I find the issues of single parenthood interesting since I myself grew up with a single mother. My father died when I was 6, so my mother had to cope alone with 3 children. Of course, while my mother being a single mother resulted out of widowhood, she was also a teenage mother (my older brother was born when she was 16.)

I am also a "Hispanic", which can mean anything as long as Spanish is your first language.

When I was a kid we were not rich. We were poor, but not miserably poor. My mother worked hard, but she managed to provide us with everything we needed. I started working when I was 13 to help pull my weight around the house. All three of us got a university education, and eventually all three of us grew up and got on with our lives.

Were we more or less happy that other families? I would say that we were the same in the sense that we had our share of good and bad times. Maybe I did not have a father growing up, but unlike my neighbor next door, I never had to see my dad get drunk and abuse my family. I never had to see my dad go out and cheat on my mom, only to find out later that I had half brothers and sisters here and there. Some of my relatives have brothers and sisters that were born out of wedlock and that they never even met.

My family was deeply religious (even though I I never believed in God, even as a child. Somehow I failed to have any faith.) My mother has remarked that if instead of weekly catechism classes she had had sexual education classes, she would not have ended up marrying at the age of 17 and having her children so young.

I find the religious arguments such as promoting "abstinence" instead of sexual education to be for the most part a failure. People have tried to suppress human sexuality not for years, not for decades, not for centuries, but for thousands of years. Abstinence always was and will always be a failed teaching because it denies human nature and the sexual nature of human behaviour. No offense to the religious out there, but promoting abstinence is hypocritical and foolish. It is like asking people to stop eating. You can't expect people to give up a very human need.

To say that children in marriages do better is not necessarily true. There are times when a single-parent family will do better than a badly dysfunctional two-parent family. Single parents might not have the same economic resources, but then neither do married couples in which one of the partners drinks or uses drugs or gambles, etc. Then when parenting money is only half the battle. Any parent can tell you that. If money was the only determining factor, the middle class would NEVER fail to parent well. Money helps, but it is not the key to parenting well.

To say that marriage is the key to parenting well, is also a misconception. There are happy marriages, and unhappy marriages. There are loving marriages, marriages of convenience and marriages of obligation. People stay married for a multitude of reasons. We wish it would always be love, but that is not always the case. Some people can parent well and marriage is an asset in that parenting process. Others can parent well, and never be married (as in some common law relationships). Some married in church, and others had only a civil marriage. The correlation between marriage and good parenting is at best coincidental. Some people have actually parented better AFTER divorce because once divorced the couple stopped fighting and could actually concentrate on meeting their children's needs.

What our young people really need is good sexual education. That is more than saying: "These are contraceptives, now, don't get pregnant." Good sexual education should imply teaching young people responsibility and good judgement in their choices. Good sexual education should also aim to give young people some of the important skills in parenting and raising children. Stigmatizing single parents or criticizing them is destructive and hypocritical because it fails to point out ot the fact that while marriage is an asset, it is not necessarily the key to parenting well.