The Obama Presidency and the Triumph of the Single Parent

Eight hours after the nation inaugurated its 44th president, a Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority bus driver made her way through one Boston's lightly traveled and lightly served routes with her young daughter by her side.

The girl, roughly five or six years old, passed the time by greeting riders and keeping count of them as the bus wound its way between the city's Jamaica Plain and Roxbury neighborhoods. It was nearly 8 p.m., and the driver and her child were heading into their last run of the day.

"Only 45 minutes more, then we can go home and have dinner," the driver told her daughter, who had been playing with the beaded elastic ties and the ends of her pigtails.

"We can get something to eat?" the girl replied.

"Yes we can."

There was an undercurrent to their interaction that had nothing to do with an absent father, an overburdened mother or a child left behind. It's about a family making it work and facing the same challenges Ann Dunham did in raising her son: Barack Obama. His elimination of racial barriers to the nation's highest office are most noteworthy, but eliminating the stigma of a "broken home" is a feat that shouldn't be overlooked.

Though Obama seems to agree with the previous administration that "healthy" marriages offer the most beneficial environment for a child, he was brought up through two unhappy marriages and he, his mother and his grandparents made the most of their situation. Yes, it is a more difficult approach, but millions of families take it by choice or circumstance and make it work.

According to the U.S. Census, there were nearly 13 million single-parent families in 2006. Of those, more than 10 million were headed by single mothers. Roughly a third of all children in the U.S. lived with single or unmarried parents. When those figures were adjusted in 2007 to account for non-married couples living together, the number of single-parent families was still about 26 percent.

Traditionalists often cite these families as a drain on public programs and impetus to pursue such marriage-as-income solutions as the "Healthy Marriage Initiative," ignoring the fact that two-thirds of all single parents shun public assistance and only six percent receive Temporary Assistance For Needy Families (TANF). In fact, among single parents, more than two thirds of single mothers and their children live above the poverty line, while nearly 90 percent percent of single fathers and their kids escape poverty.

There is no evidence of anyone claiming that being a single parent is easy. Obama and his mother benefited not only from their own unique gifts, but from the willingness of Dunham's parents to assist in the process. While there are parents who lack such support, many single parents put together a fragile patchwork of family life consisting of babysitters, family members and a flexible employer or three.

My sister and I were both young when my mother and father divorced and remember her taking us home from her first job as a teacher at our Catholic elementary school, fixing us dinner and then leaving us with a sitter while she worked her second job at a local supermarket. Lunches consisted of cheese or peanut butter on white bread; dinner was "ham steak" or 3 for $1 boxes of macaroni and cheese. When she couldn't get or afford a sitter, we would stay with our grandparents or our aunt. Our mother became adept at sewing patches in school uniforms, begrudgingly accepting my grandmother's offerings from her Newark welfare office and teaching us how to handle our own laundry and lunches before we turned 10.

The Notte children got the idea that we were poor, but our mother and the rest of our family never let us feel impoverished or deprived. Our grandmother encouraged us to read and play, and my mother bristled at nuns' accusations that our misbehavior or occasional slipping grades were a result of our "broken home." If asked about this subject today, she eagerly tell you about mine and my sisters' college diplomas, career accomplishments and how she'd like to cram them right up those nuns' habits.

I would think of the text message she'd sent me earlier in the day as I slipped past mother and daughter and off the bus. My mother had been watching the inauguration with her class and found the crowd in Washington reminiscent, if several times larger, than one she'd seen more than a decade before.

"I know how I felt when you graduated Syracuse. I can't imagine how his family feels."

Yes she can.

Comments

[downwardpuppy]

Wow, I read this differently than all of you. He's not saying "Hooray for single parenthood!" (and even if he was, I'm lost as to how that would be "feminist propaganda") In fact the thrust of the piece is clearly a sense of appreciation for the mothers who beat the odds and raise kids who go on to have wonderful lives. Nevert is it even implied that those wonderful lives are owed to the fact that there is only one parent. This piece is saying that after years of insisting kids from single parent families are screwed for life we can take this opportunity to see that they can come out okay, hell- they could be president. He never says that kids are better off without fathers but instead celebrates the fruits of the struggle faced by single parents like his. Most people don't choose single parenthood easily and it's refreshing to see somebody applauding the people whose children come out of it well. What you are all saying implies that people faced with single parenthood should just quit because their child won't have the optimum experience.

Being raised with a lot of help from grandparents does not make anyone less a "child from a broken home" and the connection to the bus driver is fairly obviously the idea of hope the Obama story can give a woman who is raising a child solo- like the bus driver.

Huffington Post readers are usually more tolerant and intelligent than this....

[h0tr0d]

Every study ever done on this subject conclusively shows kids do better with a father present in their life. Does this mean that some kids don't do well with a single mother ? No, but as public policy goes, it should be clear that there should be encouragement to keep fathers in their childrens lives. Can we get off the radical feminist propaganda ?

[zagyzebra]

The operative word in raising children is "community." It matters not whether the child is under the principle keeping of a single man or women, as long as there is a strong support system backing that individual up. In Obama's case, it was his grandparents. Makes all the difference in the world.

[Claude LaFreniere]

“Come on!
A familly: one father, one mother and kids is always better than a mother (or father) only familly for kids. Pointing out the exceptions to this rule (eg Mr. Obama familly) don't prove the inexistence of this common sense rule.

This article is a good example of the "progressive" ideology. The only progress shows here is the renewal of old way to UNthink and talk.

One of the major problem in black american familly is the absence of a father (ONE!): the man who help the mother and and coach the kids especially the teenagers boys.

:-(”

[phinney]

I really don't get the comparison of Obamas mother to that woman driving the bus. Obama spend most of his childhood being raised by his grandparents. Obama had a mother and father figure, his grandparents.

I think it's safe to say that most of us raised by single parents came out alive. But you'd be hard pressed to find those who would say it was a good experience. The scars of a broken home run deeper than anyone is willing to acknowledge.

[propitiousmoment]

"Above the federal poverty line" is a joke. Let's talk about how far above that arbitrary line, and why is it not indexed by locality.