# Making Single Parenthood Work **URL:** \ **Category:** Great Debates\ **Created:** [March 21, 2011, 7:55pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/making-single-parenthood-work/575506 "2011-03-21T19:55:56Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 20\ **Page:** 3
**Author:** ![Troubles](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/t/f4b2a3/32.png) [@Troubles](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Troubles)\ **Post date:** [March 22, 2011, 3:09am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/making-single-parenthood-work/575506/41 "2011-03-22T03:09:49Z")
> [@Shodan](#): > > Bunch of stuff about how kids without fathers grow up to be broken, empty human beings Going a bit off topic, but…does this crap apply to lesbian parents? Do 4th grade boys who live in a mother-mother household show more aggression than those raised in a mother-father household? ---
**Author:** ![even\_sven](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/e/dfb087/32.png) [@even\_sven](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/even_sven)\ **Post date:** [March 22, 2011, 3:36am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/making-single-parenthood-work/575506/42 "2011-03-22T03:36:06Z")
> [@Sateryn76](#): > > Well, in regard to work-provided daycare, I can see where it would be completely bad for small business owners. I work (from home, mostly, at this point, but full time in office for years) in a small law firm. We have 6 people with kids of various ages. There are 9 people in the entire firm. Is the boss supposed to provide daycare for us? I can see a few solutions. Why aren’t there more cooperative daycare centers in downtown areas and business parks? Or perhaps parents could set up cooperative day cares that work in concert with public schools, since every parent has relatively easy access to that. The employer does not necessarily have to pay for it- I imagine by working cooperatively parents can build institutions that are more efficient than the current model. Of course single-parent housing cooperatives could also be an option- If, say, ten parents pool together, they could probably easily afford to pay a professional to provide home-based childcare during the day. Or you might even have enough work-schedule overlap that everyone could put in a couple of hours of “watching everyone’s kids” a day and things would work. I feel like our current system developed willy-nilly as women began to play a larger role in the workforce, with each family just trying to cover their ass. I know when I was growing up, I was put in an always-changing set of stopgap childcare situations (often random homecare situations with people my mom just happened to know) that just barely worked and ate up every stray cent my mother had (since childcare is a non-negotiable need, it doesn’t really respond to markets in the same way.) The rise in for-profit daycare simplified the situations for those that can afford it, but for those that can’t it’s hard to earn more money than childcare costs. There has to be a better way. ---
**Author:** ![Agnostic\_Pagan](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/a/c4cdca/32.png) [@Agnostic\_Pagan](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Agnostic_Pagan)\ **Post date:** [March 22, 2011, 4:55am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/making-single-parenthood-work/575506/43 "2011-03-22T04:55:40Z")
As I mentioned in another thread, our statistics do a poor job of capturing the nature of single-parent households. Single-parent does not necessarily mean there is only one adult helping to raise that child. From ‘involuntary’ grandparents (considering most grandparents want grandchildren, most don’t mind helping to some degree with the grandkids, yet most grandparents are also still working) to other extended family arrangements. I agree with **even sven**. Society needs to address the issues that people face, not some mythical ideals (said the socialist). One can advocate for those ideals, but immediate policy decisions have to be focused on the current situation. Conservatives made all sorts of dire warnings about how easing divorce laws and other family planning issues would cause the destruction of two-parent families. And they were right. But forcing people to remain in dysfunctional relationships was worse. And an economy that required both parents to work full-time was perhaps just as destructive, but allowing women to pursue careers and meaningful occupations was considered more important than perpetuating June Cleavers. So we need to address the results of that, what I consider more enlightened, society. One of results is the rise in single-parent households. I advocate these reforms: 1. encourage more extended family or multi-generational households, which would require changes in many zoning laws, and tax policies to recognize more than one head of household per home. 2. encourage cooperative solutions to make day care arrangements more accessible. One scheme could be to facilitate work schedules and job-sharing arrangements so that groups of single parents could work four days, and rotate the fifth day to watch over the group’s children. I agree with those advocating more cooperative living arrangements among non-relatives. 