Are Children of Lone Parents Stronger?

I read a headline on a newspaper in a shop recently which blared that 1 in 4 parents in the UK is now a lone parent and the bulk of these are single mothers.  There is an easy assumption that this signals a decline in British morality that started sometime when the contraceptive pill came into common usage and as a result of 'free love' of the 1960s.  Of course, lone parent families are no new invention, just look at the records of 1919 and 1946 to see how many there were.  In the Victorian period when mortality was higher, the average working man dying at 45, there were often widows bringing up children alone.  People say, well, of course, it was different back them, people could draw on the wider family, forgetting that these days many grandparents, about 300,000 in the UK in 2009 are the prime child carers and that if you ever go to poor areas and I can draw on personal experiences from East London and Milton Keynes (which does have a poor ghetto area) then daughters, sisters, mothers, aunts and grandmothers often step in for childcare roles.  I remember standing behind a woman in a post office in Milton Keynes who said 'I was looking after my daughter's step-daughter's daughter...' as showing something of the nature of modern UK families; with longer life expectancy people across four generations can be involved.

You can argue that part of the problem is that people take on children as a pastime that they tire of.  It is certain that in our increasingly horribly sexualised society in which as Natasha Walton noted recently that the media in all forms encourages vigorously boys and men are to be macho and violent and girls and women submissive in a way that horrifies anyone who lived through the era of feminism.  It also means that men do not take responsibility for anything which is seen as 'feminine' and that includes looking after children.  Creating children, spreading your seed is macho, but dealing with the consequences is never seen as needing thought.  It is much the same with attacking men for looking at you in a pub or driving too fast, we have become a society which neglects thought of the consequence of any action, it is saving face that is the only thing that matters.  Thus, I am not arguing that access to contraception is causing lone parent families, in fact it is helping prevent it spreading so far.  The problem is that in the desire to move back to 'Victorian values' we have rapidly moved back to a society in which men of all social standing got women pregnant and left them to the workhouse or begging.  These days the workhouse is social welfare and so many people try to make single mothers feel guilty and grateful for the meagre income they receive.  No credit is given for trying to find work in a society in which child care is prohibitively expensive and no credit is given to those grandparents and female relatives who spare the state of its childcare responsibilities.

Thus, I would argue that we should move from this simple assumption that sees lone parent families as somehow a symptom of immorality, except on the basis of (men) not living up to the consequences of your actions, and again that seems to be something that is lauded in our media rather than condemned.  I also think that the condemnation of lone parent families on the basis that the children of them will be socially dysfunctional is also wrong.  It is far better for a child to be with a loving mother than having an abusive or neglectful father in tow.  I have noticed this many times before when speaking to children from lone parent families.  It is apparent that they are far better equipped for dealing with the world than children who grow up with two parents.  One of the most robust, innovative and well-travelled woman I ever met had had a father and uncle who had committed suicide when she was a girl.  I doubt she would have experienced all that she did unless that had happened in her life, she was a better person for it.

There is something about a child with a single parent that makes them more resilient and though I have long known this, it is has become more observable as my own household has changed.  As I have noted before, I have become de facto father on the eight year old son of the woman who lives in my house.  Now, however, whilst paying the mortgage on the house as an investment, I have moved away to find work and now live in a hotel.  Hence, the boy who has had this pseudo-father for five years, is now back, more consciously to being the child of a single parent.  Have I seen a change in his behaviour?  Immediately.  He has grown up incredibly in the three months since I left.  His literacy skills have leapt on but far more importantly he has shaken off silly, juvenile behaviour and now really contributes to the house, tidying his room, sorting out his laundry and washing up twice per week, all things he would never do when I was in the house.  He has a curiosity about vocabulary and certainly about finance that was also missing until I went.  Very rapidly he is gaining very useful skills that will stop him being one of these feckless teenagers you see trying and failing to live away from home at university and going back to live with their parents well into their 30s.

