Claudia Black offers mothers and fathers a language in which to talk with their kids of any age about drugs and alcohol and the value of talking openly about addictions.
Being a single mom means everyone criticizes everything you do, every decision you make, from teachers to neighbors to people in the store, all the way down to other mothers especially mothers who are in a functional married relationship.
Boys that are raised with fathers have a high rate of success. Boys that have no contact with their fathers grow up always fighting other boys who call them wusses because they don't have a dad.
Those boys tend to stick together in a "no dads" club, and to survive in school they are the toughest-acting kids out there. They are exposed to trouble all the time. If they aren't looking for it it is looking for them. Terrorists specifically are looking for boys with no fathers, because they find great success in preying on upset people and these are the ones that will go to battle to prove their manhood.
Most boys of single mothers end up on drugs and in prison. Mine didn't. I was lucky, and I used all the people-help offered.
I was also tougher than most people would think to be. There are reasons, but I won't go into it. When I was a lunch-lady at school, I earned the kid's respect by caring about all of them, not favoriting my kids over others, and by being fair and honest with them all.
That meant my kids were accepted by their friends, instead of rejected because they were treated "better" than the others.
In fact, the harder parents are in making sure their kids follow all the rules, the more their kids' peers like them and look up to / respect them. Life is made easier for them.
One thing I can say; if you have never been a single mom, offer up stories of how you have handled situations, offer up sympathy and support, but do not EVER think that a boy behaves the same when a father is present in the family unit as when there is not one living at home. Boys have a healthy fear of a superior male, even tho a good bit of hero-worship and competition is involved in that complicated relationship.
Boys are nothing like girls, and most women don't understand them. I got more help and usable advice from male friends in raising my kids than I ever got from another woman; yet men aren't around to talk to women about raising boys. It's not in their psyche. And most women only want to commiserate with other women when it comes to consulting about motherhood troubles.
After all, a dateable single man can't be shown home troubles, or they will run. Maybe you can begin to understand all the ways society hasn't changed with the changing times.
It isn't the government that can handle any of this, and if they try things only get made worse. We have to change things, and it starts with changing our own expectations of:
what we can do for each other and ourselves.
I could sell you this stuff, instead it's free. Freedom has much more value than money, any day of the week.
The best advice I can pass on is that which was given to me (by a man): if you want to talk seriously with boys about a topic they don't want to talk about: make sure their hands are busy. Playing with legos, coloring, blocks; anything where they don't have to sit and look at you, and they will listen. That is I think, the reason I succeeded in raising healthy boys into adulthood.