June 2011 - Single Parent Wealth

Single Parent Dads – Happy Fathers Day

06/19/2011 Donna Comments 0 Comment

Happy Fathers Day to all the hardworking dads out there; single parent dads, joint custody dads, step dads and regular dads.

I’ve found some inspiring articles about dads. I hope you enjoy them. And enjoy your special day!

Single dads find support among their peers

Just because Sheldon Kitzul is a social worker and life coach doesn’t mean he has all the answers to the challenges of fatherhood, including single parenting. So, recently, he dropped into 1UP, the Victoria Single Parent Resource Centre to see what they offered and opted to join its Dads With Dads Support Group.

A special tribute on Father’s Day to single dads

Until recently, many occupations were “gendered,” in that people thought of them as being necessarily male or female. A doctor, for example, was always assumed to be male, while a nurse was inevitably seen as female.

This meant that female doctors and male nurses were all but invisible. But no longer: The fall of gender barriers in recent decades has provided new visibility to those who previously lived in the shadows.

Fathers get a bad rap in the media and the courts

Arnold Schwarzenegger. John Edwards. Eliot Spitzer. John Ensign. Mark Sanford. To hear the media tell it, we live in the era of the bad dad.

Stories about famous, successful men who submit to temptation and harm their family lives in the process certainly make great headlines and Internet fodder, as do the divorces that often follow.

Lost in the obsession over this handful of episodes is the fact that research shows that most fathers are heavily invested in their kids’ lives and that their presence is vital.

Fathers Day: Dads are very important, and every child should have one in their lives

This is the day for fathers and their children to celebrate that they have each other.

There is much to celebrate. Dads are enormously important. They understand boys as only a former boy can, and can offer guidance and examples that only a male can provide. They teach daughters things a man understands better than a woman, and help them get ready to have healthy relationships with males.

On Father’s Day, honoring the single dads who step up

Most days, it sure doesn’t feel to Mark Hertle like he’s part of one of society’s hottest trends. Take what is supposed to be a routine part of parenting: the PTA meeting.

“I go in to those meetings, and I’m still viewed with some suspicion,” Hertle says. “It’s like: Why am I there? Am I cruising for a date or something? It’s just a little bit of a sense you get, that you’re an outlier.” Yet in that often thankless duty of child-rearing, they say nobody is stepping up these days more than dads like Hertle. By which I mean: single dads.

Read more: http://seattletimes.nwsource.com

Single Moms in Kentucky have one in three Chance of Finding a New Job that Pays Enough

06/15/2011 Donna Comments 0 Comment

For single parents in Kentucky, finding a job that pays enough to provide for your family is difficult. If you’re a single mother with two children living in Kentucky, only one in every three new jobs being created will provide you with enough income to sustain your family.

During a news conference at Spaulding University, Lopa Mehrota, interim director of the nonprofit organization, Women4Women stated that economic data they compiled showed that most new jobs fall far short of delivering the kind of wages that Kentucky single parents to survive.

“We have a long way to go in making sure Kentucky families can support themselves,” she said at the news conference.

The average Louisville single parent with two children needs to earn $23.60 per hour, or $49,836 annually, to make ends meet and still save up to $200 per month toward retirement, college education and home ownership. Those figures are from the “Basic Economic Security Tables,” compiled on a county-by-county basis throughout Kentucky.

Meanwhile, Louisville female heads of household with two children earn a median wage of around $25,000 annually, according to data from the U.S. Census.

Kentucky was one of five state analyzed in depth alongside a national set of income tables produced by Wider Opportunities for Women, a national nonprofit, in partnership with Women4Women.

The goal of making the report available to the public and policy makers is to highlight the difference between economic security and living just above the poverty level. For example, the federal poverty level for a family of three, in Kentucky is $18,130.

The poverty level guidelines describe what it takes to “barely survive on the desperate margins of society,” Mehrotra said at the press conference. As a policy tool, she added, “they do not capture what it costs to live.”

“The American dream of working hard to support your family is being rewritten by the growth of low-paying industries and rising expenses,” Joan Kuriansky, WOW’s executive director, said in a news release.

A Federal Reserve Bank official welcomed the study, calling the new income estimates “a wake-up call.”

“Job growth is not the total answer here,” Maria Hampton, vice president at the Louisville branch of the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis, said at the press conference. “This is the type of information that people need to make decisions about what they need to earn to cover basic expenses…. for a sound future.”

Source

Single Parent Wealth

A Wealth of Information for the Single Parent

Browsed by
Month: June 2011