfect mother, but I would ask for forgiveness when I made mistakes. I would keep the playing ground equal so we would both be very accepting of each other-and then hopefully he would be with himself too."

More than a decade later, Wendy's strategy has paid off noticeably. Even in private, under guarantee of confidentiality, her teenage son had terrific things to say about the way she raised him. "I have a great, involved mom," he told me. "From handling almost every aspect of my education to instilling in me a sense of right and wrong, she's done it all. And to be perfectly honest, I feel that she has done most everything right. She gives me all the freedom a teen needs without ever having to worry about me trying pot or a cigarette or anything like that."

Concept #5: Authoritative Parenting

Wendy brought up another important aspect of quality parenting: maintaining the division between parent and child by establishing the mother's authority. In fact, mutual respect enhanced her ability to be The Enforcer. She has never needed to yell or threaten her son, she told me. All she needed to do was give him "the look."

"Even now, he towers over me, is 50 pounds heavier, and I can almost bring him to tears with 'the look,'" she said. "It comes from having respect for each other, I think. At this age, he sees friends yelling at their moms, and families where the teenager becomes the boss. But he would never say anything disrespectful to me.

"It's challenging-you need to have a friendship, when it's mom and one kid together so much of the time you need to like each other. But having clearly defined boundaries between parent and child is very important."

Diana, whose college-aged daughter also expresses great respect for Mom, said establishing authority was difficult at first. "I didn't know how to say no," she told me. She adopted her daughter at 13 months from a family that had provided little nurturing. "I just wanted to hold her. For a long time when she was a child, all she wanted to do was sit on my lap. It was hard for me to learn how to discipline her."

But slowly she managed to put rules in place that helped establish her authority. When I'm eating you can't interrupt me. There is no time it is appropriate for you to hit someone.

It helped Diana to realize that setting limits didn't have to involve anger, but developing her daughter's sense of empathy. It hurts my feelings when you do that. When you wake me up at night it makes me tired and more likely to get colds.

Diana's daughter is now a highly disciplined, moral young adult. As Diana told me, "I recently asked her whether I was a successful authority figure. She said, 'Absolutely not. You were never any kind of authority figure. What you always had was an ethic that what you communicated was inviolable."

Establishing rules is naturally harder for a single parent-even a strong one. Speaking from experience, with the wisdom of many other single mothers I have talked with, it is difficult to always be the "heavy" with your child. And it is tough to avoid caving into demands without the support of another adult. Especially since, as Pruett says, any parent working alone gets "old," with a natural lessening of authority over time.

Research by gender-identity specialist Barbara Risman5 revealed that even in single-father households there tend to be weaker controls and fewer demands, suggesting that it is the logistical factor of solo parenthood, rather than the sex of the parent, that makes the difference in establishing the important authoritative approach to parenting. Kids in single-parent households tend to seem more mature, which leads the parent to be more permissive and take less of a supervisory role.

But not only is it easier to avert trouble with kids if the parent consistently establishes her authority, but as Wendy and her son are a good example of, it helps to create respect.

As child expert and Temple University psychology professor Laurence Steinberg wrote with co-author Ann Levine in the highly regarded you and Your Adolescent: A Parent's Guide for Ages 10-20, the authoritative parent:

• Solicits the child's opinion,
• Allows the child to voice disagreements,
• Can be persuaded to reconsider a decision,
• Values curiosity and self-direction
• Wants their child to understand the reasons for their demands and restrictions, so explains why behavior is inappropriate,
• Does not hesitate to assert their authority if reasoning fails,
• Does not demand unquestioning obedience,
• Sets limits based on love.

"This is in contrast to 'permissive' or 'indulgent' parents, who love their children dearly but have difficulty setting limits or imposing rules, and 'authoritarian' or 'autocratic' parents, who are controlling and in charge, but who discipline their children harshly and without sufficient affection or discussion," they wrote.

They echo the concerns raised in Chapter 6, and Risman's research, pointing out that the biggest issue for single parents with adolescents is maintaining control, because they grant more independence, don't have the time or energy for authoritative parenting, and have only one set of eyes and ears for monitoring a teen's activities. They also point out, "If a single parent maintains an authoritative relationship, however, any problems that might develop can be averted."

