The most frequent errors made by mothers facing motherhood alone as far as children’s education is referred are:
• Overprotection
Doing one’s utmost in children leads to overprotection attitudes as mother, which occasionally works as a mechanism to compensate for child’s rejection. Young single mother keeps a relationship of love-hate with the boy/girl, whom they love on the one side, but on the other side, (s)he is responsible for the loss of her adolescence or youth as an essential period in which responsibilities are not very well defined yet.
• Omnipotente or impotence
There can be two styles of thought and behaviour relative to the assumption of parental responsibilities:
1. Taking charge of everything, coping with everything: decisions, tasks, work, rules, and difficulties. It generates an important amount of stress which overwhelms mothers.
2. Letting grandparents assume children’s education, keeping themselves apart from decisions, since when it’s all said and done they are feeding both of them.
• Perfeccionism
It occasionally works as a mechanism to compensate for the made error : trying to be the best mother in the world to show the whole world and themselves this way that they are able to take charge of the situation without depending on nobody or without asking for help to third parties, in spite of having got pregnant without really having wished it.
• Assuming responsibilities and carrying out the parental tasks successfully implies being conscious of your own limitations and personal rights. Ask sometimes for help, learn how to delegate responsibilities when it is necessary and look for support s so as not to be overwhelmed. Enquire about the existing resources for single mothers, such as subsidized nurseries and so on.
• Create yourself a social circle of support being alternative to your own family. Friends play a different role and can render support from equal to equal. Try to meet other people being in the same situation. It will help you not to feel alone and to share your problems with others who can understand you.
• Try to fight for your independence, not only economic but also personal. Having your own spaces with your own properties and some incomes gained by yourself will give you the opportunity to make your own decisions and feel freer.
• Take care of yourself as much as you can. Devote daily time to yourself to keep you in high spirits and collaborate to hold you in high esteem. Do sometimes some things which you like. You have the right to have fun, and there are many ways to do it, which are compatible to a responsible motherhood.
• Try to get educated, to study or learn a trade which helps you with professional promotion. Study all the possible and available resources to get a job. Take good advice. Information is important to reach your goals.
What, when and how to tell the boy/girl?
Many mothers doubt about explaining the child that he has a father and how to do it. Some mothers think that it is not necessary to explain it, that if children are very little (less than five years), they will not understand anything. Traditionally there was a trend to hide their condition of “son of single mother”, as it is considered as a shyness or a sin, up to the point that many children grew up considering themselves as children of their grandparents and brothers of their mothers.
The most convenient thing for the boy/girl is to know the truth. Sooner or later (s)he will make questions about the absence of his/her father when comparing his/her family to other families. Knowing the truth will help him /her to accept it naturally. (S)he must be provided the information (s)he may need to know in that very moment and transmit him /her safety and confidence in the future.
Depending on his/her age (s)he must be given an explanation adequate to his/her level of understanding.
If (s)he is under five years old, (s)he needs no very detailed explanations, and i(s)he may not understand it completely at the beginning. It will be sufficient to say that there are many kinds of family and that his/her father does not live together in his/hers, although the fact that he has one.
From five to eight years (s)he will understand the implications of what (s)he is explained and will want to know what his7her father is like and where he is. (S)he will also ask for information about the perspective of what will happen to him/her.
From nine to twelve years the boy/girl tends to think with the terms good/bad, correct/incorrect. It is important to explain him/her that there is nothing wrong in a family similar to his/hers, which is one more, by talking him/her about other types of families and especially of one parent families. It would be also advisable to answer the questions s about his/her father as we can do it, in a positive way.
When going on with the trend of clarity and honesty with the information (opposing to the past negation and hide), it is advisable to keep communication channels open by expressing that we are ready to discuss this topic when the boy/child wants or needs it.
What are other families like?
