From our monthly parenting tweets series, we all have realized how being a mom or a dad is not for everyone. It requires a sheer amount of patience, dedication, and thinking ‘outside the box’ which, unsurprisingly, makes being a parent among the hardest jobs out there.
The only harder thing than being a parent is being a single parent, tackling all the challenges of raising your kid on your own. So to find out more about the hardships of being a single parent, we spoke with Natalie Maximets, a certified life transformation coach at “Online Divorce,” which is a professional divorce document preparation service with 20 years of market history.
“Being a single parent is equally difficult for both a mother and father,” Natalie said and added that most of these difficulties appear during puberty. “Do you think it is easy for a father to talk to his daughter about the first menstrual period or go together to choose the first bra? At the very least, it will be awkward for both.”
However, single dads face quite a lot of other challenges in addition to the ones mentioned above. “Many single fathers do not want to be overly strict with their children. Instead, they try to be soft, caring, and reasonable so that children do not feel neglected. In the same way, single fathers often try to make up for the absence of a mother in the family.” Natalie explained that this often leads to the fathers overindulging their children or giving up discipline altogether
Moreover, as confusing as it sounds, single fathers are often very protective of their children when solving personal problems. Natalie explained that such behavior happens because “they want to protect their child from everything that can upset or negatively affect them, like a mother hen. New friends or a date? It will be difficult for a potential partner/friend to gain the trust of a single father.”
Work-life balance is also something that single parents often have trouble with. “It is difficult to provide for their children and be with them all the time (except, of course, if you work remotely). A single father sometimes has to sacrifice something, and children do not always understand this. From here, there may be misunderstandings and alienation between parent and child,” the life transformation coach concluded.
