I grew up in the late 50s and 60s when it was taken for granted that young girls grow up, get married, have children, and keep house for a lifetime. Watching my mother serve my dad with all of his wants and needs was a lesson by example and it stuck hard. In the 70s, I married only three years out of high school. I raised our four children in the 80s and loved every minute of making a very nice home for them, with all the love, support, and family fun anyone could ever want. We were a nuclear family with marvelous opportunities thanks to their dad’s income, and we were happy and proud of it all. I was even doing it better than Mom did.
Then came 1995 and a divorce filing. Reality quickly set in as I panicked over money, health insurance, food, a place for me and my four children to live along with the astonishment and betrayal I felt. I went from a happy, uneducated homemaker just like Mom to an impoverished single mother within a year. Depression took over as I wondered where in the world my 22-year marriage went.
Eventually, we came out of it after about ten years after I got some college and went to work. It was the most difficult and heart wrenching years of my life. My oldest daughter was sixteen years old and it hit me that she wasn’t any more prepared than I was at that age for the hard realities that life can bring in a world where we never had one thought about ending up this way.
Teaching our daughters to become self-reliant before marriage is more important now than ever before. The statistics for women who end up on their own is staggering.
Half of all marriages end in divorce; the average age of widowhood in America is 54; and by the time women reach 60, two-thirds of them no longer have partners.
American women are now twice as likely to slide below the poverty line as men in their later years — and 80 percent of those women were not poor before they lost their breadwinners.
70 percent of the child support cases in this country are in arrears.
Women in the first year after divorce experience on average a 30 percent decline in family income.
By the time girls are twelve years old they begin to appreciate their independence as they begin looking forward to high school. This is a great time to explore together her college and career options and hopes with an emphasis on becoming financially secure and self-reliant in the years to come before marriage. Educate your daughters how to do things on their own and sustain them as they learn. Maybe one of the best help you can give your kids is to discover from their own blunders and to seal their lives with the self-assurance and self-reliance that is essential to succeed in life when the tough times are upon them.
Family Balance Blog 