This book provides the answers to the top concerns, problems, and challenges of single-parent life.

This book provides the answers to the top concerns, problems, and challenges of single-parent life.

Single parents face countless hardships, but they can be boiled down to a triple bind: inadequate resources, insufficient employment, and limited support policies. This book brings together research from a range of disciplines from more than forty countries--with particularly detailed case studies from the United Kingdom, Iceland, Sweden, and Scotland. It addresses numerous issues related to the struggles of single parents, including poverty, employment, health, children's development and education, and more.

Here is a comprehensive source of vital information on single parent families in contemporary society. This book analyzes literature and empirical research concerning single parent families and explores issues and challenges they face. Contributing authors from many fields and perspectives examine a broad range of subjects relating to families in which one person is primarily responsible for parenting. The only state-of-the-art compendium on the topic of single parent families available today, the book synthesizes empirical, theoretical, and contemporary literature about the diversity, myths, and realities of single parent families in western countries. Each chapter contains a demographic overview, definitions, a literature review, and implications for practice, research, education, and social policy. Theoretical and conceptual perspectives related to parenting and wider families are included. An analysis, synthesis, and commentary on single parent families concludes the volume. Themes highlighted throughout the book include socioeconomic and demographic characteristics of single parent families, cultural and ethnic features, and legal and ethical components. Some chapter topics include: single parenthood following divorce single parenthood following death of a spouse never married teen mothers and fathers female-headed homeless families adoptions by single parents noncustodial mothers and fathers grandparents as primary parents single parents of children with disabilities Single Parent Families contains additional resources useful for family professionals: an annotated bibliography, a video/filmography, and a national community resource list. The book is intended for a multidisciplinary audience, including sociologists, psychologists, health care professionals, social workers, therapists, and other researchers, clinicians, policymakers, and educators. An ideal primary or reference text for undergraduate and graduate level programs, the book can also serve as a tool for staff development and continuing education in service agencies.

Whether you became a single parent through divorce, death, adoption, or some other situation, you've probably wondered what the future holds for you and your children. Will you be able to provide the emotional, financial, and spiritual support your family needs? The Single Parent will encourage you in your journey and help avert problems before they arise. It is filled with wise counsel, biblical truth, and real-life stories--the author's own as well as those of the many single moms and dads who have come across her path through the years. It will help you bolster your abilities in such areas as · improving your child's behavior · negotiating boundaries · graciously seeking and accepting help from others · trusting God in the process God cares for the single parent and will provide for you and your children. Let this book give you the tools you need as you walk with him in this journey.

Nonwhite and white, rich and poor, born to an unwed mother or weathering divorce, over half of all children in the current generation will live in a single-parent family--and these children simply will not fare as well as their peers who live with both parents. This is the clear and urgent message of this powerful book. Based on four national surveys and drawing on more than a decade of research, Growing Up with a Single Parent sharply demonstrates the connection between family structure and a child's prospects for success. What are the chances that the child of a single parent will graduate from high school, go on to college, find and keep a job? Will she become a teenage mother? Will he be out of school and out of work? These are the questions the authors pursue across the spectrum of race, gender, and class. Children whose parents live apart, the authors find, are twice as likely to drop out of high school as those in two-parent families, one and a half times as likely to be idle in young adulthood, twice as likely to become single parents themselves. This study shows how divorce--particularly an attendant drop in income, parental involvement, and access to community resources--diminishes children's chances for well-being. The authors provide answers to other practical questions that many single parents may ask: Does the gender of the child or the custodial parent affect these outcomes? Does having a stepparent, a grandmother, or a nonmarital partner in the household help or hurt? Do children who stay in the same community after divorce fare better? Their data reveal that some of the advantages often associated with being white are really a function of family structure, and that some of the advantages associated with having educated parents evaporate when those parents separate. In a concluding chapter, McLanahan and Sandefur offer clear recommendations for rethinking our current policies. Single parents are here to stay, and their worsening situation is tearing at the fabric of our society. It is imperative, the authors show, that we shift more of the costs of raising children from mothers to fathers and from parents to society at large. Likewise, we must develop universal assistance programs that benefit low-income two-parent families as well as single mothers. Startling in its findings and trenchant in its analysis, Growing Up with a Single Parent will serve to inform both the personal decisions and governmental policies that affect our children's--and our nation's--future.

Provide effective counseling to members of single-parent families With more than half of all first marriages ending in divorce, it’s time to re-think the notion that divorce means failure. Therapy with Single Parents focuses on the strengths of the single-parent family rather than its weaknesses, stressing the need to look at the socially constructed norms, values, and definitions associated with marriage and family in order to provide effective counseling. This unique book examines experiences that are common to single parents and presents interventive strategies for treating single-parent family issues, drawing on clinical case studies to provide technical knowledge in everyday language. Current research shows that single parents account for 27 percent of family households that include children under 18 and that the number of single mothers in the United States more than tripled between 1970 and 2000. Therapy with Single Parents challenges outdated notions that the single-parent family is somehow deficient and associated with adjustment problems in children. It doesn’t ignore the anger, pain, sadness, and guilt experienced by many members of single parent families but offers therapeutic considerations from a more balanced approach. The book examines the social, psychological, and sexual experiences of newly single parents and addresses the ups and downs they’ll face in dealing with schools, the workplace, and social services. Therapy with Single Parents examines: social and psychological differences between divorce and widowhood cognitive-behavioral principles of single-parent families what children can learn from divorce dealing with the ghosts of past relationships relationship rules dealing with adult children and extended families the effect of change in divorcing families the feminization of poverty the therapeutic value of social networks Therapy with Single Parents is an invaluable resource for psychologists, professional counselors, social workers, and marriage and family therapists. The book presents a thorough, in-depth examination of the single-parent family system as a viable, healthy family form.