Raising a Boy: For the Single Mom

According to family therapist and male development specialist Michael Gurian, "Males raised in homes of single mothers are definitely at more risk for social and personal problems than males raised in two-parent homes." There is little credible research that denies this. However, should one condemn a single parent, or argue that she/he can't raise great kids? The answer is "no".

There are many reasons why it is more challenging for single mothers to raise boys-and knowing those reasons can help a mother do it better.

Brain Science: Because male brains are wired differently than female brains-coupled with different levels of hormones and social expectations-boys are in some ways more challenging to teach, Gurian says. They are naturally more impulsive, for example, because their prefrontal cortex is less active than girls and develops at a later age, and because they have less serotonin in their bloodstream and brain.

Girls and women have 15 percent more blood flow in the brain, are able to process more things simultaneously, and have stronger neural connectors enabling them to retain more from the senses and detect tones of voice more easily. Girls use more parts of their brain for verbal and emotional functioning, whereas boys use more areas for spatial and mechanical functioning.

Since a girl's brain "lights up" in more areas of her brain than a boy's, Gurian says, "She is often more flexible and adaptable and full-brained in her responses to the world around her. He is often more narrowly focused, and may end up with a narrower emotional, behavioral and therefore moral range of response."

So what does this mean? Do we throw up our hands and let innate behavior take its course?

Gurian says science tells us that boys generally need more love, discipline and modeling behavior than they are getting today in order to learn how to respond to situations in a less simplistic way. He says, "no one is saying girls are more oral than boys. What we are saying is that boys need a greater concerted effort on the part of the mom, the family, the elders, the community, and the social institutions in order to inculcate all the moral coding of a social group."

Girls need the same training, of course. But not only do girls absorb these relational skills more easily, a girl's mother is more likely to understand the way she behaves and processes experience.

Boys and Emotions: In the early years, it's easy for moms to recognize when something is bothering her son: he cries, he hits, he yells. But as the brain grows from toddler to child, around the age of five or six, boys start processing their emotions differently. Some of this is because boys are taught to hide pain more than girls. But a lot of it is natural to a male brain.

"Unlike many of my colleagues, I don't worry about boys masking their feelings," Gurian said. "Most boys are going to naturally grow into males who cry less than girls and talk about feelings less than women. It begins in childhood and continues when puberty hits and testosterone becomes a very big influence. I disagree with some colleagues who feel that the salvation for males is to learn how to feel through the use of talking and crying.

"I prefer that each child be provided profound attachment by primary and secondary caregivers-attachment so useful to the child that he will develop his own personal system for handling emotion. That system will include masculinity, masking, femininity, physical exercise, problem-solving, repression, free-expression through art or sport. The list is endless."

Michael Gurian says that the best thing single mothers can do to help their sons be emotionally healthy is not necessarily to get him to talk more, but to make sure he is attached to at least four other caregivers: grandparent, godparent, male mentor, teacher. An unconnected boy is more worrisome than a quiet one.

Communication Strategy: Male development experts tend to agree that one way single mothers raising sons are at a disadvantage is that they have very different styles of communication. As Gurian explains, girls have a much greater need to connect and attach than boys do. He refers to this as the "intimacy imperative." Females will bond by chatting before playing together, for example, whereas males will bond simply by the process of playing.

A single mother needs to learn new strategies of conversation.

According to Gurian, "A mom with a father involved in the boy's life typically does not have to do too much to extend out beyond who she already is. If she is alone in raising her son, however, then she has to hold onto her own identity as a woman and try to extend toward the masculine."

"She finds herself trying to learn how to play basketball with her son. She finds herself trying to learn other ways of processing emotion than feeling-talk or eye-to-eye conversation."

There are things a mother can do to encourage his connection with her, as Gurian and others have detailed. Boys do much better bonding while doing, rather than simply sitting and talking. William Pollack calls this "action talk." For example, start a conversation after engaging him in physical play, or while driving or biking together.

Here are a few discussion starters: "You look like you feel angry," or "What do you think about that thing that happened?" Less effective: "How do you feel?"

I guess there pretty much nothing I have to add to this. All am gonna say is, just make sure you are always open and truthful to your child, especially male kids. They find it easier to accept the truth that's told them at an early age than when they are all grown up. They tend to want to assume you hid the truth from them, and it’s gonna take a lot of motherly patience to convince him that what you did was for his protection. Pray to God to guide you, Bond with your child but always put your foot down, and you’ll be the best mom in the world raising the finest young man.

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