More than 72 percent of children in the African-American community are born out of wedlock. That means absent fathers.
After divorcing, I left South Africa to live in Toronto. They were tough years. On my own with three young children and no income. I'd cry when they spilt milk because I didn't have the money to buy any more.
I even thought of adopting a child as a single mother.
In her whole life Mom never earned more than five or six dollars a week. Being without a husband, it was hard for her to find any place at all for us to live.
There's a really unique relationship between a single parent and their child. Marriages so easily break up. There's kind of this temporary deal about marriages. That's one of the things that makes it stressful, and that's something that's nonexistent in a parent-child relationship.
I've had the kind of complex life I write about. I was a single mother for 12 years. I'd been engaged. The wedding fell through. I then discovered I was pregnant and opted to have the child on my own. I was a professor. I was in my mid-30s. I could manage it financially.
Marriage is a walk in the park compared to being a single mother or father. I'll take that walk later.
Having children is not an act of God. It's not like you're walking down the street and pregnancy strikes you; children are a result of a conscious decision. For the most part, female-headed households are the result of short-sighted, self-destructive behavior of one or two people.
Single parents in particular may have trouble maintaining themselves as authority figures because of underlying guilt; they feel acontinuing sense that they have deprived their kids of the second parent, and so they tend to give in to the children's requests, even when unreasonable.
My mother had to make an unconventional decision. We had to run away from home. She made a really difficult decision to leave financial stability behind and undertake raising two girls on her own.
Being a single mother in the late 1950s was a very shocking thing - and dreadful thing - for people.
Blacks as a group will never be equal while they have this situation going on, where the vast majority of children do not have fathers in the home married to their mother, involved in their lives, investing in them, investing in the next generation.
Most women are one man away from welfare.
I never worried about raising a kid on my own.
Look at the political base of the Democratic Party: It is single mothers who run a household. Why? Because it's so tough economically that they look to the government for help and therefore they're going to vote. So if you want to reduce the Democratic advantage, what you want to do is build two parent families, you eliminate that desire for government.
I don't think I realised how stressed I was, being a single parent. It was really, really stressful. It's not easy on anybody.
Look, my mother's not a welfare woman. She certainly had plenty of help. But there's no substitute for a husband and partner.
The causes of crime are very complicated. But there is a very big literature, as you know, about single parenthood in crime, about race in crime, and about poverty in crime.
As a single woman, I reap the benefits of being Stifler's mom.
I thought running for Congress paled in comparison to being a parent and being a mom - especially a single mom of three kids.
A woman without a man -- a condition of 'manlessness' -- is defined as alone. But a single mother is less alone than the average housewife.
My mother was a woman. A black woman. A single mother. Raising two kids on her own. So she was dark skinned. Had short hair. Got no love from nobody except for a group called the Black Panthers. So that's why she was a Black Panther.
Conservatives were sure that if you eliminated welfare for single moms, it would eliminate - or at lease greatly reduce - single motherhood. So in 1996 we had welfare reform. Did not change the trend in the least. Soon half of all babies will be born out of wedlock.
Raising children was not designed for single parents. (Which is why divorce was such a taboo prior to birth control).
I was not prepared to live as a single parent.