Why is there this difference?  I suppose because the child learns quickly that with one person if it cannot be done it will not be done.  There is no father to cover when the mother is sick.  There is no-one to mind the child when the shopping or the cleaning or the cooking is done, the child witnesses everything of everyday life which twin parents not really consciously generally shield their children from.  They also learn that if they do not do what they are asked, something is going to go wrong, there is no father to fetch the dishes or pick up the rubbish in their place.  If the child does not do it then it is simply another job for the mother.  In a single parent family there is none of the sleight of hand that occurs automatically in a dual parent family.  This tackles one of the key problems of contemporary UK society, that it is someone else's responsibility to do anything you dislike.  Shirking such responsibility is impossible in the single parent family.

The one drawback of the single parent family is money.  Since the late 1960s in the UK, certainly in southern England, but increasingly elsewehre, it has been impossible for one parent to earn enough to support a partner and two children in a middle class lifestyle, i.e. a car of less than 10 years old, a 3-bedroomed house, a foreign holiday once per year, a television that works, insuring household items and being able to replace things that break, eating out in a restaurant once per month, not a luxurious life but a 'comfortable' one.  Lone parents unless among the very rich cannot have a comfortable life.  Even with me paying into this single parent family neither they nor I can achieve such prosperity.  Some lone parents do get enough money from a partner who has gone but they are not the majority.  Given that the cost of so much, notably entering higher education, effectively precludes it to so many people, this is one drawback for the lone parent family, not helped by women earning 17% less than a man in the same role; women being in the large majority of lone parents.  However, given the efforts in the media to constantly discredit so many of the universities and degrees a large portion of the students whose families are new to higher education have been through, perhaps a more innovative, robust attitude to life that a child of a lone parent develops is going to help them when the Establishment has ensured that so many people's qualifications have been devalued.

Look around at the single parent families you know and you will find their children are more mature and are certainly aware of the consequences of their actions, even if the context they are living in limits their options for the future.  I am not advocating that men go round fathering children and abandoning them, on this blog I have always insisted people should handle the consequences of their actions.  What I am saying is that the media should not see single parent families as an easy target to say something about declining morality and rather see them as actually admirably equipping children for the challenges they are going to face.

Never (Even Temporarily) Be A Father

Back in July 2008, I warned men about the hazards of becoming a father and advised that any sane man avoid doing it. To some extent circumstances have led me to go against my precept, but the outcome has simply reinforced my feelings on this issue. There may be some men out there who can be a father, though I think they are fewer in number than those men who think they can be a father, hence why so many men leave relationships when their children have not yet become adults. Regular readers of this blog know my domestic set up: there is me; a woman acts as kind of housekeeper whilst running her business from the property and there is her 7-year old son. Despite no legal grounds the boy often perceives me as a father figure. Despite the multiplicity of shapes of families these days it is incredible how children still expect some 1950s-style family. He goes to a Christian school so perhaps they teach that that is how families 'should' be (they teach Creationism too) and he has latched on to me as the missing piece to complete the jigsaw puzzle of a 'proper' family.

Despite having lived as a single parent for over three years the woman seems to totally underestimate the difficulties of raising a child alone. I do not think this is an exclusively female perspective nor than all women are good at raising children, some clearly are not. However, it is a very difficult job filled with constant stress even when the child is safely packed off to school. The woman has gone to the USA for about 17 days and convinced me that I could look after her child while she was away. These days schools are very strict about taking children out in term time and the school just pointed out that a child away for 10 days, i.e. two school weeks, would only attain an attendance level of 95.6% whereas the target for the school is 96.4%! For fear of losing a contributor to the mortgage at a time of such housing depression I complied. That was the worst mistake I have made in a long time and regular readers of this blog will know I am very good at making bad mistakes. She left on Thursday and we are now at Tuesday and the stress is causing real health issues. I have pain down my left side, my head feels like it is in a clamp, my breathing is laboured and there is so much acid in my stomach that I have retched close to vomiting already this morning.

