Reader, they couldn't find or rather keep a man, but they are going to find the solution!
Do I worry that as a single mum I’m more likely to raise a toxic boy? It’s complicated. I am of course terrified of my son – who does not yet own a phone – getting online and being fed the sort of misogynistic poison shown on Louis Theroux’s important, but flawed, Inside The Manosphere, which is still going great guns on Netflix. But does being a single mother actually increase that risk?
Probably, it increases all sorts of risks, which is why it was once something to avoid…
Surprise, surprise: an opportunity to blame women, some of society’s hardest working at that, for the behaviour of men.
The toxic figures platformed in Theroux’s documentary, and the boys and young men being radicalised online, have not turned out this way because they were raised by single mothers.
No, it’s because of money, or rather, lack of it:
Reaching, yet again, for tired statistics – often drawn from outdated studies – about boys in single-parent homes (while ignoring the underlying economic factors) completely misses the point.Conversations like this only compound society’s suspicion of single mothers, reinforcing a narrative that positions them as part of the problem rather than recognising toxic masculinity as the real issue.
Forty-three per cent of children in lone-parent households live in poverty, compared to 26 per cent in two-parent families. It is economically difficult, and often impossible, for single-income households to meet the basic costs of family life.
That's one of the reasons why, for thousand of years, it's been discouraged. But you yhought you knew better, didn't you?
Children from the lowest-income households face stark inequalities: lower GCSE attainment, higher rates of emotional difficulties, and a significantly increased likelihood of experiencing poverty in adulthood. Yes, there is a correlation between these outcomes and single parenthood, but for obvious economic reasons.
Economic reasons that dictate that the ideal set up is a TWO parent houshold! The answer's staring you in the face! But none so blind, and all that...