3. stop condemning single parents for the decisions they made. As noted above, it came about because we decided the alternative arrangements had costs that were too high also. Freedom of choice means those choices will rarely align with the majority’s ideals. Personally, I would rather have freedom of choice and deal with those consequences than make everyone fit into some, usually, unrealistic mold. Make policy as neutral as possible. 4. encourage more churches to offer day care. I am atheist, but most single parents in this country are not, and do attend church if they are not being shunned for living in sin. Many churches do offer some day care, but more resources could be tapped. 5. make it easier for day cares to pick up children and bring them there, rather then parents have to make time to drop them off. One scheme would be to offer targeted tax breaks to allow them to purchase shuttles and hire qualified drivers. As far as I am concerned, there are several workable solutions once we decide to work with single parents, rather than adopt policies which work against them and try to discourage that phenomena. ---
**Author:** ![Dangerosa](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/d/22d042/32.png) [@Dangerosa](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Dangerosa)\ **Post date:** [March 22, 2011, 12:11pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/making-single-parenthood-work/575506/44 "2011-03-22T12:11:41Z")
> [@spark240](#): > > There are [many other models](http://directory.ic.org/records/?action=search&advanced=true). Yep. This sort of thing exists, but has not been widely successful in America, despite the options being there for some amount of time. A friend had her kids in a coop daycare. My brother in law lived in coop housing (after college even). Those options and programs ARE out there. And in many cases they fail - internal politics in the community, lack of participation. As to employers looking for solutions - they’ve done a lot. And in a lot of cases have backed off. Working from home works - but not if you have kids at home - many employers make you have alternative child care arrangements or they’ve discovered you are doing two jobs and not getting in your eight hour day. My firm has a large number of people who work from home. My husband’s firm has a daycare in the building - but that really just means you commute with your kids and it makes it easier for breastfeeding moms. We have job sharing arrangements and four day work weeks. A LOT of companies do. ---
**Author:** ![Shodan](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/9f8e36/32.png) [@Shodan](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Shodan)\ **Post date:** [March 22, 2011, 12:40pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/making-single-parenthood-work/575506/45 "2011-03-22T12:40:27Z")
> [@Voyager](#): > > So, unless you want to start a thread defending Communism, how about responding to the actual point, which is that saying the way to solve the single parent problem is for single women to stop having kids is kind of naive and Utopian, and hasn’t worked despite thousands of years of trying in much more regressive societies than ours. So you are saying that blacks are inferior. That’s pretty harsh - do you have some cites? Regards, Shodan ---
**Author:** ![Frylock](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/f/ce7236/32.png) [@Frylock](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Frylock)\ **Post date:** [March 22, 2011, 12:52pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/making-single-parenthood-work/575506/46 "2011-03-22T12:52:24Z")
> [@Rand\_Rover](#): > > you are aware of the bent of many on this board–if they can think of some government program that they think would make society better, they automatically think the government should implement their idea. You won’t find a single SDMB regular who has done this. Hedging my bets: If you do find one, it will be only after a surprisingly difficult search. ---
**Author:** ![CrazyCatLady](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/c/dfb087/32.png) [@CrazyCatLady](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/CrazyCatLady)\ **Post date:** [March 22, 2011, 12:53pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/making-single-parenthood-work/575506/47 "2011-03-22T12:53:17Z")
The main problem I see with daycare coops is this: No matter who is providing daycare, no matter if there’s profit or even any money at all changing hands, you still need 1) sufficient space for the children to play and 2) enough qualified providers to keep the provider:child ratio at a reasonable level. Just taking the OP’s example of a 10-parent coop, there are already problems of scale. The average house or apartment simply isn’t big enough to take care of 10 kids (assuming nobody has multiple kids–a more realistic number would be 15 or so) in any kind of good conditions, so you have to rent a place specifically to watch the kids, and set up accounts for water, electric, and gas. How much it costs to do this varies by what you get and where it is, but it’s not going to be cheap. The kids have to be able to run and play at some point, either indoors or out. You can rent a space big enough to put in some indoor playground equipment, or one with a yard, but that’s going to cost you, especially downtown or in an office park. Or you can take