Not affiliated with or endorsed by any government agency. Its hard. Fully 30% of cohabiting single fathers are younger than 30, compared with only 10% of those who are not living with a spouse or partner. Copyright 2011 NPR. But that is just the natural inclination - the mother - you know, because the mother is the one. It's the TALK OF THE NATION from NPR News. Mary Pols is a film reviewer and author. Some women are single parents through divorceor separation or. The majority of the 11 million single-parent families in the United States are headed by single mothers, . You know, three movies, no dad. America. We're all living the family dynamic, as parents, as children, as siblings, uncles and aunts. Young white men from single-parent families, for instance, are more likely to end up in prison than young Black men from intact, two-parent homes. Among household heads who are fathers, some are more likely to be single dads than others. Nice to have you with us. President Barack Obama was raised by his mother, Stanley Ann Dunham, from the time that he was born until he was 4 years old, when she married Lolo Soetoro. Single fathers who are married but not living with their spouse are classified as having no spouse or partner in the household. And while 22% of fathers with no spouse or partner have a bachelors degree or more, the share of cohabiting fathers with this level of education is less than half that (10%). Of all single-parent families in the U.S., single mothers make up the majority. NPR's Tom Gjelten will join us with the latest, plus we'll wrap up our series on Oscar-nominated documentaries with Josh Fox, director of "Gasland." CONAN: Yeah, being raised by Pixar, yeah. Tell us your story, 800-989(ph) is the phone number. I'm, you know, I'm pregnant, I'm going to come in looking pregnant, and there's really nothing much I can do about it, and people are just going to have to roll with it the way I'm rolling with it. The photograph, taken on a Manhattan rooftop in August 1987 and e-mailed to me twenty years later, was a revelation and a puzzle. Are you treated differently because you're a single mom, do you think? No, he doesn't have a father. And many of the children I work with are raised in single-mother households. For more details, see. Mr. MORAN: Good question. He was raised by his mother May Smith until he was 4 years old, at which point his grandparents took over the primary parenting responsibilities. And we asked people did they think this was a good thing for society, a bad thing for society, or it really didn't make one difference one way or another. However, single father householders differ from single mother householders on several indicators. She was raised solely by her mother Judy Loe for the next four years until Loe remarried. CONAN: Let's see if we can get Alan(ph) on the line. It is a less discussed but important character strength because they understand the needs of a growing family type in America who can influence the presidential vote. Single parent households in both the US and England have jumped from less than 10 percent in the 1970s to roughly 30 percent today. But, you know, people are going to think what they're going to think, and you just kind of have to get back to doing what you're doing, which is working really hard for your child. CONAN: And broadly, the groups broke into three categories: accepters, rejecters and, in the middle, people you call skeptics. Subscribe to the Weekly E-mail. Is there some ostracism? Rachel Lehmann-Haupt is an author of "In Her Own Sweet Time: Unexpected Adventures in Finding Love, Commitment and Motherhood," and a single mother by choice. In the next chapter, she is the naive idealist, the innocent abroad. Mr. MORAN: It really was fascinating to us to see that sharp division because you're right, skeptics account for about four in 10 Americans. Without financial aid, single mother students have little or no means to contribute financially to their educational expenses. Some 27% of fathers under the age of 30 are single fathers, and most of these are cohabiting. Roughly two thirds received free or reduced-price meals. So you have to ask, compared to what? Yet, they were quick to identify men in their lives that stepped in as father figures. I interviewed nearly two hundred colleagues, friends, professors, employers, acquaintances, and relatives, including her two children. The statistical impacts of being raised by a single parent (like lower average scores on standardized tests, poorer grades and an increased likelihood of dropping out of high school or failing to attend college) may be stronger for sons, but they affect daughters too. Click on TALK OF THE NATION. She taught us to be conscious and compassionate about the struggles of all people. Who Is The Coolest Actor In The World Right Now? Deep in grief, he took on the role of single father to his two sonsbefore he married his current wife, Jill. You can be both, President Trump. CONAN: Rich Moran, I wonder: Have you got any kind of database that can show whether attitudes have changed over the years? We did not ask - we didn't ask that. In fact, it dates back our first president, George Washington to President Obama. I was 39 when I had my son, and I was just a month shy of 40. I met with bankers in glass towers in Jakarta where, nearly two decades before Muhammad Yunus and Grameen Bank shared