Family Talk: Single Mother Celebrities ‘Manage’ . . . ?

This article was written by Liliana De Jesus.

Perception is in the eye of the beholder.

After reading a Huffington Post article, Single Celebrity Moms Who Manage To Do It All On Their Own, I could not help but to think of how the title alone is condescending.

Can all single mothers be grouped into the same category, even celebrities?Single motherhood is a struggle on a number of levels for any woman.

And to take it a step further: to acknowledge the blind spot of the blanket statement of the single motherhood struggle being referenced, any single parent, man or woman, faces obstacles almost daily. 

The struggle found therein is not gender specific and should not be referenced as such, to use the cliché . . . in this day and age.

Every single parent has to overcome considerable hurdles, more times than not, having to deal with money, time and energy.

Having that celebrity status directly implies that, financially, the single mothers referenced are not struggling.

Doing it all on your own, for a single parent, does, at times, mean financially.

There are many single parents who do not have a co-parent fulfilling their financial part of the bargain, so to speak, to the kid(s) in question. And they do not have salaries in line with what celebrities are making.

The fact that these single celebrity moms are financially well-off, alone, takes away one of the biggest struggles many, ‘average,’ single parents face – that of financial hardship.

Should that mean that these single celebrity moms should be disqualified from gaining the recognition they deserve for raising their kids, biological and/or adoptive, all on their own?

Absolutely not.

But, there should be distinction made between the hardships a single celebrity mom/parent faces and that of any ‘average’ single parent.

It is true that money cannot buy happiness, but in the realm of being a single parent, money, or the lack thereof, has the ability to disseminate and create, respectively, tremendous obstacles.

Single celebrity moms have the means to outsource help - from top-notch child care and extracurricular activities to nutritious meals and cleaning services.

Being a single parent, of any kind is hard, plain and simple. But putting all single parents into one bucket is failing to realize the level of severity some of the encumbrances actually entail.