The impact of growing up without a father
Often one of the hardest issues women need to consider as they make this choice is what impact it will have on their child to grow up without a father.
For some women who grew up with a distant or absent father, they don't want to have their child experience the same lack. For others who have had a loving, supportive father, they don't want their child to miss out on having the same. And still others wonder whether surrounding their child with men and women who care will help balance any sense of loss.
The question largely becomes one of trying to decide whether one's own desire to become a parent is fair to a child who might then grow up without a second parent.
In Choosing Single Motherhood: The Thinking Woman's Guide, the chapter about "Growing Up Without a Father" includes the wisdom of Kyle Pruett and Michael Gurian. It also includes an assessment of what children typically miss in having a dedicated, skilled male parent in the home:
- Two loving parents, instead of one, to provide that extra measure of security
- An authority whose rough-housing style of play and example seems to give children a stronger lesson in self-control than the stereotypically nurturing and flexible mother
- A different style of risk-taking, discipline, communication and play
In general, the chapter indicates, fathers help children prepare to be part of the world, and mothers tend to emphasize how behavior affects other individuals.
Many women, of course, recognize that perhaps half of today's children do not grow up with two loving, skilled parents in the home -- even those raised by married parents. It often becomes an issue of whether one's own values and support network give a woman reassurance that she can do as well alone as many families do with two.
Mikki's Huffington Post articles on the topic remind us that there are also strengths in a single-parent home to be considered:
The important result, in the end, is how the kids are turning out, and what they think about the way they were raised. Choosing Single Motherhood also has a chapter about that, and we will have more to come on the subject at this website in the future.
