Worrying: The rising number of single-parent households!

The recent rise in single-parent households is worrying! Young people are actively and proudly campaigning against marriage! Up to now, I don’t understand why many youth are shying away from getting committed and, instead, proudly announcing and promoting the idea of ‘just having a child’! I have chatted with so many young people, and all they whisper is, ‘all I want is getting a child and I move on’. But then I ask, ‘hey, that is about you, your dreams. But how about that child who will grow without a father or a mother? How about him?’

Across the globe, the wave of modern day socioeconomic transformation, including the growing trends of feminism, liberalism, and what most of us call freedom, and then championed by internet and technology is clearly giving less attention to family. Across the globe, single parent households are on a rise. USA and Europe are championing this ‘progress’.

Single-parent households in USA and Uganda

More than 23% of USA’s 18 years and below children are in a single-parent home (Pew Research Center, 2019). USA population census bureau puts this at 30%. To be exact, says Statista (2021), 15.76 million children in USA were living with a single mother. And 3.23 million were living with a single father. Added together, that is about 19 million children, which is a bigger number than the population of Chad (16 million people). In other words, a big country of children in a single-parent household! Sadly, for USA and Europe, the cause isn’t just death, but divorce and cohabitation.

In Uganda, some studies have revealed that 17% of households are single-parent households. This number is really big. In some specific communities, Single Parents Association of Uganda in 2004 revealed that more than 50% of households or, in their words, ‘almost all households’ were single-parent ones! In this specific case, the major cause was death, especially due to HIV. However, the recent reports are due to divorce, negligence, premarital pregnancy and childbirth, and other preventable causes.

The modern day entrepreneur and single-parent households

Why are we joking about a sensitive issue like family? Without a family, there is no a nation. And without a nation, we have no future. And yet this trend is coming to us, and most young people are proud of it! People aren’t even ashamed of announcing how marriage and family issues aren’t their concerns at all. Why are young people fearing responsibility? Who is telling them that family will rob them of their dreams?

The modern day young entrepreneurs are talking about everything but marriage! I don’t know who is coaching you, but I would love to understand: Does getting committed in a relationship and, actually, marrying that fiancé of yours look like a roadblock to your ‘American’ dream? Is having a child without a mother or a father around something to be proud of and even promote? When did marriage and starting up real families become secondary to everything else?

READ THIS: When did love and relationships become secondary to everything else?

Trouble with house-hold households

Across the globe, research studies agree that there are serious economic and psychosocial health hardships associated with belonging to a single-parent household. In various studies, cites BBC, children from single-parent households perform poorly in class, are likely not to graduate, and struggle with other psychosocial issues. Unfortunately, these children face difficulties even when coming from stable single-parent households.

Additionally, studies (this and this) link single-parenthood to crime among youth, and crime was worse among those coming from single-mother households. According to Raja (2021) at Mother Junction, single-parenting implies short on money, work overload, trouble disciplining children, negative attitude and stigma in some societies, feeling alone, and negativity in the children. Talking about negativity in children, studies show that children from single-parent households are likely to have negative attitude towards relationships and are themselves likely to stay single!

A 2016 study by Mikkonem and colleagues explore the long term effects of belonging to single-parent households. Sadly, the results weren’t good! According to this study (closely examined children from 1934 to 1944), children from single-mother households were likely to perform poorly with education, employment, and relationships. Sadly, these effects remained irrespective of how well the single-parent household was in terms of socioeconomics. Get it from the researchers’ mouths:

“Children of unmarried mothers were more likely to have lower educational attainment and occupational status. They were also less likely to reach the highest income third in adulthood and more likely to stay unmarried themselves. The associations were also present when adjusted for childhood socioeconomic position (Mikkonem et al., 2016, p.1).

Take home: Work on rising single-parent households ASAP

Of course, I am aware of various circumstances that could result in such kind of settings. And for these, I surely can understand, I am sorry. Indeed, there are various causes of single-parent trends, including deaths and other unavoidable circumstances. I would not celebrate you living in agony for the rest of your life simply because you want to keep up with family. However, if living alone, getting a child outside marriage, and not committing to anything like marriage is a thing we no longer dread but receive with pleasure and promote with our heads high, then something is entirely wrong with our priority setting system, and our, I dread saying this, morals (don’t call me a moralist for I am a moral failure a lot)! And we need to work on it ASAP.

According to my extensive research, there are three most important things in life that no man can be without: Faith, Family, Work. The rest is just noise. While my take on family isn’t necessarily about you committing to marriage alone (there are indeed various forms of family), I insist that the usual father-mother-child is the best form of them! If no natural calamities fight you against having this, why stop it yourself? Welcome to #ChristianDating and #Marriage and #LoveandRelationships. For more, explore the blog: love and relationships