the Nobel Peace Prize for their work with microcredit, Dunham worked on the largest self-sustaining commercial microfinance program in the world. Are Zoomies a Sign of a Happy Dog or a Crazy Dog? Why Are So Many Young Men Single And Sexless? But he has said he largely thanks his mother for the values that led him to the work he now does. We all come to single parenthood in different ways: some through divorce; some through the death of a spouse, and others, like myself, increasingly through personal choice. Someof the most influential people in the world wereeven raised by a strong single mother. Catch up on any essays, posts and This is the case for fathers with same-sex and opposite-sex partners. More than two in five (43%) lived in poverty. When articles about the book started coming out, they referred to his mother, Stanley Ann Dunham, as simply "a white anthropologist from Kansas.". The focus on men and boys shouldnt distract from a larger problem: single mothers and their daughters may be doing better, but they cant be said to be thriving. So - but for me, it's been a very good and very positive experience, and, you know, I read something like this Pew study, and I think, as do I think a lot of my single-mother friends: Oh, that's so annoying. And I'll take the answer off the air. This is what makes the new documentary IN A PERFECT WORLD such an important and timely film. Allison Steen. There are some notable differences between single mothers and single fathers. But they always called me first - always. And, you know, for me, I'm sort of I'm in the middle of movie screening. January 17, 2007. likely to become, in turn, the parents of lower-income children. "She made it look easy, though I know it never was.". economists David H. Autor and Melanie Wasserman took a deep dive into the economic trends, research When lives are reduced to numbers on a page, we are in danger of losing touch with our humanity. Cross article echoed themes from an earlier article, The Myth of the Two-Parent Home, that she published in The New York Times that claimed living apart from a biological parent does not carry the same cost for black youths as for their white peers.. A majority (62%) of SNAP households with children were single mother households. They don't give full custody to men. Black fathers are the most likely to be heads of single father households29% are. 2 Today 1 in 4 children under the age of 18 a total of about 13 million are being raised without a father. So the next time you come across a study from Harvard or some other ivory tower academic trying to cast shade on the idea that fathers matter for kids, youd be better off just reprising the wisdom articulated by our 44th president on this matter for Fathers Day in 2008, which is as relevant for Fathers Day in 2021: Of all the rocks upon which we build our lives, we are reminded today that family is the most important We know the statistics that children who grow up without a father are five times more likely to live in poverty and commit crime They are more likely to have behavioral problems, or run away from home, or become teenage parents themselves. Naturally, this would be case-by-case, but I think children should know both of their parents. It was in Hawaii that she met a Kenyan student named Barack Obama. In the capsule version of Obama's life story, she is the white mother from Kansas coupled alliteratively with the black father from Kenya. The issue is the outcomes that come from a child being raised by just one parent. Jon Stewart's parents, Marian and Donald Leibowitz, divorced when theDaily Showhost was 9 years old, at which point he was raised by his mother. Ms. POLS: You know, I remember when I was pregnant, one of my dear male friends said to me, you know: You are going to be alone in this emotional landscape. 1. Causation is unclear, but. And this from Jeanie(ph) in Washington, D.C.: I'm sure you're going to receive lots of emails that echo my sentiment, but I was raised, for better or worse, by a single mother. The poverty rate for single-mother families in 2020 was 23.4%, nearly five times more than the rate (4.7%) for married-couple families. Around half (51.4%) of single mothers have never married, almost a third (29.3%) are divorced, 19.2% are either separated or widowed. I'm fascinated by this subject. ADEL: I find it true in Cub Scouts, as well. Does this conversation about women raising children alone resonate with you? To describe Dunham as a white woman from Kansas is about as illuminating as describing her son as a politician who likes golf. This prevalence is due in part to the growing trend of children born outside marriage a societal trend that was virtually unheard of decades ago. His father didn't abandon his family, but Clinton never met his father. And the foundations of our community are weaker because of it., Ian Rowe is the founder and CEO of Vertex Partnership Academies. But while the fact that the sons of single mothers struggle more than their daughters is the easy headline to take away from the work done by Professors Autor and Wasserman, its I traveled twice to Indonesia, where she brought her son, at six, and from whence she sent him back, alone, at age ten, to her parents in Hawaii. He had the studied casualness of a catalog model, in khakis, at home in the viewfinder. 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