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Recently in Salon Mothers Who Think

My Mother, the disaster
When my mother was diagnosed with breast cancer, of course I came out to help. But I didn't expect her to seduce the doctor.
By Laurel Touby
[08/30/99]

My son, the junkie
I finally had to let him save, or kill, himself.
By Wendy Mnookin
[08/27/99]

Harvard and heroin
I coasted to an Ivy League degree as a drug addict, but forever damaged the bond between mother and son.
By Seth Mnookin
[08/27/99]

Emotional handicap
What do you do when your normally sweet, loving child wholeheartedly rejects his suddenly disabled, wheelchair-bound grandmother?
By Diane Lore
[08/26/99]

Wild Thing
Is hell satisfied?
In keeping with their authors' dark histories, "The Iron Giant" and other children's tales by Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath tell ominous fables about ambition, despair and people's disregard for nature and one another.
By Polly Shulman
[08/25/99]

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By Joan Oleck

Aug. 31, 1999 | It wasn't supposed to be like this, an annoying little voice hissed inside my head as my trusty Honda started the ascent into the Berkshire Mountains in western Massachusetts. The summer morning was a fine one and I should have felt ebullient that first day of vacation: the aromatic mountain pine forest, the glorious views and an actual quiet moment to myself, since my 3-year-old had dozed off in her car seat. Still, I wasn't content. I wasn't -- how do the New Agers put it? -- in the moment.

The reason: I was taking my first official single-parent vacation. Sure, I had been excited to learn that there actually is such a thing: this particular one a getaway hosted by Eastover Resort in Lenox, Mass., for single parents and their kids to bond with each other and nature. Yet here I was, beating myself up about my singlehood and letting my inner bully nag me about the vacation I had really been destined for: the two perfectly behaved kids (and non-slobbering dog) in the back seat; the elaborately outfitted camper towed by my funky but stylish car; the handsome husband beside me, a man capable of making witty car conversation yet not too proud to ask for directions ... Well, it simply wasn't going to happen, I reminded myself.

Then I pulled into Eastover, a picturesque thousand-acre estate with a rambling old Georgian mansion nestled against rolling hills and misty mountains. And I remembered that the week-long program offers five hours a day of free child care for kids 3 and up. I began feeling better about this singles vacation thing. Single parenthood is no longer a pitiable lot! I argued back at myself. Widows and widowers have always been with us, divorce is as prevalent as ever, and now there's something new: men and women who have chosen to become single parents via donor insemination and adoption. In fact, there are enough single parents with middle class incomes to deserve products and services all our own.

Aren't there?

The answer is: yes and no. There's no denying that middle-income single parents are a growing segment of the population. According to census data, the number of single head-of-household families with incomes of $35,000 or more increased from 1.5 million in 1994 to 5.3 million by 1997 -- with the most dramatic increases among single mothers. A recent cover story in American Demographics magazine noted that there are 10 million single mothers overall in the U.S. today, nearly triple the number in 1970. Most remarkably, a Census Bureau study found that for the first time in the agency's 60 years of tracking family data, the majority of first children -- 53 percent -- were conceived by or born to unmarried women.

And since "Murphy Brown," unmarried mothers are no longer scorned -- in fact, we're something of a pop cult phenomenon. On television, Lifetime's "Oh, Baby" features a single woman who sets out to be a mother. It will be joined this fall by "Safe Harbor," about a Florida sheriff and widowed father of four, and "Once and Again," a drama about divorced 40ish men and women trying to begin new relationships. There is also the well-received documentary "And Baby Makes Two," about a single mothers' group in New York, and the best-selling novel "About a Boy," Nick Hornby's amusing tale of a London bachelor who suddenly decides single mothers are an untapped and attractive source for sex.

Still, marketers don't seem quite sure what to do with this new, more affluent group of parents. "It is a big enough area for marketers to care, but the question is whether or not marketers will find [single parents] on their radar screen," J. Walker Smith, president of the marketing research outfit Yankelovich Partners, told me when I began to look into why. There are so many kinds of single parents, he added -- divorced, never married (the largest growing segment), those living with parents, those living with roommates -- that marketers are confused about how to target them. "It's just this phenomenon of diversity that is hard to process from a marketing standpoint," Smith said.

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