Recommended Blog

By: Oliver

The Successful Single Mom/The Successful Single Dad

In browsing the web and looking up other blogs about single parenting, I came across The Successful Single Mom. At first, I skimmed the blog for some additional insight on single parenting and to learn more about the conversations taking place elsewhere. Within just a few minutes of glancing at the posts on the blog’s home page, I was intrigued with how broad, yet specific this blog was. I was reading great information from finding the best nanny for a single parent to dating as a single mother. In addition, most of the post have been done based off of Honoree's research. Whether it is an article, book, or a new study, Honoree covers what her readers want to know about single parenting.

The brilliant Honoree Corder, who is an Executive Coach at Honoree Enterprise in Austin, a mother, an author, and overall amazingly successful women and leader in our generation, is the mastermind behind both the blogs. Her insight on single parenting is motivating and worth spending time learning about. I mentioned The Successful Single Mom blog and how it is geared towards mothers, but Honoree also has another blog that is called The Successful Single Dad, which focused on helping educate readers about how to be a successful single dad. In a quick summary of Honoree, she is filled with outstanding tips, steps, and methods that can help both mothers and fathers who are single parents. Below are some steps that Honoree mentions on her two blogs. 

* * * * *

The Successful Single Mom: Short-Term Massive Action (STMA) 100-Day Plan

This is a program outline that Honoree uses to get single mothers on the track to success! For the full list and details, see this blog (link at the bottom).

• 100-Day Vision: This is your “what.” What you want achieve over the next 100days?
• 100-Day Purpose: This is your “why.” Help you to achieve down the road?
• Top 3 Goals: The 3 most important things you wish to accomplish in the 100-days?
• Empowering Descriptors: This is the fun part – give yourself a reputation to live up to!
• Three areas of focus: These are the three areas of your life you want to focus on during the Program. They could include: weight loss (or gain), positioning, client development, etc.
• Resources: These are the people and things you can rely on to shorten your success cycle – they would include books, seminars, music, mentors, CD programs, etc.
• Next Steps: This is your “data dump.” Get out of your head and on paper every single thing that needs to get done. These items could include cleaning out your car, buying cat food or sending a card to your mom. If you’re carrying it around in your head, it’s adding to your stress level and making you less effective. Take your list and put the items in order of importance. Your items will fall into one of four categories: Do, Delegate, Delay or Dump.

 (Corder, The Successful Single Mom, 2013)

The Successful Single Dad: The Single Dad Transformation Program (SPTP)

This is also a program that helps single fathers get on the right path to secure overall life balance. This is a session and/or workshop to some extent. If you are interested in this program, I encourage you to follow the link below.

Part of this program is to help dads to do…

1.  Identify where you are now, where you want to go, and the results you want to create.
2. Get organized.
3. Feel self-confident and authentic and express that to the world.
4. Create and keep unstoppable momentum; more life balance
5. Get control of your finances, physical body and love life.

(Corder, 2012)

* * * * *

I highly encourage you to check how both of these wonderful blogs, even if you’re not a single parent yourself. Honoree has many posts that span across many topics and issues. Also, if you want to read more in depth with Honoree’s work, check out her books! That’s right, Honoree doesn’t just blog, but she is an author of over a hand full of books about being a successful single parent! For a list of these books, check out her blogs and she has the list under the “Book” tab. Happy reading! Enjoy!

The Successful Single Mom

http://thesuccessfulsinglemom.blogspot.com

The Successful Single Dad

http://thesuccessfulsingledad.blogspot.com

References

Corder, H. (2012, October 12). The Successful Single Dad. Retrieved March 5, 2013, from Blogspot: http://thesuccessfulsingledad.blogspot.com/p/single-dad-transformation-program-sdtp.html

Corder, H. (2013, March 6). The Successful Single Mom. Retrieved March 6, 2013, from Blogspot: http://thesuccessfulsinglemom.blogspot.com

Blog Review

For this weeks post I decided reviewing another blog about Single Parenting. The blog I picked out to review is called “Single Parents Town”. I provided a link below if you would like to check it out. I found this blog helpful in many ways. The main author of the blog is Bill McLeod who is a single parent of two children. I found that this blog was well written and had a variety of different post that may interest you.  Bill explains on his blog that there were three reasons for starting this blog.

The three reasons are stated here:

1.  “To support single parents across the country as they face the challenges, fears, and joys of single parenthood.”

2.   “To inspire and motivate parents to be an excellent role model for their children.”

3.   “To provide a source of services, advice, and resources to help organize and balance their life.”

Bill has set up a section on the blog so that others may send him their stories and have him share their experience on his blog. If you currently do not have a blog and/or would like to help others by sharing your story this would be a great place to go and check out further information. The way that he has things setup on this blog for posting purposes is that there is a separate post each day from one of his chosen writer. Each of his writer or as her refers to as “experts” has a particular day that they write on.

            I decided to review one of the posts a little further than the others that I had read. I wanted the see if it had any reliable research done on it or if it was just simply written by experience. The post that I reviewed was called “Have you tapped into your child’s imagination lately? By Scott Deetz”. This post was based on his own experience and his own feeling on how imagination is important to your children. I believe even though this post was not supported by much research it could still be helpful. I found an article that talks about how important imagination is for a child to support his thoughts. In this article it talks about how a child using imagination can be a huge benefit. The author states “Children use cognitive imagination when they reproduce actions with substitute objects (for example feeding a doll) and affective imagination when they reproduce their own feelings”(Diachenko, 2011). There are also many other articles and researchers that have proven the effectiveness of imagination in children and how it either benefits or helps the child.

