Single Parents redirects here. For the abc television series, see

Single Parents" redirects here. For the ABC television series, see Single Parents (TV series).
"Single father" and "Single mother" redirect here. For other uses, see Single Father (disambiguation) and Single Mother (disambiguation).
"Motherless" redirects here. For other uses, see Motherless (disambiguation).
A single parent is a person who has a child or children but does not have a spouse or live-in partner to assist in the upbringing or support of the child. Reasons for becoming a single parent include divorce, break-up, abandonment, becoming widowed, domestic violence, rape, childbirth by a single person or single-person adoption. A single parent family is a family with children that is headed by a single parent.[1][2][3][4]

History[edit]

Single parenthood has been common historically due to parental mortality rate due to disease, wars, homicide, work accidents and maternal mortality. Historical estimates indicate that in French, English, or Spanish villages in the 17th and 18th centuries at least one-third of children lost one of their parents during childhood; in 19th-century Milan, about half of all children lost at least one parent by age 20; in 19th-century China, almost one-third of boys had lost one parent or both by the age of 15.[5] Such single parenthood was often short in duration, since remarriage rates were high.[6]
Divorce was generally rare historically (although this depends by culture and era), and divorce especially became very difficult to obtain after the fall of the Roman Empire, in Medieval Europe, due to strong involvement of ecclesiastical courts in family life (though annulment and other forms of separation were more common).[7]