Parenting
How Millennials are redefining single motherhood
Like every generation in recent history, Millennials are redefining parenthood — and one of the most dramatic shifts is the rise of single motherhood among new moms. Meta trends around women in 2017 are intertwined with the recent surge in the number of single mothers in recent decades. A full 64 percent of Millennial moms report having…
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“Don’t cry for me, I’m a black single mother”
Photo credit: J. Ballet This is a guest post by Shana Swain. Shana is a full-time mother, bartender, and freelance writer. She contributes to the Huffington Post and the Lowcountry Herald, and her personal blog is Feedmetipme.wordpress.com Boiling tears scalded my cheeks as I tried to swallow nausea to brush my teeth. The reflection in the…
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Who tells single moms’ kids nice things about their mom?
In the past few weeks I had really sweet experiences with friends’ paying lovely compliments to me via my kids. Like last night when my neighbors came for dinner with their new baby, and over stew and winter salad Helena complained how her mom (that would be me) yelled at her in the mornings. “Well,” my friend…
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Does helicopter parenting make you broke?
Plenty has been written about the drastic downside of helicopter parenting — or the practice of hovering over our children, protecting them from every discomfort and failure, that they grow up to be incompetent, anxious adults with a sense of entitlement so crippling it stands to undo our economy (sorry to blame you for everything,…
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How she did it: Med school at 35, single and 6 months pregnant
Other ways to listen: iTunes ♦ Stitcher ♦ TuneIn ♦ SoundCloud ♦ Google Play Dr. Susan O’Malley is pretty awesome. With her thick New York accent, this lifelong underachiever, secretary with no more than a high school diploma, set out at age 30 to become a physician. She did it. In this interview, I interview this amazing, charming woman who…
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Kickass Single Mom Grant: A doula for low-income new mothers
Other ways to listen: iTunes ♦ Stitcher ♦ TuneIn ♦ SoundCloud ♦ Google Play When Tiara Caldwell gave birth to her twins, she was distraught when hospital staff kept the newborns from her for more than 11 hours. Nurses assumed that she didn’t want to nurse. She felt she was discriminated against because she is African American, and she was…
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Parental alienation: A call to change parenting culture — and law
Other ways to listen: iTunes ♦ Stitcher ♦ TuneIn ♦ SoundCloud ♦ Google Play On this Like a Mother episode I interview film maker Ginger Gentile, whose latest project is Erasing Family, a documentary about parental alienation. Award-winning documentarian and herself a victim of parental alienation, Gentile’s work focuses on the now-adult children who grew up without knowing a…
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Are single-parent families whole?
I wrote the below a few years ago. I stand by it — and then some. In fact, I’ve started to look at two-parent, monogamous, heterosexual families as kind of weird. Statistically, they are a 49 percent minority — a figure poised to plummet in our lifetimes. After all, 57 percent of Millennial moms…
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Single mom movies: Best and worst single moms on film (and TV)
My running list of single moms in pop culture. Who is your favorite? Who do you loathe? Share in the comments! Everyone loves a single mom character because she makes an easy heroine. Historically, in movies she’s also made an easy victim — a one-dimensional victim to be saved from her ability to function in…
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Happy Mother’s Day to you, beautiful single mom!
Lots of WealthySingleMommy is devoted to the challenges of single motherhood. But you deserve to celebrate why you, as a single mom, are so awesome! Let me count the ways… You’re raising a human being by yourself. WTF. That’s HUGE. You pay the bills and plan a future by yourself. When your kid does something so…
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Kickass Single Mom: From homeless to chef entrepreneur
Other ways to listen: iTunes ♦ Stitcher ♦ TuneIn ♦ SoundCloud ♦ Google Play Ladies!! I am two months in to the Kickass Single Mom Grant project (I grant $1,000 monthly to a mom who is doing incredible things — whether in business, community service, her family, politics, the arts … essentially a mom who is awesome and…
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A dad explains: “Why I don’t see my child.”
Bring up the fatherless epidemic in the United States, and the arguments are as diametric and unrelenting as bipartisan politics. It is either: Men are irresponsible douchebags who abandon their children to mothers, who are left to raise the children with few resources, or … Women are conniving, malicious, entitled nut-jobs who alienate fathers from their…
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Are breadwinning moms good for families?
A few years ago headlines screamed when Pew reported that 40 percent of families with kids were headed by breadwinner moms. This is a prickly social shift: On one hand, hooray for gender equality! On the other, swarms of anecdotes from both men and women quickly reveal that this result of the feminist revolution is…
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Public assistance helped this professional single mom get on her feet
I often struggle with this platform, where I speak primarily to women like me: Educated, professional single moms. The number of unmarried mothers is increasingly affluent and educated, as women gain power in business and earning. But the reality remains that about half of kids raised primarily by a single mom live in poverty (a figure plummets…
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Single dads are better dads (& control freak moms ruin fathers)
I’ve heard it time and again: While they they were married, he worked a bazillion hours, rarely helped around the house, barely made time for the kids and spent any free time or money doing whatever the eff he wanted. She was overwhelmed, angry, felt abandoned and worried – and the kids felt abandoned by…
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This is what it’s like to be a single mom in NYC
Here are some of the awesome things about being a single mom in New York City: Dating as a single mom in New York City Nowhere in the world is there a higher concentration of interesting, successful, progressive men — many of them devoted dads. Men in NYC, more so than other parts of the…
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“My drive to get off child support led to insane career growth”
Erica, 32, a research biologist in Washington, D.C., is mom to a 3-year-old son (Erica asked I not use her last name). She sent me this email last week about how she stopped taking child support payments from her ex. So many lessons here. PLEASE READ! I have a three year old son, and his…
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When your kid’s dad cancels visits, or shows up unexpectedly
One of single moms’ most common frustrations — and by frustrations, I mean ENRAGEMENTS — is dads who don’t stick to visitation schedules. This might man they fail to show up for scheduled visits, cancel at the last minute — or show up unannounced, or ask for last-minute visits, messing up your life and plans. Dads, if…
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When should single moms tell a man she has kids?
This is a story about single-mom dating etiquette, but it is also about single moms cruising for men together. Having kids is often a deal-breaker when dating. That is OK. When it comes to dating, the possession of offspring is right up there with bisexuality (in men), herpes, smoking, being a Republican, and refusal to…
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#LikeAMother Mother-daughter interview with my Helena, 8
My favorite episode yet! Super-special guest today … my daughter, Helena. This 8-year-old gorgeous pickle and I have a mother-daughter interview: What it’s like to be a kid of divorce What she thinks about her mom dating Why kissing in movies makes her so embarrassed My proudest and best memories of motherhood How she feels…
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