            In conclusion, I believe that this blog has many positive posts and very good information to read and compare to. Although “Single Parents Town” blog is not fully backed up research I still believe it has many useful and great lessons to learn. Bill is a single parent himself and the other contributors to the blog have great insights as well. Experience is always something that can teach and show people things. I hope that this has helped and if you have any question or another blog you would like to know more about just let me know.

References:

Diachenko, O. M. (2011). On major developments in preschoolers' imagination. International Journal Of Early Years Education, 19(1), 19-25

Single Parents Town Blog Link: http://www.singleparentstown.com/blog/2013/03/02/scott/have-you-tapped-into-your-childs-imagination-lately-by-scott-deetz/

By Courtney 

Successful Single Parenting

By: Oliver

            Many people believe that individuals raised by a single parent, especially mothers who raise sons, are at a higher risk of having poor academics, lack of responsibility, and higher chances of getting into trouble. According to sociologist W. Bradford Wilcox, single parenting is worse than parents who are poor. He explains that the likelihood of becoming a pregnant teen and/or end up in jail increases with the lack of the other parent (Kripke, 2013).

            However, fatherhood expert Michael Lamb’s new research has poke holes into this notion that two parents are better than a single parent, when raising children. Moreover, what does President Barack Obama, Lance Armstrong, and Michael Phelps have in common, besides fame and attention from the media? If you have not guessed the correct connection between the three men, it is the fact that they were raised in a single-parent household (Jayson, 2008).

            Tim Biblarz, another fatherhood expert states, "Those who grow up with single mothers with adequate socioeconomic resources tend to do well. The children of poor single mothers are more at risk.” With a focus on the socioeconomics, Biblarz believes that many of the kids who find trouble do so from having a lack of economic stability. "What's important is not whether they are raised by one or two parents. It's how good is the relationship with the parent, how much support they're getting from that parent and how harmonious is the environment,” says Lamb (Jayson, 2008).

            With an understanding with the recent research above, single parenting families product successful children just like a two-parent family, if not better. In the paragraph above, Lamb states that the crucial component of successful children come from the relationship between the child and the parent (Jayson, 2008). Below is an outline of a report that helps single parents build those relationships by the following steps: (1) characteristics of successful single parenting and (2) how single parents can help their child adapt to the single-parent family (Duncan, 2010).

(1) Characteristics of Successful Parenting

• Accept responsibility: successful single parents accept the responsibilities and the challenges of parenting their children by themselves 
• Seek solutions to problems: without understating or overstating the difficulties, successful single parents find ways to make things work
• Recognize the difficulties: without self-pity or bitterness, successful single parents accept the sacrifices they will make for their children
• Make plans: successful single parents look to the future for their children and for themselves instead of wallowing in self-pity
•  Maintain traditions and routines: successful single parents carry on family holiday customs and traditions as well as day-to-day routines to provide stability for children
• Commit to the family: successful single parents make the family their highest priority and put the needs of their children first
• Create open communication: successful single parents encourage clear and open expression of thoughts and feelings with their children
• Encourage: successful single parents encourage their children to develop healthy relationships with their extended family members
• Make the most of time spent together: successful single parents know that quality time spent with their children is always better than buying more toys, clothes, or gadgets to make up for an absent parent

Also, be aware of problems that single-parent families face, that two-parent families may not…

• Helping children adjust to living with one parent in the case of divorce or death
• Visitation and/or custody arrangements
• Effects on the children of conflict between parents
• Decrease in the amount of time parents and children spend together

(2) How Can Single Parents Help Children Adapt to the Single-Parent Family?

In the case of divorce:

• Keep the children out of the dispute between the two of you
• Don’t have the children take messages to the other parent for you; communicate with your ex-spouse yourself
• Work to make visitation time pleasant for 
children
• Keep the other parent informed about and 
involved in the children’s activities, school 
progress, problems, etc.

In the case of death or temporary-yet-long- term separation (military assignment, for example):

• Talk and focus on the good and the bad of the one who was lost
•  Help your child form meaningful bonds with other family members (grandparents, uncles and aunts, older cousins) who can help to be role models
• Understand that everyone grieves and handles separation differently, so be patient and sympathetic
• Spend extra time with children to assure them that you will always be there for them
• Include the children in age-appropriate chores and decision-making at home to encourage voluntary cooperation from them
• Continue to require your children to behave according to your expectations; appropriate discipline is needed to maintain stability and continuity in the family

(Duncan, 2010)

           

In conclusion, single parenting can be done successfully and can result in a successful child. The characteristics listed above by Duncan, are similar to those that I displayed in my video, which was posted last week. Michael Kimmel, a sociologist and gender studies expert at Stony Brook University in New York, says the resident parent has a huge effect. "We see constantly children of single-parent families who thrive because the parents are so devoted because they're compensating for the absence of the other parent," says Kimmel (Jayson, 2008). Overall, single parenting is just another way to raise children. Though society has a strong belief of what is right and wrong on the raising of children, sociologist such as Lambs and Kimmel are proving that a child who is raised in a single parent family can be just as successful (or more) as kids who are raised in a two-parent family. 

President Barack Obama was largely raised by a single mother and his grandmother.

References 

Duncan, D. S. (2010). Successful Single Parenting. Buffalo: Parent Education Network.

Jayson, S. (2008, 08 08). Single moms' sons can succeed, new research shows. Retrieved 02 28, 2013, from USA Today: http://usatoday30.usatoday.com/news/nation/2008-08-27-single-moms-succeed_N.htm

Kripke, P. G. (2013, 1 3). It's Better To Be Raised by a Single Mom. Retrieved 2 27, 2013, from Slate http://www.slate.com/articles/double_x/doublex/2013/01/single_moms_are_better_kids_raised_by_single_mothers_are_sturdier.html 

Single Parenting: Myths on Child Support

Single Parenting: Myths on Child Support
By: Barb