Children of 7 have set patterns that they are unwilling to break even when circumstances have changed. You cannot get them to understand that they cannot continue behaving the way they do when Mummy is around when she is not around. If I could have done I should have taken leave for this whole period as holding down a job 30-46 miles (depending on which office I am in that day) from where the child is schooled makes things difficult. I pleaded with my employer (which is supposedly family-friendly) to not have things scheduled to clash with school times and they simply did the opposite. In addition, one department has kept setting meetings at short notice and moving them around as if we are all entirely flexible. To cope with the situation I have been compelled to use a childminder but it is very difficult if I have to keep ringing her up to say, do not collect the child this afternoon as the meeting is off, but could she do it on Thursday and then ringing back the next day to say, now Thursday is off, it is back to Wednesday. I know single parents cope with this kind of stuff all the time, but I imagine most do not work full-time in the next city along.

I lack the authority of a genuine parent, I accept that, so I am left with cajoling, bribing, threatening withholding of treats and simply begging to get the child to comply. I am effectively sharing a house with a 65-year old Classics professor, he is so pedantic and insistent that everything is done 'just so'. There is no room for variation. I imagine I would be a bad candidate for someone caring for an elderly person too. I have not even begun to explore that type of caring. I suppose I could just let the child do what it wants, stay up all night and live on crisps for 17 days, but I worry the school will then get upset and complain. His school is unwilling to act in loco parentis on any occasion (e.g. when the child is vomiting they simply stick him/her in the corridor and shriek down the telephone for the parent to come and collect the child no matter what they might be doing), but is happy to police what it feels is wrong at home. The lack of compliance with what seems even a sensible suggestion got me to such a state last night that I was tempted to telephone social services and get the child taken into foster care saying his mother had skipped off across the Atlantic, which, in fact is the truth. Selfishly, though doing that would mean the end of the mortgage payments from her and me having to move for the fifth time in four years. Of course if this stressful situation leads me to a heart attack then that will have to occur anyway, so it might be just a matter of time. There are 11 days still to go and a lot could happen in that time.

Anyway, men, learn from me. Do not let yourself be tricked into looking after a child for more than a few hours. It is a near impossible task especially as you are having to start from scratch with the child and they will fight tooth and nail to adhere to their normal day-to-day pattern as well as trying to see how far they can push you. If you find yourself in such a situation and are not trapped by financial arrangements, blame the mother for desertion and hand the child over to social services, they are trained for dealing with these things, you are not.

P.P. 22/01/2009, my health was deteriorating as a result of my blood pressure rocketing due to looking after the child. My head felt like it was in a vice, my breathing was laboured and I had pain all down my left side. My emailed demand to the woman to return from the USA led her to send her sister immediately to collect the child and he has gone away to stay with her. The woman is furious that I have failed in my duty and is trying to fly back early though this is proving difficult due to the Obama effect. Naturally she is equally angry that I have wrecked her holiday. I was in an impossible situation from the start, if I had tried to stop her going there would have been complaints (there are anyway now that I have asked her to come back) that I was restricting her life. Equally I am not physically or emotionally able to raised a child on my own, and I had said this all along.

Never Become A Father

Yesterday I read an open letter in the 'Family' section of 'The Guardian' from a mother of three children to them and also to their father who committed suicide ten years ago. Reading it reinforced my view that single-parent families are the only model that can adequately prepare children for life in the UK in the 21st century. Though all the children who are now 21, 17 and 16 have had the usual run-ins with some self-harm and contact with drugs, they are all now prospering and pursuing a range of interests and careers, they have not become homeless junkies. I imagine the same would have been much the same if their father had stayed alive. He would have been in no better position to stop them doing bad things to themselves than the mother has been. In fact especially for the two boys, the 21 and 16 year olds, antagonism with their father may have driven them to behave more hostilely and destructively than their brief flirtations with things have done. I think this is a classic example of a riposte to the group 'Familes Need Fathers', proof is stacking up that they do not at all.

