Why I Chose Single Parenting

I have decided to examine and analyze the sub culture of single parenting. This is a subculture that is somewhat foreign to me because my own parents have been together since they were in high school and I’ve always had two parents working as a team to raise me and to give me guidance. However, while this is something that I have no personal experience with in my own home, I do have many friends who were raised by one parent. It is not a rarity to see a single parent raising a family in our culture today, yet I think there are still a lot of stigmas and questions behind it. I will be exchanging some of my research with Aimee Shafner who is also investigating single parenting. She will be interviewing a middle aged single mother raising three children. I will be interviewing one of my good friends and old roommates from home who is a single father of a two year old. He is someone who a lot of people know of in my town, but also someone who most people don’t know well. On many occasions I have heard people say judgmental comments about him and how he raises his child. These ignorant comments have always made me angry because people don’t understand half of the struggles he has gone through with his son and his son’s mother. For this reason, I wanted to explore this prejudice, analyze the reasons behind the assumptions people make, and perhaps shed some positive light on the subculture of single parenting.