Choosing Single Motherhood: The Thinking Woman’s Guide
- ISBN13: 9780618833320
- Condition: NEW
- Notes: Brand New from Publisher. No Remainder Mark.
Product Description
The comprehensive guide for single women interested in proactively becoming and being a mother?includes the essential tools needed to decide whether to take this step, information on how best to follow through, and insight about answering the child’s questions and needs over time.
Choosing Single Motherhood, written by a longtime journalist and Choice Mother (a woman who chooses to conceive or adopt without a life partner), will become the indispensable to… More >>
I searched the text for “unemployed” and “unemployment”. Nowhere in this book is there a discussion of serious financial realities as a single mother. I am, incidentally, a middle-aged single mother, recently unemployed, with no family to fall back on, and with an ex-husband who reliably pays support and shows up for visitation, but is not a friend, and is not well.
What will you do when you lose your job, your family declines to help out, and you can’t job-hunt effectively because you can’t pay for childcare anymore and you have no one to leave a three-year-old with while you fly cross-country for an interview? What will you do when the daycare gives your child’s spot away?
What will you do when you have major surgery and have no one who can look after your child for weeks while you recover?
What will you do when your child can’t get into the elementary school’s before/after-school daycare for two years, and you can’t find someone to show up reliably for 45 minutes, five days a week, to drive the child to and from the daycare? Can you leave work repeatedly at 2:30 pm and be gone for an hour without getting fired?
Problems like these are addressed by a breezy, impatient, “you’ll take these things as they come” in the book, and then forgotten. But as one who’s been there for years, I can tell you that family does not always come through; that jobs vanish; that people in midlife get sick, sometimes seriously; that friends have their own families to look after and their own problems. There are reasons why so many single mothers end up living with their children in a spare bedroom in their parents’ houses, and also reasons why so many single mothers escape that situation by jumping for the wrong man.
The economic situation is not likely to improve. As much as this book likes to pretend otherwise, economic hardship is a serious thing for children. Single motherhood by choice is only for the exceptionally secure, financially, with rock-solid family and a knack for friendship. I would not advise it for mother or child, otherwise. If you go ahead and have a child you will, of course, be glad; sentimentality helps raise a child, and you will be sentimental about both motherhood and your child. You will not allow yourself to consider it a mistake. But raising children in insecurity, isolation, and poverty can do real damage to both of you; so can turning children into caregivers early if you get sick. Please reconsider if you are not exceptionally fortunate in money, love, and friendship. There are many, many children who could benefit from your love and affection without your being their biological mother.
Rating: 1 / 5
The author’s “Choice Mother” is financially independent and too good to be true. I did not find the book to be useful in preparing advice for a beautiful, single, impecunious woman whose biological clock is running out. I know she wants children and can find a husband subsequently. That possibility is not mentioned.
Rating: 1 / 5
This book was very very helpful and in great shape it was just like new! I enjoyed it. Delivery was good and had no problems. I am completely Satisfy. Thank you so much
Rating: 5 / 5
This book provides a good analysis of the issues surrounding the choice to be a single mom. Very smart and helpful.
Rating: 5 / 5
Single motherhood is a profoundly life altering decision. This book helps women considering single motherhood by choice to take a realistic look at their options and the possible complications and difficulties. The interviews with “grown – up” children is a bonus and fairly reflects the perceptions of the majority of the children raised by single moms by choice. Single moms by choice or by chance will also want to check out The Complete Single Mother, recently published in a completely revised third edition.
Rating: 4 / 5