Single mothers and children Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 500 words

Single mothers and children - Essay Example The homeless women and their families are exposed to deplorable living standards that sometimes may be described as inhumane and unworthy of human habitation. Polakow, in her book, succinctly captures this view when she says that, â€Å"This necessitates the decoding of our own myths of democracy and enlightened progress as one out of four infants, one out of five children, and one out of four single mothers already live in destitution, and as thousands more stand on the edge of a landscape that condemns, like young Oliver Twists, to their proper stations† (Polakow, 1994, pp. 3-4). The question that then presents itself is; why single mothers and children? The population of homeless women continues to rise every year, particularly the number of single homeless women. Many scholars have been quick to point out that the rising numbers of homeless single women represents the feminization of poverty across the globe (Rosenheck, Bassuk, and Salomon, 2010, p. 1). Many of the exceptionally destitute women have limited, job skills, earning power and education, and are beleaguered by childcare duties. In families where the woman is the head of the family, it is quite common to find that they are poorer than two-parent families because of the existence of a single income and the cost of bringing up a child. These facts only serve to prove that poor women do not have a chance in the contemporary labor market, which is primarily planned to support two-parent families with male breadwinners (Rosenheck, Bassuk, & Salomon, 2010, p.1). This leaves the single mother with no option but to seek additional income, failure of which results in the inabilit y to provide. This ultimately has the effect of forcing such women to seek accommodations in shelters resulting to an increase in the number of homeless people. The increasing numbers of homeless children may be directed attributed to child abandonment either by parents who cannot be able to provide for their needs, or by death