Single Parent Family Reaserch Paper
Ryan Stango
Mr. Crawford
English
May 31, 2010 Forty-five to fifty percent of marriages end in divorce and sixty percent of kids will have their parents separated at one point before they are eighteen. (Kittleson pg149) It is an all too genuine reality that a child will grow up in a single parent family because of this. That’s not even including the amount of kids who have faced the tragedy of a parent dying. These kids will have untold amounts of hardships and hurdles to face in their life, from not being able to play a game of ball with dad or never having the chance to go for a walk with their mother on a warm spring day. It seems as if they are forced to grow up instantly and face the nasty truth that people don’t live forever and not all love lasts forever. The children of single-parent families face different emotional, social and financial problems than those of their two-parent family counter parts. In the immortal words of the Wu-Tang Clan “Cash rules everything around me”. Almost everything in life revolves around money. This is no exception for a single-parent family. With the loss of a major source of income many of these families descend quickly into poverty. Two-parent families make on average 70,000 dollars a year, a single mother normal makes about 40,000 dollars a year and single fathers make about 60,000 dollars a year (whitehead pg16). Out of all the female single-parent families about half live under the poverty line (kittleson pg143). This has to do both with the trends of women receiving on average twenty-five percent lower child support rates then men (kittleson) and large differences in annual income. Because of this many people started to think that the mothers were the cause of poverty and this is not true. Poverty in most cases was the reason for divorce in the first place (young pg75). The fathers still face the problem of poverty about twelve percent of single-father families find their way under the poverty line also. Poverty
Mr. Crawford
English
May 31, 2010 Forty-five to fifty percent of marriages end in divorce and sixty percent of kids will have their parents separated at one point before they are eighteen. (Kittleson pg149) It is an all too genuine reality that a child will grow up in a single parent family because of this. That’s not even including the amount of kids who have faced the tragedy of a parent dying. These kids will have untold amounts of hardships and hurdles to face in their life, from not being able to play a game of ball with dad or never having the chance to go for a walk with their mother on a warm spring day. It seems as if they are forced to grow up instantly and face the nasty truth that people don’t live forever and not all love lasts forever. The children of single-parent families face different emotional, social and financial problems than those of their two-parent family counter parts. In the immortal words of the Wu-Tang Clan “Cash rules everything around me”. Almost everything in life revolves around money. This is no exception for a single-parent family. With the loss of a major source of income many of these families descend quickly into poverty. Two-parent families make on average 70,000 dollars a year, a single mother normal makes about 40,000 dollars a year and single fathers make about 60,000 dollars a year (whitehead pg16). Out of all the female single-parent families about half live under the poverty line (kittleson pg143). This has to do both with the trends of women receiving on average twenty-five percent lower child support rates then men (kittleson) and large differences in annual income. Because of this many people started to think that the mothers were the cause of poverty and this is not true. Poverty in most cases was the reason for divorce in the first place (young pg75). The fathers still face the problem of poverty about twelve percent of single-father families find their way under the poverty line also. Poverty