An Insight to the life of an American Single Mother
United States has experienced a massive rise in the single parent families recently. The increase in the number of single parent families has led to a higher degree of income inequality. Life of an American Single Mother invariably goes through a good deal of adversities and compromises. Majority of single mothers lead a stressful life deprived of good education.
If we turn back the clock by 30 years, less than 20% of the children born in United States were outside marriage. There has been a rise in the rate of such births to 41%. At the same time, the statistics for women education shows a rather significant downfall too. Statistics reveal that in 1990, nearly 10% of the women with no college degree gave birth to children. Today, the percentage has tripled to 30%.
These changes in single mothers statistics are also accompanied with high level of income inequality. Many people contribute these changes to deviating structure of the families these days. There is high likelihood that these factors of inequality would affect the upcoming generations as well. The reason behind the poor state of single mother families can be attributed to majority of their employment in retail sector which offers inflexibility in work, lack of proper benefits, and poor payouts. Statistics also reveals that more than half of the workers in retail industry work for less than $10 an hour and nearly 70% of them work without any health insurance through job.
These facts lay the foundation of poverty and income disparity for families of single mothers. Every single mother brings home less than half of what married couples bring home. Inability to chase the career dreams by seeking quality education often deprives the single moms from achieving what they actually can. They are not able to seek education due to familial responsibilities and priorities. Being exposed to chronic health problems also predisposes them to lose a day’s worth of pay and even risks their job with frequent absence from work.
Coping up with childcare is one of the biggest problems in the way of a single mother to raise a healthy family. Things like asset building and ability to save are directly affected by the cost of childcare, housing, rentals, and daily expenses. It has been estimated that a large number of single mothers end up paying 75% of their total income towards childcare.
In view of the hardships of the lives of single mothers, it becomes highly crucial that they should be diligent about measures of help that come available around in different forms. It is imperative that they should be knowledgeable about how to create a budget catered to single mothers. They can make their life easy with the help of grants, assistance programs, schemes, and financial aids. Where the families of single mothers that fall in the low income category can benefit from programs like Food Stamps, there are special provisions for easy mortgage and housing loans for single moms. There are plenty of home-based opportunities that can help single mothers earn decent sum and spend time with children. Every single mom needs to be conscious and observant to make the most of what is available around. This can greatly help bring down the income inequality and help them raise the standard of life for their families.
