You learn a lot being raised by single parents, here are just a few of many more.
1. Independence
Eventually you learn to realize that your parents don't know how to do this whole thing anymore than the next couple, and ultimately it's up to you, you are responsible for your own happiness. You begin to realize that you can't trust everyone, only yourself sometimes. Some might say that has made me a skeptic, only I see it as a realist.
Sure you'll have friends, but at the end of the day there really is just you. It might sound lonely, but reality is it just means we've had to get more creative than the rest, to entertain and amuse ourselves.
We learn to rely on ourselves to try to ease the burden entrusted on our parent.
2. Need for Control
3. Communication
Ever heard the term communication is key? Yeah? Well, it's the biggest key part of what makes a successful relationship is straight up communication.
4. Appreciation
Appreciate the things you DO have in life, not what you don't. Appreciate how hard your parent has worked to raise you, and tell them. There's nothing more rewarding than for your single parent to hear how grateful you are for all the years of hard work they have put into raising you, and it's music to their ears to know that they were able to raise a child on their own, and have them turn out to be more than what they ever could have imagined.
5. Acceptance
Life is never going to go the way you plan it. We learn this first hand, it is ingrained into our minds from the moment we first begin to think for ourselves. Going along with appreciation, accept what you do have, not what you don't. No you don't have a big family with two doting parents living under the same roof. You never got that dynamic, and that's okay. There might have been a time period in our lives where we struggled to accept this, but more often than not, we learn acceptance in every aspect of our lives. We accept the things we cannot control, because that's life. And life, no matter what, is a beautiful thing.
6. Empathy
To be empathetic means to be able to relate to someone, to be able to put yourself in their shoes, and feel with them. Not necessarily for them. Believe me when I say, growing up seeing the struggles of a single parent shape you into an empathetic individual.
7. Honesty
And, after all these lessons you've learned at the end of the day, after telling yourself that being an only child and raised by a single parent has helped you for the better, you still find yourself vowing to not let your child be raised this way.
No matter how many positive, self-growing, life lessons we learn, we still want the chance to make things different for our future kids. And there's absolutely nothing wrong with that.
It is because of this wish that we try to make every relationship work to the best of our ability. We don't want to accept failure because that means we might have failed as a potential parent, failed our dream of creating that wholesome stability we never truly got.
Part of what makes a successful relationship is flat out honesty. We learn this quickly, as having a dynamic of only two people in a household, honesty is needed to keep it functioning. There's no room for BS, because you'll get called out pretty quickly for that.