Being a father has nothing to do with caring, it is all about male virility and proving it. This stretches across the social classes of the UK from the shaven-headed, obese, sun-burnt unskilled man pushing his child in a pushchair through East London to the balding, bespectacled middle class father unloading his offspring from a 4x4 to the upper class father kissing his child before handing them over to the nanny or the boarding school. None of this is about being a parent it is about effectively flashing your penis at people, it is no different to how baboons behave. In a society in which most of us have no power or come back against the state children are the one accessory which allows us to be self-righteous and aggressive 'because of my kids'. You might as well simply hire some child actors to strut around your local supermarket with or to take along when you feel you need an excuse to buy yet another vast, petrol-guzzling car. The signs on cars saying 'child on board' brings this into the arena where most British men face off against others most often, whilst driving. It berates anyone who is infertile and those who choose not to have children despite us being in an over-crowded world.

In our consumerist society it is impossible to satisfy children. I have just had a magazine shoved through my letterbox which lists 'Ten great reasons to be a dad' and yet they are nothing of any truth or substance. In fact even this list shows up you will be left looking after the unwanted pets after the fad has passed. The reference to unconditional love is entirely false these days even if it was ever true. You are only as good as the last toy you bought, nothing more. If it was the wrong one or stops working then even that 'love' is cut off instantly. Girls in particular are groomed by advertisers to want, want, want. It destroys their independence and initiative. As I have commented before the 'princess obsession' leads them to believe they a) have to have everything they want at a moment's notice, b) that they have no power to get what they want themselves, it has to be supplied by first their parents and then by their 'prince' who has to keep going through challenges to prove himself, there is no equality. This extends into adult life and they turn themselves into coquettes in a belief that they can only get the man by their 'beauty' (how many fairytale princesses prove themselves by using their brains, 'Shrek the Third' (2007) was a refreshing exception) and that he will then supply everything they need notably numerous children who she can turn into mini replicas of herself. As I have noted the role for boys fed as the counterpoint to the princess and also through this constant assertion of virility is to be violent and drive aggressively and shout and so on. Since when did medieval behaviour patterns serve us well? The whole myth of chivalry in the middle ages themselves was supposed to counteract these dangerous trends. Anyway, as a father, and in the 2000s, thus perceived as the prime breadwinner once again, you are under constant assault from the mother and children to supply more and more and more. They whine if they do not get precisely what they want. So many women now are raised to be like girls that they cannot address issues in an adult way at all; single mothers are different because they have to face the breadline and that makes them and their children grow up properly.

Being a father is a thankless task. Even if you work at it there is a good chance your child will be stabbed to death at the age of 14 (on average each UK hospital now receives 32 people with stab wounds every day of the week) or lost to drugs by the time they are 18. To counteract that what do you have? Well the main way seems to search out the child's specific weaknesses and twist them to the full. You find their most beloved toy and take it away from them. What does this teach children? That seeking how to exploit people and effectively blackmail them, is the best way to behave. No wonder universities are complaining that students approach 'team work' in class as if it is an episode of 'The Apprentice' and rather than working together seek to exploit and then dump the others. What is the alternative? Smacking? Of course this is illegal in the UK now, you can be arrested for smacking a child in public which is why you hear so many whining children in supermarkets these days as they are denied everything that they want as they pass it and yet the parents have no way to punish the child for such an attitude. Violence of course does screw up lives. A lot of my problems stem from when my father kicked me across my bedroom and on another occasion tried to slit my ears off with a kitchen knife. So fathers, you are in a lose/lose situation. Your children feel they have a moral right to consume everything they want and you have no sanctions against them that do not involve blackmail or violence.

