Stereotyped and Stigmatized? Tell the True Stories of Your Strengths
The stereotype-defying lived experiences of Black single mothers and other single people, too
If you live a life that is different from what is most often valued or celebrated, you are probably living with the feeling — and fact — of being stigmatized. In the U.S., for example, marriage and nuclear family are held up as ideals. If you are a single person, you are, in many ways, cast as second-rate. You are the one who (supposedly) did not get a happy ending.
If you are a single mother, the story about you is even worse. You have, it is presumed, acted irresponsibly, and now your kids are doomed to a life of criminality, early pregnancy, and despair. And if you are a Black single mother, double or triple or quadruple that stigma.
The most sophisticated social science research shows that all of those demeaning claims are grossly exaggerated or just plain false. No matter. The beliefs persist.
An important report, “The Case Against Marriage Fundamentalism: Embracing Family Justice for All,” shows that the idealization of marriage and of one particular family form didn’t just happen naturally. More than a dozen well-funded organizations and institutions have been working for decades to promote their agenda of “marriage fundamentalism”: “the idea that a family composed of a man and a woman in their first marriage is ‘the best’ or ‘ideal’ type of family — especially for children.”
What the marriage fundamentalists never seem to acknowledge is the hurtfulness of their agenda. The harm can be economic, as, for example, when they succeeded in getting federal funding directed away from income support for poor children and poured into programs to encourage adults to marry.
It can also be psychological. Getting told that you are not a good mother because you are a single mother, or that your children just aren’t going to do as well in life as those kids from the “ideal” families, or that your family is “broken,” takes its toll.
It is not just the mothers who notice. Their kids do, too. A high school student and daughter of a single parent, when researching the topic of single-parent families, was confronted…
