Single Parenting Stigma

Single-Parenting Families: Attached Stigmas

The social deviance that interests me is single parenting, one who chose to have a child out of wed-lock. The stigma attached to being a single parent is rising anew. Many media commentators blame America's uptrend in violence and other social problems on family breakdown - on single parents. This stigma is based on myths and stereotypes that have been promoted by half-truths and, often, by prejudiced viewpoints. Many in our society still regard single parenthood as a unwelcome status. I as a single parent myself, I am often admired, but at the same time looked upon with pity, disgust, sympathy, and perhaps with uneasiness. In defense of single parent families I would argue to de-stigmatized single motherhood by society, in which the shifting of family type in single parent household is now normal and acceptable. One obvious identity is I am a woman and my hidden identities are I am a mother, unmarried, and parenting alone. A complex of set social and cultural stigma perceived as making a selfish or misguided decision to have a child and raise it on my own as a unmarried single mother. Growing up I was told by my parents the unwed mothers were bad girls who make mistakes and gotten pregnant, whom family, friends, and the community shamed and reject. There is a clear cultural, moral, and religious message of stigma. In my parents generation, it would highly scandalous of a single woman raising a child alone and never married. In those days it was expected for the man to do the honorable thing, and marry the woman who is carrying his child. It did not matter whether he love her or not, having a child out of wedlock is unacceptable and the child would be considered a bastard( child born to unmarried parents). I am a single parent. I never planned on being a single parent. Few do. I grew up with an ideal of parenting as something I would do with a husband, within a marriage. Choosing to parent alone was