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Kinship and Family Systems

Single-Parent Family

Family Structures

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A single parent is a person who has a child or children but does not have a spouse or live-in partner sharing the household to help with the child's upbringing or support. People become single parents for many reasons, including annulment, the death of a partner, divorce, relationship breakup, abandonment, domestic violence, rape, childbirth by a single person, or single-person adoption. A single-parent family is a family with children headed by one such single parent rather than by a couple.

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The single-parent family is commonly defined and studied in contrast to the two-parent nuclear family, from which it departs by the absence of one parent from the household.

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