Single Parent Communication Issues

Single Parent Communication Issues

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Single Parent Communication Issues

Introduction:

Parents play an essential role in forming the behavioral and personality patterns of child. The primary intergenerational relationship in every family is the relation between the parent and child. Both parents play a critical role in raising a confident child. The communication between child and parent plays a lasting impact on children. But the communication patterns get altered if child gets raised by single parent. Warmth and control are the two primary dimensions that play role in effecting communication between parent and child. Warmth is associated with care, support, involvement and responsiveness; on the other hand control is attributed by discipline and setting limitations. These two components of communication affects the child outcomes regarding confidence, communication, self-concept and self-control. But these warmth and control focused communication patterns get severely damaged by the parental separation or support. Also the children born in families with single families despite of gender or demographics suffer from communication difficulties. It becomes difficult for both parents to maintain stable communication with children and the other ex-partner. This paper discusses the communication issues faced by single parents.

Stress and loneliness are the common issues faced by the single parents, as they lack support from the other parent in raising a child. Raising a child on by single parent is not easy. Being with other partner provides any advantages in raising a child. These parents often lack social support from the families and peers. The lack of financial support is more common in single mothers as they usually have to raise child without child-support from the fathers (Segrin & Flora, 2011).

Time management issues:

Single parents are usually bound with their tough work routines and can’t spend enough time with kids which effects their communication patterns ADDIN ZOTERO_ITEM CSL_CITATION {"citationID":"7TKPKG8W","properties":{"formattedCitation":"(Horowitz, 1994)","plainCitation":"(Horowitz, 1994)","noteIndex":0},"citationItems":[{"id":1999,"uris":["http://zotero.org/users/local/KZl8ZL3A/items/XA3H4589"],"uri":["http://zotero.org/users/local/KZl8ZL3A/items/XA3H4589"],"itemData":{"id":1999,"type":"article-journal","title":"A Conceptualization of Parenting:","container-title":"Marriage & Family Review","page":"43-70","volume":"20","issue":"1-2","source":"Taylor and Francis+NEJM","abstract":"The purpose of this paper is to provide a framework for examining the parenting process. Tasks, roles, rules, communication, resources, and relationships are described as essential components of parenting. The conceptualization of parenting is not tied to a particular family structure or type. Rather, parenting is examined as a process undertaken with the goal of ferrying children from conception and birth through developmental challenges and life events to adulthood. As a bridge between the conceptualization of parenting and its application to single parent families, questions are raised concerning what it takes to parent adequately. Notions of the successful or ‘‘good enough’’ parent are derived from facets of the conceptual framework. The challenge of providing adequate parenting for single parent families is presented. Single parent families are not described as automatic ‘‘at risk’’ situations for children. However, identification of the ingredients needed for adequate parenting provides a useful framework for evaluation of the effectiveness of single parent families in the many forms and situations con- sidered in the other papers in this special volume of Marriage & Family Review.","DOI":"10.1300/J002v20n01_03","ISSN":"0149-4929","shortTitle":"A Conceptualization of Parenting","author":[{"family":"Horowitz","given":"June Andrews"}],"issued":{"date-parts":[["1994",10,28]]}}}],"schema":"https://github.com/citation-style-language/schema/raw/master/csl-citation.json"} (Horowitz, 1994). Also if child is moving between the mother and father, the parental communication with child gets effected. Residential-parent usually gets to spend time with child in the working days while non-residential parent usually spend the weekends with the children. The residential parent is responsible for raising and maintaining the activities of child, like homework, preparing lunch etc. It becomes their primary concern to care about wellbeing of child, these parents complain of not getting fun time spend with child and fun communication gets effected by that Similarly nonresidential parent suffers from not having enough authority in making rules as child lives away from them.

Parental Competition:

After divorce or breakup the communication between the parents gets compromised and start to live in competition from each other. That alters the communication parents. Children get effected by the competition as both parents start to strive to become better parents then the other parents. This situation can result in lowering the levels of control over the child. In opposite scenario parent competition can result in fighting that negatively affects the communication the child.