As we mentioned previously, it is convenient to provide boys/girls with some information about types of families, in particular of one parent families, by being sure of transmitting them a total normality and the consciousness of profiting from the same rights and duties as any other family.
As a kind of sketch we could suggest speaking about the following types of families:
1. Families in which daughters/sons, father, mother and grandparents live together.
2. Families of father, mother and daughters/sons (core family).
3. Families in which daughters/sons live together only with their father or mother (one parent family) and which can be composed of :
4. Biological or adoptive motherhood or fatherhood alone.
5. Partner’s death.
6. Legal separation, divorce or annulment of the couple.
Many single mothers hurry to look for a couple to solve their emotional needs, to “normalize” their situation as family and provide their son/daughter a fatherly figure.
Finding a couple as fast as possible seems to be the solution to all their problems. A high percentage of them usually get pregnant to give an own son/daughter to their partner and assure the link with him.
Unfortunately this solution fails in most cases, and when looking for another couple fast she does not give the couple enough time either to create an emotional link with the boy/girl who she already had or to let the couple develop itself in an appropriate period of time so as to progress positively.
On the other side, when having another child soon the first one finally gets hurt inevitably, since (s)he does not integrate into this new context and feels rejected, not loved by his/her mother’s partner and not a natural part of the new family.
The most sensible approach would be the couple as a choice, neither a solution nor the best one.
It is necessary for the relationships to develop themselves along the time and for the people to assume some compromises consciously so that people can link themselves to each other emotionally. Single mothers can educate their children on their own with satisfactory results.
Dependence or independence?
The quest of independence is one of the primary aims in adult life of everybody. It becomes a primary need to single mothers. Many of the most severe problems presented by single mother’s situation are caused by the fact that their life precisely gets developed in a situation of dependence to other people.
Most single mothers face a series of problems and difficulties of which they are often unconscious, problems which impose serious restrictions to their social integration and their personal development.
Additional burden
Single mother face parental tasks, housework, responsibilities of education and the weight of being the only source of family income on their own. This burden of tasks generally condemns them to the absence of personal life. Proper family pressure contributes to worsen the situation, in which they feel overloaded.
The previously mentioned situation prevents them form devoting time to personal and social life and contributes to isolation and generates feelings of loneliness and apathy. one of single mothers’ fears is not being loved because of a child, not being able to rebuild their emotional life with a couple.
The younger single mothers are, moreover if they are immature adolescent single mothers assuming responsibilities, more their own families usually control the situation and impose the rules. Grandparents are the authority. Child belongs to nobody until (s9he is born. Later (s)he belongs to everybody except his/her mother. Nowadays parents do not reject them out of home, but they put up with mistreatment and humiliation of those who provide them with a place to live and resources to survive. Thy become the “maid” and get married as fast as possible, so their life turns into a whirlpool of events in which they get involve without deciding on their own.
Low self-esteem
A series of events have a negative influence on single mothers’ self-esteem: physical changes resulting from pregnancy, isolation from their equal ones, quitting school in order to look after the baby, the unsuccessful search for job without education nor experience, life ruled by proper family who prevents them from making their own decisions guiltiness for having got pregnant, loss of all pleasant activities and prevalence of compulsory activities.
Stigmatization
Present society does not reject single mother explicatively as it did formerly, for being a sinner or immoral, but many single mothers notice a hidden refusal due to their stigmatization as ignorant and illiterate ; they are neither taken into account anywhere nor have their rights respected on the social and family level. They feel this rejection systematically when they try to negotiate with institutions and excluded from meetings, in which politicians address to professional workers, keeping them apart.
Unemployment
Being a woman and having family burdens become two of the main difficulties to obtain a job in our country nowadays. Single mothers feel the need to work in order to survive, since they are the only source of income for their family, but they also have greater problems to conciliate family and work, growing up children on their own.
Risk of social exclusion
These factors previously quoted are considered to create a greater risk of social exclusion: greater need of financial help, of employment, of family support services, of culture and education.