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The paper discusses the problems single parent families face. The aim of the paper is to discover what factors contribute to difficulties raising children in single parent families and how these families can be more secure in economic and social terms. The paper depicts everyday life of a single parent household. Single Parent Households In recent years, single mothers and fathers achieved notoriety under a Republican government determined to identify and pin the blame on those it believed were simultaneously draining the welfare system of precious resources and undermining decent society. A statistic says that over 60 percent of American families are headed by single parents.
So far, the government has been largely silent on the specifics of its attitude to single parent households. Republican Party avoided both big principles and big promises, saying only: Over time, single parents with children of school age, will be invited to obtain the help of the Employment Service. They will be given advice and, insofar as is possible, shown what child-care packages might be on offer. Economic factor is another one contributing to the difficulties single parent households face. During resent years women became more involved in labor market and have less time to give to their family and children. Consequently the quantity of single parent families grew rapidly, and that has poor impact on the development of young individual.
Pushing more single parents into the workplace without providing adequate day care is not the way to produce normal development in children. The most urgent government and business responsibility today is to provide good childcare for children of working single parents. For single parent families, while the urgency to provide adequate day care is vitally important, there are some options. A healthy child surely is worth one parent staying home and scaling back ones standard of living until adequate childcare is found. The post-war social security system was based on three important assumptions: full employment, male breadwinners and child benefit. Male wages were the main element of family support and, with the increase in single-parent families; the state has increasingly had to foot the bill.
As Smart (1990) pointed out, it was assumed that divorced women would remarry but this has not always happened. This has led to a feminization of poverty (Millar 1994). The number of one-parent families with incomes less than half the average rose from 19 to 60 per cent between 1979 and 1990 (Millar 1994). A high degree of consensus has developed among commentators and politicians in hostility to single parents, and, in particular, to never-married mothers, who are seen as a particular burden on the state and are linked with the threat of an underclass, irresponsible and grasping.
The increased burden of state financial support for single parents led to the setting up government programs, which introduced a new system of child assistance aimed at ensuring that absent fathers contributed to the upkeep of their children. Similar schemes are introduced in the worldwide with the intention of making men responsible for their children and reducing the benefits bill. Despite almost total support, it was strongly opposed by a small but vocal group of middle-class fathers who organized into various pressure groups as a network which led to violent demonstrations. Nevertheless, it is not hard to imagine that the Christian morale might be attracted of bringing back the traditional virtues of stable marriage, committed fatherhood and moral order. The Americans have taken this road. In some states, lone parents are being driven into homeless shelters because they have been cut off from welfare payments and cannot earn enough to support themselves.
It is also the shape of welfare systems in parts of southern Europe and the developing world, in which women who do not have a man to pay for them, or a family to shelter them is literally kicked into work. According to the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development report, this way of dealing with the problems of lone motherhood creates particularly high levels of poverty and deprivation for the children concerned. To kick single parents back to work by withdrawing benefit would have particularly bad effects in this country - where the creation of very low-paid casual work has been presented as a model for the rest of Europe - because we have high housing, transport and food costs. It is the interaction between high living costs and low wage levels, which explains why more than three children in ten below school age are living on benefits, irrespective of the shape of their families. With or without a husband, mothers on benefits cannot lift themselves, or their children, out of the poverty trap unless they are helped rather than kicked into work. Women in this country have already shown that they want to work: mothers with school-age children have one of the highest workplace participation rates in States.
It is women with young children and lousy job prospects that are unable to join the workforce and almost half of the 1. 9 million lone parents have children under five. (Polakow, 1992) Delfina Reyes, a young single mother who has endured a real odyssey in her five-year quest to get child support for her son, can be a perfect example of single parent family. Since her separation and divorce from an insensitive, abusive and irresponsible husband, the Los Angeles County Children Support Services, instead of enforcing the law, has treated her with disdain and indifference. In essence, the bureaucracy has thwarted her constitutionally protected right to receive spousal sustainment for food, clothing and shelter for her eight-year-old son. Delfina, born in the Mexican state of Jalisco, is not the typical Mexican immigrant. She is the daughter of a successful restaurateur and business family from the provincial city of Oxnard, California, where she was raised. However, because of her proud nature, sometime ago she decided to be an independent woman and make it on her own.