Partner Hurt: It is important for children to communicate to their parents their true feelings. Often child cannot talk about one parent without hurting the other parent. This hurt makes a child feel guilty for talking about the other parent, which effects the communication of child with parents.

Rules of residential parents:

The residential parents are ones that create most of the rules for a child. They set timings and meeting durations for the child they are majorly responsible for providing care. This creates the communication for the nonresidential parent for meeting a child ADDIN ZOTERO_ITEM CSL_CITATION {"citationID":"hzdYtGny","properties":{"formattedCitation":"(Yarosh, \\uc0\\u8220{}Denise\\uc0\\u8221{} Chew, & Abowd, 2009)","plainCitation":"(Yarosh, “Denise” Chew, & Abowd, 2009)","noteIndex":0},"citationItems":[{"id":2000,"uris":["http://zotero.org/users/local/KZl8ZL3A/items/MB34MJTN"],"uri":["http://zotero.org/users/local/KZl8ZL3A/items/MB34MJTN"],"itemData":{"id":2000,"type":"article-journal","title":"Supporting parent–child communication in divorced families","container-title":"International Journal of Human-Computer Studies","collection-title":"The family and communication technologies","page":"192-203","volume":"67","issue":"2","source":"ScienceDirect","abstract":"Divorce affects a significant number of children and parents worldwide. We interviewed 10 parents and five children to get a qualitative understanding of the challenges faced by these families and the role of technology in maintaining contact. We found that both parents had a strong need to maintain autonomy in raising the child, though the residential parent had more opportunities to be instrumentally involved. Both parents and children sought to manage tensions between the two households—parents by reducing interruption of the other household, children by trying to keep contact with the other parent as private as possible. Our participants used the telephone as the primary means to stay in touch while apart but expressed dissatisfaction with the limits of audio-only communication. It was difficult to keep a phone conversation engaging—both parents and children instead sought ways to maintain contact through shared activities and routines but found little technological support to do so while separated. Situated in these results, we present implications for design that may aid in creating technologies for communication between parents and young children in divorced families.","DOI":"10.1016/j.ijhcs.2008.09.005","ISSN":"1071-5819","journalAbbreviation":"International Journal of Human-Computer Studies","author":[{"family":"Yarosh","given":"Svetlana"},{"family":"“Denise” Chew","given":"Yee Chieh"},{"family":"Abowd","given":"Gregory D."}],"issued":{"date-parts":[["2009",2,1]]}}}],"schema":"https://github.com/citation-style-language/schema/raw/master/csl-citation.json"} (Yarosh, “Denise” Chew, & Abowd, 2009).

Distance issues:

Parents fail to maintain a healthy relation with child due to distance issues which creates barrier for them to maintain a healthy communication with the child in terms of staying aware of the activities of the child and contacting a child without effecting the flow of the residential parent’s house flow. Often parents don’t feel satisfied with the use of technology in maintain communication with child.

Handling Issues:

The communication issues can be resolves by creating set of boundaries for the child. Both parents also need to communicate about the rules and issues for the betterment of the child. Each parent needs to understand with co-operation they both can make better contribution in life of the child. Both parents also need to make their communication patterns better with each other better. This will allow them both to create rules for child with consent. They can also take help from professional counselor to resolve the communication issues.

References

Segrin, C., & Flora, J. (2011). Parent-Child Communication. In Family Communication (2nd ed., pp. 142- 166). New York, NY: Routledge Communication Series.

ADDIN ZOTERO_BIBL {"uncited":[],"omitted":[],"custom":[]} CSL_BIBLIOGRAPHY Horowitz, J. A. (1994). A Conceptualization of Parenting: Marriage & Family Review, 20(1–2), 43–70. https://doi.org/10.1300/J002v20n01_03

Yarosh, S., “Denise” Chew, Y. C., & Abowd, G. D. (2009). Supporting parent–child communication in divorced families. International Journal of Human-Computer Studies, 67(2), 192–203. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ijhcs.2008.09.005