As an existing or newly single mother or father, the destiny of your children is in your hands and you are in complete control over balancing the negative and positive effects of single parenting. If you know how – and where to look, there are endless resources online to give you tips and guidance on parenting.
As a single parent, you need to be as creative as possible, juggling work and the duties of two persons. In effect, you are a new kind of super hero and there is no reason you should not use some ‘super powers’ to facilitate your journey of making the most of your children’s futures.
Introduction to the benefits
Some introductory examples of the positive effects of single parenting include:
- Kids learn that there is no ‘I’ in team: Kids with single parents learn early in life about smooth household functioning. They gain self-confidence and a healthy work ethic to serve them into adulthood.
- Children who learn by example are not limited by antiquated gender roles: Gender roles become blurred for example in the case of divorce. Mom has to get under the car’s hood and dad has to cook. This challenges perspectives and limitations.
- One-on-one bonding: The chance to get to know your kids better, and vice versa. Positive effects of single parenting include being able to enjoy a deeper, more respectful relationship with their kids. This helps to observe each one another’s needs and limitations.
- Kids learn responsibility: Young ones are afforded the opportunity to grow into responsible, kind, considerate and respectful people.
- Learning negotiation skills: One of the positive effects of single parenting is teaching kids how to work together to manage logistics.
- Learning how to treat the opposite gender: Children can lead by your example and learn from your experience how to discern what the right and wrong ways of dealing with a partner in a relationship should be.
Many articles focus repetitively on the same sets positive effects of single parenting, namely self esteem development, early emotional maturity Here, we will proceed to look at the positive effects of single parenting in context to how one can develop more of them, instead of by analysing the each separately. Often one can eradicate more than one negative effect by finding their cause instead of exhaustingly treating the symptoms. Since education and self-esteem are linked, academic support can be an interesting inroad to overcoming some of the negative and replacing them with positive effects of single parenting.
Award winning journalists Po Bronson and Ashley Merryman, authors of Nurtureshock: New Thinking About Children, are masters at presenting different ways of looking at society when it comes to parenting that every single mom and dad should be aware of. It was published in 2009 and has a very trendy take on modern child-raising. It is perfect for both married and single parents and can equip them with a fresh viewpoint, which challenges parenting stigmas. Nurtureshock, as the name suggests, looks at trends in the genre of raising children, which could greatly add to your resources while seeking tips on how to build on the positive effects of single parenting.
Looking for answers in offbeat places and thinking laterally can enhance your existing super parent powers and help with everything from Christmas gift ideas which sharpen the IQ to trends in childhood brain development which lend hope to the greatest young ‘under achiever’. This article focuses on the positive effects of single parenting in context to childhood intellectual development and academic tendencies. In order to highlight the cutting edge nature of information trends available, a good example can be seen in Bronson and Merryman’s Newsweek contribution: New Research: $13 Christmas gifts = 13 point gain in kids’.
For any single parents concerned about finding ways to overcome certain parenting challenges into positive ones, by transforming their child’s behavioural tendencies through academic application – the following exciting research shows how there are programs out there which benefit the neediest kids the most.
The positive effects of single parenting: Education
The writers introduce Dr. Silvia Bunge, a neuroscientist at UC Berkeley who has been measuring kids’ intelligence and conducting brain scans for several years to figure out what makes some function better than others do. In doing so, she made breakthroughs concerning what children are actually capable of – and even better – how to test for it. In a simple exercise with her students, Bunge decided to see how they could sharpen up kid’s minds by first looking at run of the mill board games due to their reasoning ability and video games, which need certain particular mental functions.
By understanding how your child’s brain works, you can add to the positive effects of single parenting in creative and inspirational ways. The below mentioned games are like gym for reasoning abilities. Most require forethought, planning, comparisons and logical integration. The researchers used the following board and video games;
- SET;
- The traffic-jam puzzle;
- Rush Hour;
- Qwirkle: a cross between Dominos and Scrabble.
- Nintendo DS: Picross and Big Brain Academy;
- Azada; and
- Chocolate Fix.
Reasoning vs brain speed
Their choice of school was Oakland elementary, known for low state test scores. Second, third and fourth graders to stayed after school to play for the researchers. Adopting a keen understanding of children’s brain function tendencies can assist in enhancing the positive effects of single parenting when it comes to education. These kids’ parents were on average high school dropouts with an IQ average of 90 but they played twice a week for an hour and 15, rotating between games to ensure differentiation.
After just eight weeks (20 hours of game playing) Bunge remarked; “From adult training studies, we knew some improvement was possible, but it was enormous.” Children’s reasoning scores leapt 32% and added 13 IQ points (bearing in mind that a 12-point gain happens on point a month for a year of school on average!)
Imagine this can contribute to the relevant positive effects of single parenting by being aware of childhood neural development by being aware of such dynamics. The team also looked at a second component of intelligence: processing speed. A second set of experiments was conducted with games that did not require memory or strategy but rapid visual recognition like Spoons and Speed, the video game Brickbuster as well as board games Blink and Perfection. 8 weeks later scores leap by 27% however while those who trained on speed did not gain much reasoning and vice versa, showing a need to diversify.
If you aim to develop your child’s intellectual potential as one of the many potentially positive effects of single parenting, it is valuable to know important conclusions to this research as Bunge explains; “All parts of intelligence are malleable. They’re all in the brain, and all of the brain shows plasticity. There’s no evidence that some regions are most or less plastic than others.”
Bronson and Merryman conclude by listing the cost of these games (which average only $13) while and Brickbuster aka Breakout aka Brickbreaker can be played online, free:
- Deck of Cards $1.25
- Blink $5
- Azada $7
- SET $10
- Perfection $12
- Chocolate Fix $12
- Rush Hour $18
- Qwirkle $19
- Big Brain Academy $26
- Picross $20
Don’t fear the Pokémon
It gets even better, Bronson looks at other games that increase children’s brain power 100-fold in Why Dumb Toys Make Kids Smarter. In his article he looks at how he was reticent to buy his son Pokémon cards until he noticed how they could turn him into a human computer. Many married and single parents dread negative effects of games and media on their children, Bronson’s family decided against violent videogames and Pokémon cards. They were concerned that their son would not show interest in other things due to an obsession with the cards. They quickly learned something that can be added to your tips for gaining positive effects of signal parenting: flexibility.
Though the kid could usually do nothing without distraction for 20 minute periods, he could pretend to be Pokémon characters for two solid hours. It slowly became apparent that what was perceived before to be an addiction was in fact a ‘good-natured absorption – genuine, intrinsically oriented self-direction.’ In addition, it was teaching him category systems and math.
In light of this, one can see how the positive effects of single parenting can be enhanced by understanding the role society play in your child’s life and development. The cards consist of an intricate system of numbers which represent of strength and power which are measured off against the ‘opponent’ player. Bronson continues: I didn’t know then what I know now: Through this repetition, his brain was transforming. Heavily used neurons were learning to fire together, and these chains of neurons were becoming myelinated in thin sheaths of fat; by this process, “gray matter” is converted into “white matter.”
In effect, active repetition fostered super neural highways, which made computation speed radically faster, in his case at elementary-school math. These, and other articles of a related nature at the cutting edge of science and learning for children which are within reach can have great benefit on how best to enhance the positive effects of single parenting through education. Imagine having a bit of time to yourself guiltlessly knowing that your child is becoming a human computer!?