Having a parent absent from your life is not something anyone would want to wish upon themselves. As in why would you rather have one parent when you know you’re supposed to have two? But then, life being what it is, always has a way of shocking us all. Many things happen that are not supposed to and we find ourselves in situations that we’d rather not be in. That’s the sad reality of life.
Anything at all can happen that would make a child grow up without a parent. There are cases of abandonment when a parent would simply wake up one morning and decide to leave. Just like that. This has been known to affect the mindset of any child. Knowing that the parent was alive but didn’t want anything to do with them. And then, there are unavoidable situations where death plays a huge role, or some other unavoidable factors. Either way, it’s never fun being a single parent.
This is the reason parents do their best to make sure that even though they’re divorced, the other parent also needs to have an active role in the life of their kid. Many use this as a tool, choosing to keep the kid away from a particular parent in hopes to punish them, but the poor child only suffers as a result.
Personally, I don’t think it’s possible to raise a child alone. For a child to be properly raised, there must be a mother-figure and a father-figure in their life. One half will never be enough to fill the void that the absence of the other would create. No matter how hard they try. A woman can’t be a father and mother to a child, in the same way that a man can’t be a mother and a father to a child.
Now, this doesn’t mean that both parents must be in the picture. If you noticed, I said, mother-figure and father-figure was what was needed. So, if a child is being raised by a single mom, there has to be a father figure in the child’s life. It can be the child’s grandfather, uncle, or even a family friend that the mother can trust. Having a reliable and trustworthy male presence in the life of the child would go a long way in helping them.
The same for having a single father. There must be mother-figures as well. It could be grandmothers, aunts and elderly female cousins. They might not be able to fill the void left by the mother, but they know what it is to be a mother and would be ready to show it to the child in ways that the father never could.
The saying that it takes a whole village to raise a kid is very true in this case. Because as a man , there are some things you might never be able to talk about with your daughter. Only a mother-figure can do that. In the same way, some discussions that can’t be had between a mother and her son. You might look at it through the lens of, “they’re my kids, they should be able to tell me everything.”
Yeah, but then, the older they get, the more aware of themselves they get and the wiser they become, they will look to people they know have experienced similar things before. That’s just how it is, I don’t think there’s anything that can be changed about it. We’re who we are.
Now, I don’t think that the absence of any single biological parent from a child’s life would make any major difference. But the absence of the maternal or paternal love will definitely be felt and it would affect the kind of adults that they become. This is a fact.