them to the park, but then you’re probably looking at either locating well away from most work settings, or having to have a way to drive the kids to the park. And no qualified daycare provider is going to try to watch 10 kids by themselves. You’re going to need at least two people, which obviously costs a lot more than hiring one person. With that many kids at least one of those people will have to be licensed or else the state will shut you down. It costs a lot more than you think to provide daycare. Well, to be perfectly clear, it costs a lot more than you think to provide _good_ daycare. You can provide totally shitty daycare really cheaply–bring the absolute maximum the state will allow without a license into your home and park 'em in front of the tv all day, give a crappy lunch full of junk food, and send 'em home. But most parents, single or partnered, want a little more than that for their kids. ---
**Author:** ![MandaJo](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/ac91a4/32.png) [@MandaJo](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/MandaJo)\ **Post date:** [March 22, 2011, 1:39pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/making-single-parenthood-work/575506/48 "2011-03-22T13:39:39Z")
It’s also just a matter of paying people. If you want a qualified provider and a good teacher-student ration, you need to pay them decently. Say you want a 5/1 ratio for babies, which I think is considered pretty high. The money doesn’t work out: say you pay a provider $15/hour, which will cost you $20/hour after payroll taxes and administrative costs. That means at a minimum each kid needs to pay $4/hour. At 8 hours a day, that’s $32 week and $640 month just to have five kids sitting in a bare room with a qualified person. Add a facility, food, utilities, toys, supplies . . .and it’s just not crazy that baby care costs $1000 month. ---
**Author:** ![Blake](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/b/a9a28c/32.png) [@Blake](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Blake)\ **Post date:** [March 22, 2011, 2:22pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/making-single-parenthood-work/575506/49 "2011-03-22T14:22:13Z")
> [@even\_sven](#): > > Divorce accounts for the majority of single-parent households. Do you happen to have figures to back up this claim? The reason I ask is that the last statistics I saw said that only 9% of households are single parent, while over 33% of all children are born to unmarried mothers. So for it to be true that divorce accounts for the majority of single-parent households, single-mothers-at-time-of-birth would need to be producing more than three times as many children as married women. I find that very hard to believe. And if it is true, it very telling in its own right. But i look forward to seeing your figures so we can puzzle this out. ---
**Author:** ![MandaJo](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/ac91a4/32.png) [@MandaJo](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/MandaJo)\ **Post date:** [March 22, 2011, 2:26pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/making-single-parenthood-work/575506/50 "2011-03-22T14:26:29Z")
> [@Blake](#): > > Do you happen to have figures to back up this claim? > > The reason I ask is that the last statistics I saw said that only 9% of households are single parent, while over 33% of all children are born to unmarried mothers. > > So for it to be true that divorce accounts for the majority of single-parent households, single-mothers-at-time-of-birth would need to be producing more than three times as many children as married women. > > I find that very hard to believe. And if it is true, it very telling in its own right. > > But i look forward to seeing your figures so we can puzzle this out. Or unmarried mothers go on to get married (this seems common), or unmarried mothers with a live-in partner are not counted as single parents (I don’t know about this). ---
**Author:** ![Kearsen](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/k/82dd89/32.png) [@Kearsen](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Kearsen)\ **Post date:** [March 22, 2011, 2:34pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/making-single-parenthood-work/575506/51 "2011-03-22T14:34:08Z")
> [@even\_sven](#): > > Not infrequently on this board, people bemoan the phenomena of single parenthood. They mention increased poverty, higher crime rates, potential psychological damage, etc. There seems to be a longing for a return to the 1950s style nuclear family. I also notice that a lot of the focus is on single _mothers_, and rarely about the fathers who almost always play an important role- and usually a decisive one- in why kids are being raised by one parent. Anyway, in my thinking, this ignore the fact that people generally have reasons for doing what they do. Few people make outright irrational decisions. There is some kind of motivation. For whatever reason, our society makes it make sense to raise children in single-parent situations. > > I don’t think we can put the genie back in the bottle. We can’t return to the 1950s. Single parents are here to stay. > > So I think it makes sense to stop putting so much of the focus on preventing single parenthood, and more into making single parenthood more viable. After all, society exists to serve the