I am not advocating fathers walking away from their children, so many do this anyway. What I am saying is think twice before trying to create some. If you must show your virility do it in some other way. Having children around will simply sap your energy (just having a 6-year old in my house is incredibly sapping I dread to think what he must have been like as a baby). You can prove yourself in so many other ways on the football pitch, climbing, cycling or travelling the world, joining the Territorial Army/Special Constables/Volunteer Fireman or Lifeboatman. All of these things will get you lots of male credit without the constant burden and unavoidable failure of being a father. If you want to go around having unprotected sex because it makes you feel strong, then have a vasectomy. It might make you feel weaker, but in fact you will be able to sleep with many more women and force non-condom usage on them (which so many men seem to think is brilliant) if you are not going to get them pregnant and you know there is going to be no come back from someone seeking maintenance nine months down the road. Stay away from single mothers. Single-parent families are the only type of family that will create people who can survive in the 21st century, they do not need you coming in and buggering it all up. As a step-father you will always be in an even worse position than a biological father. You will still be exhausted by badly-behaved, demanding children without any love for you and constantly compared negatively to the father who is not there who will be idealised. Being a step-father is a fool's game.

There are more than enough men around who will go on creating children, most often inadvertently, but if you have sense and want to actually live life, then take all the steps you can to avoid becoming a father, you'll not regret it.

P.P. Often writing on fatherhood point to the 'wonderful' minor incidents of charming interaction between father and child. I encountered one of these in my role of pseudo-step-father to the six year old in my house. I was going for a blood test today and he asked me what colour my blood is and I said red. I added that all people's blood is the same colour and he said 'Yes, everyone is the same on the inside' and I thought how wonderful it was that in this country so riven by discrimination he still held to such a positive view as that. It heartened me a little about the next generation. However, a relationship cannot be built on such incidents and it would have had a similar impact on me if I had heard it from some child I encountered on the bus. I still cannot shake the sense by even partially playing a father role to that child I am utterly screwing up the robust single-parent family set-up he had with his mother and so he will be torn apart by the world when he gets out there. For his sake I need to be far more distant and not have such moments with him ever again.

The Trouble After Suicide Fails Is That You Still Have To Face Life

One reason why I have not been blogging much recently is because I have been facing pressures: severe ill-health during my first holiday since 2005 and now bad news about my employment prospects. I suppose I should have not expected any more. In this age we should expect to have to have twenty plus jobs in our lives. I have been fortunate that at a time when 2 year contracts or less are the norm, my last job went on for 4.5 years and this one will reach 4 years too if I complete the latest contract in August 2009. For a man in his twenties, two years is probably enough in a post, but as I age it gets harder, exacerbated by having to move across England and then move house twice more during the 2 years 7 months that I have had this current job. Anyway, yesterday it was revealed to us that the company had found out it was doing worse than it thought and was looking at cutting jobs. Of course the high ups will be unaffected they always are and will not even see a pay cut. The most vulnerable are people like me, the contract workers. They do not need to pay redundancy money they just do not re-employ us. This means another move and now of course I have to sell the house (the value of which is falling) which could easily take 5 months or more given it took 7 months to get in here. My industry is not one with jobs everywhere so I will be back on the road again. The longest I have spent in one town was 6 years in London and it looks like the average is about 4 years. Anyway, I just could not face the uncertainty, the need to keep on applying for jobs (I usually get 1 interview for every 25 applications I make and 1 job for every 125 applications, that is hours and hours of filling in forms) all made worse by now being over 40 (my insurance companies keep telling me this fact and why it means my premiums have to rise).

You will not be surprised to find that all of this simply made me tired with life and I began taking an overdose of prescription medicine last night. Of course I bottled it (for non-UK readers, I lost the courage to finish it off), I made the mistake of not getting drunk first and having watched a particularly bleak episode of the science fiction series 'Torchwood' this week about a man brought back to life, I became terrified of what lurked waiting for me beyond life. Initially it had felt really relaxing and I had no desire to write a note or anything, just to get away from all the stuff piling on my head. Today I feel incredibly cowardly that I am still here, extremely weak in terms of my resolve and so rather than yesterday when I felt courageous I now despise myself even more. I do feel rather numb which is quite a good sensation because the big problem of failing to kill yourself is that you still have to face up to all the rubbish you were trying to leave behind and that is where I am now, but the fear of unemployment and the house respossession that would inevitably fail, the need to throw away so many of my possessions so I could fit into a flat I could afford and give up what I have accumulated in my life, is dulled now, though of course it has not gone away and is still to be faced.

