Are You A Deadbeat Mom

No matter how hard it is being a single parent, I don’t think I could ever turn the responsibility of raising my son over to someone else. Despite my feelings, I do understand how a mother can feel overwhelmed, but I do not understand a mother that does not provide for her child emotionally or financially. Even if she cannot care for the child full time, the child should have no doubt in their minds that the mother loves them.

Don’t get it twisted, deadbeat moms do exist. I’ve read the stories about the mothers wanting to go back to school or travel the world and decided to turn the kids over to their fathers. Sometimes the arrangement is until the mother gets herself together and sometimes it’s a permanent adjustment. The situations that I am more familiar with are the ones where the mothers let drinking and drugs cloud their judgment, or those that find the new man in their life more important than their children. Whatever the reason, the child loses. There’s so much talk about deadbeat dads but from my life and what I’ve witnessed, the number of deadbeat moms are rising every day.

If the mother is not the custodial parent, I think she should be paying child support just like the father would if the situation was reversed. Most custodial fathers never get support and because of pride, they usually don’t complain about it. They just do what they have to do for their kids. Some custodial mothers are at the courthouse every time she thinks the dad has gotten a raise at his job, but that’s another story for another day.

I know women that get public assistance or child support for kids that don’t even live with them. They drop the kids off at their grandma’s or auntie’s house, days sometimes weeks at a time. When the grandma or auntie asks for some money to feed the kid or buy some diapers, the supposed to be custodial mother goes off like it’s not her responsibility to make sure her kids have what they need. Chicks like this make me want to see if there’s a such thing as shaking adult syndrome but I’m sure it wouldn’t do any good.

There were a couple of scenarios that I wanted to share with you but my family and friends do read my blog. Because I don’t want to get to fighting this weekend, I’ll keep the details to myself. I will say that I totally feel for people that didn’t have their fathers growing up but in my opinion, not having your mother there is so much worse. The kids I know in these situations, mostly girls, are constantly vying for their mother’s attention, sometimes they get it sometimes they don’t. They even go so far as to act up at school or talk back to grandma just so their mom can curse them out. To them, negative attention is better than none. I feel sorry for these girls. I also fear that they will treat their future children just as bad as or worse than their mothers treated them. It could also result in the opposite; they could spoil their kids so much that the kids are so rotten no one else wants to be bothered with them.

I’ve said all of that to say this, ladies, you are supposed to nurture your children. If you come to the conclusion that you are not the nurturing type, don’t you ever, ever, ever let your child/children think that you do not love them. Whatever you are going through is your problem, not theirs. They should not be punished and neglected. We hear too much about deadbeat dads, do everything in your power NOT to be a deadbeat mom.