Lynn Olcott's The Ballad Of A Single Mother

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In today’s society the view of what a “family” is, is constantly changing from day to day. The traditional view of marriage and family once being a valued and cherished thing has now changed to families splitting up whenever there are tough times or one of the adults to no longer want to be a parent; causing many adults to become single parents an in today’s economy being a single parent is one of the hardest nonpaid jobs there is. From authors Lynn Olcott in “The Ballad of a Single Mother” to Rebecca Blank in “Absent Fathers: Why Don’t We Ever talk About the Unmarried Men?”, there are many complimentary topics and subtopics in their short pieces of work when it comes to the hardships that being a single parent and having a family can bring. …show more content…

Many of the cases she missed a lot of their adolescent years she states “I missed a lot of milestones. Day-care workers toilet-trained my babies and wrote me note about their days.” (Olcott 446) Being a single parent and trying to provide comes with some heavy burdens of having to miss a lot of what goes on in the child’s life. Being a parent you have to make sacrifices even when times get hard like when she stated the “One year, I lost my job. I quickly took another, but at a much lower salary. My Son was a talented soccer player, and I could no longer afford the fee for him to play.” (Olcott 447) There are many kids out there being supported by single parents that cant do all the things that are available to children with both sets of parents can. In Absent Fathers Rebecca Blank adds that “Many less-skilled single mothers find it difficult to escape poverty through their own earnings” …show more content…

We don’t often tend to look at the absent fathers point of view of things because mainly it is the single mothers that are in the spot light but what really is behind the men that are affected by the fact that they cannot support their children. “The lives of poor single men are much less well understood, since these men typically have less contact with the public and private organizations that serve the poor. By most accounts, poor unmarried men exhibit far more behavioral problems than single mothers, despite the fact that much of the policy discussion focuses on the mothers.” (Blank 441) Furthermore in the “Pursuit of Happyness” a movie based on real life which is set in 1981, in San Francisco, the smart salesman and family man Chris Gardner invests the family savings in a bone-density scanners, a piece of equipment twice as expensive as an x-ray machine but has a slightly clearer image. This decision financially breaks the family, bringing troubles with his wife Linda, who leaves him and moves to New York. Their son Christopher stays with Chris because he and his wife both know that he will be able to take better care of him. Without any money or a wife, but committed to his son, Chris sees a chance to fight for a stockbroker internship position at Dean Witter, offering a better career at the end of a six-month unpaid training period. During that period,

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