The Pros And Cons Of Single Parenting

The disciplinarian in the family is the father, according researchers at Ohio State University thus, children living with single mothers may likely to have behavioral problems, but the result of their study contradicted their assumption. Children who were less well-behaved in the classroom were raised by single fathers. Teachers reported that children raised by solo fathers put less effort in class and are less successful in getting along with others (Grabmeier, 2015).

Solo Parenting

Children are expectant and dependent on their parents for their needs, affection, and love. One or more children dependent on one parent describe solo parenthood (Kowalczyk). Republic Act 8972, also known as Solo Parent’s Welfare Act, defined solo parent as an individual who took sole responsibility for parenthood for the following reasons: death of spouse, annulment, legal separation, criminal conviction and abandonment of the spouse for at least one (1) year, and physical and /or mental incapacity of his/ her spouse. A solo parent can also be an unmarried mother or father, a rape victim who chooses to rear his/her own child/children alone.

A qualitative research method was used to gather data wherein the interviews made from the collected information from 11 single mothers and 11 children from single parent families using snowball sampling technique served as the qualitative data (Weldegabreal, 2014). Single motherhood may be rooted from three different ways: first, when a mother is never married or it may also be a woman who became a mother before marriage; second, may be due to divorce; and third, may be due to the death of the spouse (Weldegabreal, 2014). These probable reasons of single parenthood were also catered in this study since the following were used as criteria to gather the study