Single parenting is one of the hardest recipes to cook up, but one of the most fulfilling. Most people don’t plan on being single parents. There are a small percentage of women who are making a choice to thwart their biological clocks, but that’s not the typical scenario. The sad truth is that if you are single parent, most of the time you got there through either divorce or the death of a spouse. The shock of these situations may make it difficult to get a foothold on successful single parenting, but not impossible.
Successful Single Parenting Ingredients You Will Need
A Dependable Income
Multi-tasking skills
Patience (lots of it)
Community and family support
Faith in yourself
A Dependable Income
Successful single parenting takes money. It is true that many women struggle to make ends meet when they are single mothers, even when they work. However, without a steady and dependable income, single parenting is impossible. Whether the income comes from child support payments, a steady job, a business, renting a room in your house, or even familial support – it doesn’t matter. Children take an enormous amount of financial resources to nurture and raise. From the minute they are using up expensive diapers to the day they are asking for money for school trips and special outfits, children are expensive. The best way to meet that challenge is to have a dependable income, preferably from multiple sources.
Multi-Tasking Skills
There’s no doubt about it. If you are a single parent, whether you have an infant or a teen-ager in the home, multi-tasking is a must. You might be called upon to chauffer the kids to and from daycare or school, arrange their lunches and medicines, set up backup pickups in case school lets out early or the kid gets sick, and then arrive at work eager to get to work. You may have actually started working two hours before, but no one else will know that.
Patience
That’s where patience comes in. It’s amazing how little appreciation a single parent gets. Single parenting is a full-time job with no pay and benefits reaped only after years of service. No one who hasn’t been there seems to understand the degree of patience it takes to do this job and to do it well. The next generation of human beings depends on it.
The children may sometimes also become exasperated with the difficulty of the situation. Have patience with them and with yourself. Successful single parenting calls for you to set an example that at times may seem inhumanly possible, but upon looking back you realized you did it anyway.
Community And Family Support
If you’re not physically present with your children, they are on your mind 24/7. This can become emotionally challenging. In the situation where you need help because your child is stuck at school in a snowstorm and you are 40 miles away and unable to reach them, how do you get your children home? You have to turn to community. Either neighbors you trust, or people you’ve hired. Family support can offer a caregiver a needed break so they can recharge their batteries and b ready to face another day. In successful single parenting the old saying is true: It takes a village to raise a child.
Faith In Yourself
There comes a time in every single parents life where they feel like they’ve failed as a single parent. Single parenting is tough! Have faith in yourself. As you learn to overcome obstacles and stop comparing your situation to other traditional families, you may find that your own style of home is not only fine it is just wonderful.
