According to Pam Lehman, a counselor with the Trinity Recovery Center at Trinity Regional Hospital, "behavior problems such as aggression, defiance and withdrawal are common for up to a year or more" after a major family change such as divorce. Discipline problems, however, often occur long after a divorce or separation, and in many cases, the family may have always been a single-parent household.
The economic burden on single-parent families often is a factor, says Melissa Henderson, an English teacher at Linden McKinley High School in Columbus, Ohio. "I think the bigger correlation [between single-parent homes and discipline problems]...is the one-parent home where it’s a low-income one-parent home, and so then you have those factors on top of [it],” Henderson says.
English teacher Melissa Henderson sees more discipline issues with children who come from larger single-parent families. A single parent with only one child likely can devote more time to that child while still working to make ends meet, she says.
Many students are simply starved for attention they don't get at home, where the parent may work long hours, says English teacher Melissa Henderson. "The student may be more disruptive because they're home by themselves most of the time," Henderson says. "I think you see a lot of that [attention-getting behavior] more than anything."
Coming from a single-parent home needn't be a recipe for discipline problems. "It is hard being a single parent because you've got to take on dual roles," Dawn Dowouna-Hyde, a single mother of two girls, says in an Associated Press story, "but as long as the children know where they stand and as long as they know they are loved, it's probably OK."