To support herself and her children, she now works evenings as a waitress at the Fiesta Mexicana Restaurant in Montebello. During the day she attends beauty school and she plans, upon graduation and state certification, to open her own hair styling boutique. Not surprisingly, she does not receive any kind of government assistance. Delfina's problems with the county bureaucracy began immediately after the court absolved her marriage in 1999. With the court order in hand, mandating monthly payments of $ 1, 001, she reported and filed her papers with County Children Support Services. Although she is a resident of Montebello, inexplicably her case was assigned to the El Segundo District Office and for reasons unknown to her, the department has refused to transfer her file to the City of Commerce office near her home.
Amazingly she says, The department personnel has done nothing to help me and my children in all these years, but unexpectedly, they did manage to reduce the monthly child support payment to $ 738. This was done without her knowledge and despite the fact that she is presently owed $ 60, 000, of which she has only received a total of $ 500. She has diligently called the district office three times per month, and on most occasions she is told her ex husband's social security number is not being worked so therefore their hands are tied. She has pleaded for real assistance but she has always gotten the run around.
I even asked if I should hire a private attorney and they told me there was no need for one, that the department would take care of it. Last year in December, Delfina went personally to the El Segundo office to request information on the status of her case and for a change of venue. The transfer was refused and again she was told they were still working on her case. This time the remarks were made with sarcasm and scorn as she was told that she wasnt the only case file they had to deal with and they could not assign a special investigator to her case. Logically, Delfina is frustrated, desperate and angry and says she now suffers from a nervous condition she suspects stems from the lack of resolution and the callous treatment she has been subjected to by L.
A. County Children Support Services. Delfina Reyes finally had enough and sought out help from activist friends who frequent the restaurant where she works. On their advice, she hired private investigator Frank Sandoval, a former Dodger batting practice pitcher. Together they cased and followed Rodolfo Corona, the father. They videotaped him entering his job at Downey Ford, where he labors as a skilled body and fender man.
Allegedly Corona makes $ 5, 000 per month plus what he makes on side jobs at home or at his fathers body and fender shop. Moreover, Corona is a homeowner and drives a new car. Armed with the new information, the young but feisty Reyes called Child Support Services and, predictably she was ignored once again. On the advice of her friends and a whistle blower from inside the department, Delfina filed a complaint against County Children Support Services and did not stop there.
She then wrote a letter, addressed personal and confidential, to the newly appointed department director, Phillip Brownie, and had it hand delivered, along with the videotape of her ex-husband at work, to the director's office. In the wake of September 11 and the anthrax hype still fresh in the country, you can imagine what happened to the poor volunteer messenger who delivered the items. He was thoroughly investigated and treated like a suspected terrorist delivering a dangerous package. When he exited the elevator on the fourth floor, four security officers confronted him, scaring the living hell out of him.
He was told that he was not delivering a package to just any employee, but to the top boss in the department. As the suits harshly interrogated him, questioning him on his relationship with the case, he became nervous. He told me that the tragic story of the Mexican in Santa Ana, recently arrested for videotaping the federal building ran through his mind. I do not blame him.
That man, an Indian looking man from Puebla, Mexico, is now facing deportation. What saved the messenger was the fact that he told the guardians of safety he had also delivered a similar package to Supervisor Gloria Molina. It was only then that the package received full attention. Those were the magic words. However, now get this; they questioned the wisdom of involving the supervisor?
The moral of the story could be: The county bureaucrats will do anything to protect their behind against the terrorism unleashed by single mothers in search of justice. According to my source at the department, there are hundreds of cases like Delfina's involving mothers, grandmothers, aunts and even men that are stuck somewhere in cold file cabinets, red tape and government indifference. Bibliography: Gerson, Kathleen. Hard Choices: How Women Decide about Work, Career, and Motherhood. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985. Millar, J.
and Whiteford, P. Child Support in Lone-Parent Families: Policies in Australia and the UK, 1993. Swiss, Deborah J. , and Judith P. Walker.
Women and the Work/Family Dilemma. New York: John Wiley & Sons, 1993. Polakow, Valerie. Lives on the Edge: Single Mothers and Their Children in the Other America. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992. Rodriguez, Javier.
Children of the Dream: Our Own Stories of Growing up in America. New-York Double Day, 1999. Smart, C. A Postmodern Woman Meets Atavistic Man, in L.
Gelsthorpe, and A. Morris (Eds) Feminist Perspectives in Criminology, Milton Keynes: Open University Press, 1990
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Research essay sample on The Discusses Problems Single Parent Families Face
