Journal ArticleDOI
Solo mothers and their donor insemination infants: follow-up at age 2 years
Clare Murray,Susan Golombok +1 more
TLDR
The findings from this first cohort of solo DI families to be studied lend further weight to the view that these women represent a distinct subgroup of single parents, who, out of a strong desire for a child, have made the active choice to go it alone.Abstract:
BACKGROUND: Findings are presented of the second phase of a longitudinal study of solo-mother families created through donor insemination (DI). METHODS: At the time of the child's second birthday, 21 solo DI mother families were compared with 46 married DI families on standardized interview and questionnaire measures of the psychological well being of the mothers, mother-child relationships and the psychological development of the child. RESULTS: The solo DI mothers showed greater pleasure in their child and lower levels of anger accompanied by a perception of their child ar less 'clingy'. Fewer emotional and behavioural difficulties were shown by children of solo than married DI mothers. CONCLUSIONS: The findings from this first cohort of solo DI families to be studied lend further weight to the view that these women represent a distinct subgroup of single parents, who, out of a strong desire for a child, have made the active choice to go it alone. Moreover, this route to parenthood does not necessarily seem to have an adverse effect on mothers' parenting ability or the psychological adjustment of the child.read more
Citations
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Modern Families: Parents and Children in New Family Forms
TL;DR: This chapter discusses lesbian mother families, 'Test-tube' baby families, donor conception families, Surrogacy families, Solo mother families and so on.
A study of the use of the Edinburgh postnatal depression scale with parent groups outside the postpartum period
TL;DR: Completion of the postally-administered EPDS was satisfactory, though some difficulties were experienced in a second postal administration to a subsample, and the scale was completed without obvious error or omission.
Journal ArticleDOI
‘Mom by choice, single by life's circumstance…’ Findings from a large scale survey of the experiences of single mothers by choice
TL;DR: The findings showed that women often sought advice from others and made practical changes before becoming choice mothers, and the most common method used to have a child was sperm donation with most opting for an anonymous donor.
Journal ArticleDOI
Single mothers by choice: Mother-child relationships and children's psychological adjustment.
TL;DR: The findings suggest that solo motherhood, in itself, does not result in psychological problems for children.
References
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Growing Up With a Single Parent: What Hurts, What Helps
Sara McLanahan,Gary D. Sandefur +1 more
TL;DR: In this paper, the role of parenting and the community connection in single-parenting is discussed and why we care about single-parenthood, and what should be done about it.
Journal ArticleDOI
Contemporary research on parenting: The case for nature and nurture.
W. Andrew Collins,Eleanor E. Maccoby,Laurence Steinberg,E. Mavis Hetherington,Marc H. Bornstein +4 more
TL;DR: Current findings on parental influences provide more sophisticated and less deterministic explanations than did earlier theory and research on parenting and indicate that parental influences on child development are neither as unambiguous as earlier researchers suggested nor as insubstantial as current critics claim.
Journal ArticleDOI
Measurement of infant difficultness.
TL;DR: The Infant Characteristics Questionnaire (ICQ) was developed as a short, factor-analytic screening device for difficultness and it was found that mother characteristics may affect perceptions of infant difficultness.