Single-parent strain (lone parenthood and mental health)
The extra load carried by a parent raising children with no partner in the home: one income, one adult for every night waking, school call and sick day, and often fewer people to lean on. Research calls it lone or single parenthood. Most single parents are mothers, and as a group they report more depression and distress than partnered parents, with the size of the gap depending on the country and its support for families.
What drives it
The same demands of raising children land on one adult, usually with less money, less time and fewer people to hand a child to for an hour. Useful for identification because a single parent who is struggling often reads it as a personal failing, while the research ties most of the gap for mothers to money, support and earlier hardship, and leaves a part unexplained, most of all for fathers.
How it shows
Work
Taking the job with the shorter commute over the better-paid one because there is no one else for pickup. Using every sick day on a child's fever. Being the parent who can never stay for the drink after work, and wondering what colleagues make of it.
Relationships
Friends say 'let me know if you need anything' and the parent never takes them up on it. Weekends when the children are at the other parent's home go on sleep and laundry, or feel empty. Dating, family visits and old friendships get squeezed into whatever is left.
Self
Notice whether the low mood moves with money, sleep and how much help there is that week, and whether it lifts in a week when someone else takes a share. Notice how often the thought 'other parents manage this' comes up.
What tells it apart
Parental burnout (Mikolajczak and Roskam): Parental burnout is exhaustion and distance in the parenting role, and it can happen in any family. Single-parent strain is the wider load of doing it alone, money and isolation included, and it may lead to burnout, to depression or to neither.
Major depression: Depression is more likely when low mood and loss of pleasure stay the same in good weeks and bad ones. Distress from single-parent strain is more likely to rise and fall with money, sleep and help, though long strain can tip into depression, which can be assessed and treated.
Financial strain: Financial strain is the pressure of not having enough money, in any household. In single parenthood it is one part of the load beside time and having no second adult, and in several studies it explains much of the gap for mothers.
A test
Ask what changes in a week with more money or another adult sharing the care, such as a grandparent staying over. A clear lift may point to strain from the load. Low mood that stays the same either way could be depression running on its own, which a doctor can assess.
Questions to carry
- At what point today did I need a second pair of hands, and what did I do instead?
- What do I tell myself about why this is hard for me?
Go deeper
- Read: The Kazdin Method for Parenting the Defiant Child, Alan E. Kazdin with Carlo Rotella, 2008. Written for parents by a Yale psychologist who spent decades testing parent management training: praise and small rewards for the behavior a parent wants to see, built up in small steps. That approach has many controlled trials behind it with children referred for defiance and aggression, though Kazdin's own 1997 review said questions remained about how large, wide and lasting the effects are. The book itself does not walk through the studies. It carries the Association for Behavioral and Cognitive Therapies' Self-Help Seal of Merit.
How strong the research is
strong. In Canada's 1994 to 1995 National Population Health Survey (Cairney, Boyle, Offord and Racine, 2003, 2,921 mothers), single mothers were more likely than married mothers to have had a depressive episode in the past year, and chronic stress, recent life events, childhood adversity and less social support together explained almost 40% of the difference. In Australia's HILDA survey (Crosier, Butterworth and Rodgers, 2007), 28.7% of 354 single mothers and 15.7% of 1,689 partnered mothers had moderate to severe mental health problems, and income, financial hardship, social support and background together accounted for 94% of the gap, with hardship and support the strongest. In Britain's 2000 psychiatric morbidity survey (Cooper and colleagues, Psychological Medicine, 2008), lone mothers' extra risk was no longer significant once financial strain or social support was taken into account, while lone fathers' nearly fourfold risk, against other men, barely changed with income, debt or support. In an Ontario cohort (Chiu and colleagues, Lancet Public Health, 2018), single fathers had about twice the risk of death of partnered fathers over a median of 11 years, after adjusting for background, lifestyle and health. Most of this work is cross-sectional, so it cannot show whether money and isolation cause the distress, or whether earlier hardship and depression make single parenthood more likely in the first place.
Where it comes from
John Cairney, Michael Boyle, David Offord and Yvonne Racine, Social Psychiatry and Psychiatric Epidemiology, 2003. Timothy Crosier, Peter Butterworth and Bryan Rodgers, Social Psychiatry and Psychiatric Epidemiology, 2007. Sarah Van de Velde, Clare Bambra and colleagues on lone mothers' health in 27 European countries, Sociology of Health & Illness, 2014