people in it, and if those people are deciding to be single parents, society better start serving single parents. Any number of systems- from the way we work, go to school, associate as communities, etc. work against single parents. > > How can we fix that, and make it so that children of single parents can grow up just as likely to succeed as those in two-parent homes? One thing they can do is stop awarding the children to the mother just because ‘that’s the way it’s always been’ If it is such a burden to raise these children, start giving fathers a chance at it. Let them deal with the repercussions. I imagine if that was the default, the workplace and some other ideas that have already been mentioned might take on a different light. Child Support is broken. Find a way to make it amiable, force a way to make it amiable, if necessary. Father’s forking over a percentage of what they earn is not fundamentally fair if all the kid needs to ‘not be a burden on the state’ is say $400/month. ---
**Author:** ![Shodan](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/9f8e36/32.png) [@Shodan](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Shodan)\ **Post date:** [March 22, 2011, 2:39pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/making-single-parenthood-work/575506/52 "2011-03-22T14:39:46Z")
> [@Blake](#): > > Do you happen to have figures to back up this claim? > > The reason I ask is that the last statistics I saw said that only 9% of households are single parent, while over 33% of all children are born to unmarried mothers. **even sven** is correct. > [@](#): > > Of the mothers who are custodial parents: > > ``` > * 45% are currently divorced or separated > * 34.2% have never been married > * 19% are married (In most cases, these numbers represent women who have remarried.) > * 1.7% were widowed > > ``` > [@](#): > > Births to unmarried women constituted 36 percent of all births in 2004, reaching a record high of nearly 1.5 million births. Over half of births to women in their early twenties and nearly 30 percent of births to women ages 25-29 were to unmarried women [Cite](http://www.childstats.gov/). > [@](#): > > Single Parent Households > > Of the 34.6 million households with children under age 18: > > 72% were headed by married couples. > > 28% of households with children under age 18 were headed by a single parent. [Cite](http://single-parenting.families.com/blog/single-parent-family-stats-from-the-2000-us-census). I think we need to be sure we are comparing apples to apples. Regards, Shodan ---
**Author:** ![Nava](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/n/da6949/32.png) [@Nava](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Nava)\ **Post date:** [March 22, 2011, 2:59pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/making-single-parenthood-work/575506/53 "2011-03-22T14:59:10Z")
> [@Sateryn76](#): > > Well, in regard to work-provided daycare, I can see where it would be completely bad for small business owners. I work (from home, mostly, at this point, but full time in office for years) in a small law firm. We have 6 people with kids of various ages. There are 9 people in the entire firm. Is the boss supposed to provide daycare for us? > > Ultimately, we would still need to pay for the daycare, since less money would be available for paychecks, and we have no room for a daycare room. Should he have to move into a different building? > > I can see that having a major chilling effect on jobs available to single parents. There is an office building near my mother’s: the biggest business there employs three people. They formed a “purchasing coop” of sorts, initially because the building had a photocopier but each business was expected to provide its own fax - someone had the bright idea of “why don’t we buy one for everybody, since none of us really has enough volume to justify buying one, but we all need access to one?” Eventually they got the photocopier upgraded to a color fax/scanner/photocopier, started pooling other expenses… and negotiated a reduced rate for their children in a daycare nearby. Mind you, this took place in a country where collaboration comes much more naturally than in the US and coops are an integral part of the economy. Our biggest supermarket chain is a coop and it’s quite common to see the employees buying a factory off the big multinational which was going to close it down: as one such former-employee/now-owner-for-5-years put it “they wanted to get higher benefits every year, we want to keep roofs over our heads, food on our tables and send our kids to school.” ---
**Author:** ![Czarcasm](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/czarcasm/32/4050_2.png) [@Czarcasm](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Czarcasm)\ **Post date:** [March 22, 2011, 2:59pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/making-single-parenthood-work/575506/54 "2011-03-22T14:59:22Z")
> [@Shodan](#): > > So you are saying that blacks are inferior. That’s pretty harsh - do you have some cites? I just read the post you cited. And re-read it. And re-read it again. I didn’t find either the word “blacks” or the word “inferior” in it, so either you accidentally linked to the wrong post…or you are yet again playing that cheap-ass “in _other_ words” game, in which the “other words” never actually belong to anyone but yourself. ---
