Raising a child is no small feat; it takes an unbelievable amount of patience, commitment, love, and care. And being a single mother, doing it all on your own? It’s easy to see how that might feel absolutely impossible sometimes, especially when you factor in dueling priorities like paying the bills or going to work.
So how can we support the single mothers in our life, and help them not just navigate the daily responsibilities of parenthood, but also achieve their hopes and dreams — whether that’s an education, a career, or even just a good night’s sleep? It doesn’t need to be anything big; offering to babysit, drive kids back from school, or even just pick up dinner can make a world of difference for busy moms.
Raising a child is no small feat; it takes an unbelievable amount of patience, commitment, love, and care. And being a single mother, doing it all on your own? It’s easy to see how that might feel absolutely impossible sometimes, especially when you factor in dueling priorities like paying the bills or going to work.
So how can we support the single mothers in our life, and help them not just navigate the daily responsibilities of parenthood, but also achieve their hopes and dreams — whether that’s an education, a career, or even just a good night’s sleep? It doesn’t need to be anything big; offering to babysit, drive kids back from school, or even just pick up dinner can make a world of difference for busy moms.
In this episode of Sustainability @ Work, we’re talking about building communities of support and what we can do to help the single mothers in our lives.
Key Quotes
00:00: “The feeling that a lot of I think single moms, or any single parent, fully feels is it's all on you.”
01:21: “When I look back and I think about some of their earlier childhood days, I don't even know how I did it.”
03:07: “As a young kid, you know, you're not always witnessing the challenges that your parents are going through in their pursuits of everyday life.”
07:36: “When I was trying to pay tuition and pay daycare, you're trying to decide: do you pay that? Or do you pay the electric bill?”
09:04: “ I can't forecast that my kid’s going to be sick tomorrow morning on a Monday when I have to wake up.”
12:54: “[The Judy Nelson Foundation’s] mission is to provide single mothers the opportunity to further their education without financial or practical barriers.”
15:39: “We're even looking into how we take care of [single mothers] being able to get meals while they're on campus, because they may be doing after school programs – there's dinner, there's all these kinds of barriers.”
19:22: “What the Judy Nelson Foundation is trying to do in terms of creating the space, making it okay and helping these women actually get an education and fulfill those things so that they don't have to feel forever behind.”
22:55: “That feeling of who you become together after whatever it is that you're going through is better than anything you could have imagined if you just summed it up as individual events.”
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