Single Parent Family

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Introduction and Back ground of the study Children all over the world grow up in a variety of family structures and single-parent families have become very common. They are created through divorce, births outside of marriage, death of a spouse and to some extent through rape. These family transitions are stressful for children and the negative effects of these accumulate (Cherlin et al 1991; Wu and Martinson 1993; Wu 1996) as cited by Raley (2006). Children raised by single divorced parents have been found to experience substantial distress (Laumann-Billings & Emery, 2000), and divorce is associated with an increased risk for a number of adjustment, achievement and relationship difficulties. The changes in family structure especially due…show more content…
Children of separated families as compared to never separated families are more disobedient, aggressive, non-compliant and lacking in self-regulation (Wadsworth et al, 1985) as cited by (McIntosh et al, 2009). These children are more inclined to have issues in social and close connections, for example, those with their moms and fathers, authority figures, siblings and peers (Amato & Keith, 1991b: Hetherington, 1997).Adjustment after the separation of parents is very difficult for most children. (McLanahan, 1999; McLanahan & Sandefur, 1994) concur that children raised by single parents solely are more likely to commence sexual activity earlier, to give birth to a child as a teenager, and to have more pregnancies outside marriage, use alcohol, cigarettes and drugs and to associate with antisocial…show more content…
According to (Green, 1999) biologist Ludwig von Bertalanffy founded the systems theory in 1968. Siporin, (1975, p.106) denotes that “a system is a holistic, organized unit of interdependent, transacting, and mutually influencing parts (individuals or collectives and their subunits) within an identifiable (social ecological) environment”. Systems are those components in lives that relate and interrelate, which have contact and effect on people’s ability to function, (Beder, 2000, p. 42). The general systems theory concentrates on the arrangement of and relations between the parts which connect them into a whole. The GTS works on the premise that organisms including human beings function well in totality not as individual segments. Therefore, this study works on the theory’s presumption that if one part of the system is malfunctioning it causes the whole system to malfunction. Hence the absence of one biological parent in the family system causes the other members such as the children to malfunction, emotionally, psychologically, socially and

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