Single Parenting: Finding Love While Parenting

    It’s in the title, single parent, that a crucial conflict often lays -- between wanting to be a single person free to date and find a significant other, and wanting to be a responsible parent by honoring family commitment to one’s children. This conflict feels like a double bind because it often is, satisfying one want sometimes coming at the expense of satisfying the other. To make time for dating and developing a serious relationship can mean energy and attention taken away from parenting; while putting offspring first, treating children as a top priority, can mean placing romantic interest second. One outcome of this conflict can be an honest ambivalence. 

Sometimes the single parent can feel like having children is a mixed blessing when their needs or demands make it difficult or impossible to cultivate a serious adult relationship. Other times the single parent can feel the significant other is a mixed blessing when his or her needs and opinions complicate or conflict with parental management of the children. Resolution of this conflict by siding totally with one extreme or the other can be costly. 

Total focus on the children can deny the single parent of loving adult companionship, create undue dependency for love on children, and cause great pain from loss when it is time to let grown children go. Total focus on a significant other can deny children of needed parental attention, cause actual neglect, and foster feelings in children of emotional abandonment. So what resolution should the single parent seek? There are two. One is making a compromise about attention and the second is making a distinction of love. 

THE COMPROMISE ABOUT ATENTION  

The compromise between balancing needs for adult companionship and parental responsibility requires knowing that between the extremes of total absorption with children and total romantic preoccupation with another adult is a middle way. Children have to understand that it is important for their single parent to have loving adult companionship so that child love is not the only love that mother or father is bound to have. The significant other has to understand that the single parent is married to a previous and ongoing commitment to children that will not be forsaken for romantic love.