Selena Hatcher
Single Mothers
Selena Hatcher
Social psychology
The daily struggle that I come across everyday is being a single mother. With this paper it started making me think how many people are in a situation like me. I am just twenty-one years of age and I have a 5-month-old daughter. I’m a proud African American woman who is a full-time college student. Not to mention I’m also in search of a job. So, my life is rough, but how many others are going through similar struggles. Most importantly I want to try to come across the question why. Why so many single mothers, why so many single mothers in poverty, how many are unemployed, how many are in college? These are some of the things I will hope to be able to show and answer throughout.
So, to get us started how many single mothers are out there, and what types of single mothers are they? According to writer Dawn Lee there are 11,667,000 single parent families. 81.4% of that 11 million families are single mothers (Single Mother). 50% of those women never been married.29% is divorced and 21% is widowed. (Single Mother) Why such a high single parent rate, are people just not looking for love anymore? I don’t think that people aren’t looking for love because in my case I thought the love was there. I think that there isn’t an answer to why a person is single, because there are many reasons to why people are single depending on the person. But according to the article Single Parent Families the leading case of single parent homes isn’t death or divorce, but unmarried couples who just separate. In the 1950’s single parent families weren’t common. But over the time they started to be seen almost in a timeline fashion. “In the mid-twentieth century, most single-parent families came about because of the death of a spouse. In the 1970s and 1980s, most single-parent families were the result of divorce. In the early 2000s, more and more single parents have never married. Many of these single parents live with an adult partner, sometimes even the unmarried father of their child. These families are counted by the Census Bureau as single-parent families, although two adults are present. “(Single Parent Families)
I can proudly say that I am in my junior year of college and I’m still going. Even though there has been a dramatic change in my life I feel as though having a daughter makes me strive even harder into my studies. Mainly because as a mother you always want your child to have and become everything you couldn’t or didn’t. According to Marcella Bombardieri , “There are nearly 2.1 million single mothers in college today, many of whom are women of color. Almost 2 in every 5 black women in college are single mothers, as well as 1 in 5 Latinas and 1 in 7 white women. These mothers face nearly insurmountable odds to finishing their degrees—even as many of them are pursuing higher education to lift their families out of poverty.” (...