**Author:** ![Really\_Not\_All\_That\_Bright](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/r/e8c25b/32.png) [@Really\_Not\_All\_That\_Bright](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Really_Not_All_That_Bright)\ **Post date:** [March 22, 2011, 3:09pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/making-single-parenthood-work/575506/55 "2011-03-22T15:09:49Z")
I know a single mother who is raising three kids, works 40 hours a week, and attending law school full time with a B average. I don’t know how the fuck it can be done, but apparently it can. ---
**Author:** ![even\_sven](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/e/dfb087/32.png) [@even\_sven](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/even_sven)\ **Post date:** [March 22, 2011, 3:16pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/making-single-parenthood-work/575506/56 "2011-03-22T15:16:02Z")
> [@Blake](#): > > Do you happen to have figures to back up this claim? Sure, from the [US census](http://www.census.gov/population/www/socdemo/hh-fam/cps2010.html): Of 11,686 single-parent families surveyed, 4,968 were never married, 6,217 were divorced or separated and 501 were subject to the death of a spouse. The 33% figure you see is probably for percent of children living with single parents, not born of single parents. This idea that women are going out in droves and getting knocked up without caring if there is a man around is simply a myth. Most single parents went in to parenthood thinking they had a partner who wanted what they wanted. ---
**Author:** ![Czarcasm](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/czarcasm/32/4050_2.png) [@Czarcasm](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Czarcasm)\ **Post date:** [March 22, 2011, 3:25pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/making-single-parenthood-work/575506/57 "2011-03-22T15:25:37Z")
> [@Really\_Not\_All\_That\_Bright](#): > > I know a single mother who is raising three kids, works 40 hours a week, and attending law school full time with a B average. I don’t know how the fuck it can be done, but apparently it can. Could you do us a favor and ask her? What resources are available to her? ---
**Author:** ![Kearsen](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/k/82dd89/32.png) [@Kearsen](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Kearsen)\ **Post date:** [March 22, 2011, 3:27pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/making-single-parenthood-work/575506/58 "2011-03-22T15:27:58Z")
> [@even\_sven](#): > > Sure, from the [US census](http://www.census.gov/population/www/socdemo/hh-fam/cps2010.html): > > Of 11,686 single-parent families surveyed, 4,968 were never married, 6,217 were divorced or separated and 501 were subject to the death of a spouse. > > The 33% figure you see is probably for percent of children living with single parents, not born of single parents. This idea that women are going out in droves and getting knocked up without caring if there is a man around is simply a myth. Most single parents went in to parenthood thinking they had a partner who wanted what they wanted. You are right, according to your quoted cite, the figure is 42%. Specifically the 4,968 that were never married. ---
**Author:** ![Shodan](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/9f8e36/32.png) [@Shodan](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Shodan)\ **Post date:** [March 22, 2011, 3:35pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/making-single-parenthood-work/575506/59 "2011-03-22T15:35:54Z")
> [@Czarcasm](#): > > I just read the post you cited. And re-read it. And re-read it again. I didn’t find either the word “blacks” or the word “inferior” in it, so either you accidentally linked to the wrong post…or you are yet again playing that cheap-ass “in _other_ words” game, in which the “other words” never actually belong to anyone but yourself. **Voyager** apparently wants to conduct a debate wherein one side simply makes things up and assigns them to the other side. You did the same thing. Fine with me, but that cuts both ways. You don’t see the words “blacks” or “inferior” in Voyager’s post. You also don’t see the words “Communism”, or “human nature” in mine. Funny how that doesn’t bother you. **Troubles** is altering quotes inside tags, but you skipped over that to attack my post. If you want to make shit up, go ahead, but be aware that you are going to get it back just as hard as you pitch it. Regards, Shodan ---
**Author:** ![Sateryn76](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/a88e4f/32.png) [@Sateryn76](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Sateryn76)\ **Post date:** [March 22, 2011, 3:36pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/making-single-parenthood-work/575506/60 "2011-03-22T15:36:23Z")
> [@Really\_Not\_All\_That\_Bright](#): > > I know a single mother who is raising three kids, works 40 hours a week, and attending law school full time with a B average. I don’t know how the fuck it can be done, but apparently it can. I feel bad for her kids. I hope it’s worth it. [Previous page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/making-single-parenthood-work/575506.md?page=2) [Next page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/making-single-parenthood-work/575506.md?page=4)