They say unemployment has fallen from the 4 million out of work of the 1980s down to somewhere like 1.6 million people these days. However, I think there is a lot of missing unemployment, unreported and also for people like me, underemployment in the sense that my next job is unlikely to pay sufficient to keep the house. How foolish I was to fall for the pressure and the lure of buying the house, and how incredibly quickly (it is just over 3 months since we moved in) that it is all coming apart. This is my moment of being truly middle class, it is likely to expire in 17 months if not sooner. Men are obsolete, the new jobs being created are low paid and unappealing. What a waste of government money all my education was in that it cannot keep me in a decent job and in my house. I should have simply left school at 16 and I would be in no different position now. I would probably have had fewer experiences, but so many of them have been about stress and pressure, I would have given up the bulk of them. I can see why the suicide rate among young men in the UK is so high, there is nothing to live for. If you are lucky you will get a decent life for a few years, but then it will evaporate sooner or later and certainly when you retire if not before. How dare people try to stop young men exiting the so bleak existence that lies before the bulk of them.

This was another point which angered me. My housemate got angry that I would kill myself in my own house with a 6-year old living here. For a start I reserve the right to kill myself in my own house and no-one is going to stop that. Second, I have ended up as de facto father figure to this child (you cannot avoid it, beware of this two adults plus child, no matter what the relationship, end up being perceived as the parents no matter how badly qualified one or other is for the role. I imagine it even applies with two people of the same sex living in the house but it is even easier if you are a different gender to the real parent) and apparently that means I cannot kill myself. That is ridiculous, the strongest woman I ever knew had had both her father and uncle kill themselves and it made her outward going and intelligent and incredibly well travelled. The reason behind this is because children who come from two-parent families are too weak to live in this modern world. Only children from single parent families stand any chance these days. They are not pandered to and early on they learn to be tough and resourceful. If I had not been brought up by two parents I am sure I could cope far better with the situations I am facing. It is rubbish to say families need fathers; two parent families are unsuitable for western society in the twenty-first century and that 6-year old would be better off without some pretend father.

So where does this leave me now? Well, I guess the numbness will wear off and the fear of the future will return. Also massive regret over so many things I have done wrong. Every decision I seem to have made since 2005 has been a big error. Leaving my old permanent post for a contract job in more expensive region of the UK was a major mistake especially as they reneged on three-quarters of the relocation expenses I had been promised. The second thing was not to downsize immediately and try to keep the space I had previously enjoyed, that is impossible in South-East England. I picked two wrong houses to rent. They initially seemed good but the behaviour of the landlords cut the ground from beneath me and costs thousands of pounds in moving and moving again let alone a lot of stress. Of course the house purchase was handled very poorly, getting so little for my London flat, paying so much for this house and getting a fixed-rate mortgage when interest rates were at their peak. Done differently I could have got £5-10,000 more out of the deal and not eaten up all my savings for a house I will not see two years in and that money could have tided me over the period of unemployment that is coming up. I have been a fool at every turn.

As you can tell given that nothing has changed in the circumstances that led to me trying to take my own life (something I can never get right, I tried to hang myself at the age of 22 and the hook to which the rope was tied broke dropping me to the floor) remains. Next time I am going to get a lot of alcohol to keep the frights away as I do it and I am going to make sure that I have far far more medicines so that there is no chance I will come back simply with a headache. Then the government can simply continue its authoritarian steps (still trying to push for 42 days detention without charge and now rushing through identity cards for all foreign nationals in the UK, a cynical ploy as the libertarian right are strongly against identity cards but they hate immigrants even more) without me.