Mom and Dad in one person, plus the pandemic - There is help in the sacrificial work!

It’s almost commonplace to say it’s hard to be a single parent, but we rarely think about exactly what challenges it poses in everyday life. What are the difficulties a mother or father faces when raising his or her child or children alone?

The first problem that most people think of when thinking of single-parent families is financial difficulty, and that’s what we experience. Obviously, it’s much harder to pay a rent or just installments if you have to farm from a salary, but that’s just the tip of the iceberg. A single parent has to almost juggle the tasks, as he or she has to be a mother and father in one person: he or she has to bring the child out of kindergarten after work, take the bigger one for training, cook dinner, and install the dripping tap. And what’s one of the hardest things is perhaps that at the end of the day, there’s no one next to him to discuss your concerns with.

Mentally, it means a lot to have someone next to us who we know is just as worried about whether the little one will have a fever after the vaccination or what the mechanic says about the washing machine tomorrow.

Because everyone tries to be strong in front of the children and there is no companion with whom to share these thoughts, single mothers and fathers can almost never relax.

Following the declaration of the emergency, the difficulties of single-parent families multiplied. In families where the parent has lost their job, daily living is the biggest problem. Those who have left their jobs have a hard time solving the education and attention of the children at the same time as their work. The current situation further exacerbates the isolation that afflicts single-parent families anyway, and the mental endurance of parents is significantly reduced.

What does the Single Parent Center offer to these parents and families?

In addition to tangible, everyday help - courses, tutoring, career counseling - we build community. We are creating a national network, currently there are seven rural and two cross-border clubs outside of Budapest. The Center is at once a crisis center, a help and support space, a playhouse, a pub and an event venue.

We try to find solutions to situations that require immediate intervention, but also to ad hoc problems, such as when someone needs to improve their electricity, and we also provide support in implementing long-term plans, such as a career building.

We can provide legal advice, help with mediation between parents, we have an art therapy group for parents, we have a child psychologist, we organized camps and family programs before the emergency, which we can hopefully continue soon.

How can the Single Parent Center help in the current emergency?

As the first and most important task, we strengthened our donation activities, and with the help of our rural clubs, we also announced support opportunities outside Budapest.

We have provided nearly 5 tons of durable food to needy single-parent families so far. From the first weeks, and since then we have been sending new food packages with weekly deliveries.

Many families do not have the right IT tools for online education, nor do they have a laptop or tablet. We delivered the laptops we received as a gift to ten families, so we were able to ensure that 25 children did not miss out on their classmates, they could participate in daily learning. More families are planned to receive a laptop donation soon.

We have translated most of our services online, so that legal assistance, coaching, psychological counseling, supportive interviews, as well as job placement and job search are still available, which is of particular interest in the current situation. We have created a database on the local government support opportunities of the larger settlements and the districts of Budapest, the on-call order of public education institutions and the free child meals available.

In an emergency, a lot of people struggle to stay on the surface somehow, which is terribly stressful, especially when there is no one to share our fears with. What support can parents give in this area?

When a single adult in a family carries the burden on his shoulders, it is exhausting anyway, and in such a precarious situation, it is natural for everyone to be worried, everyone to be a little scared. In front of the child, of course, everyone tries to look strong. We want to create an opportunity for mothers and fathers to find a place where they don’t have to be strong, where they can ask for help, even as a single parent.

We have launched new services to help parents stay mentally fit: we provide online learning assistance to children with the help of trained educators from seven subjects, thus also relieving parents of the burden of preparation and education. In language development sessions, our teachers prepare the little ones for the first grade, and in our stress-relieving conversations, we try to give support to overworked single parents.

As a novelty, we have created our “Self Time in Quarantine” program, where parents can break away from everyday problems in the form of online individual and group conversations.

In our online yoga classes, we provide opportunities for movement and relaxation. On our social media platforms, we provide single videos to help single-parent families with the issues that concern them most now.

# nehagydegyedül

In addition, we launched a social awareness campaign called #non'tegyedegyül, in which famous people and public figures draw attention to the current difficult situation of single-parent families.

Kata Huszárik, Dia Summer, Andrea Várkonyi, Béla Mészáros, Gergő Sveges and myself in the video we want to make people aware of what it is like to stand alone in everyday life, raise a child, run a household, work, do 48 hours a day, two instead of people.

Nearly one million people live in single-parent families in Hungary today, everyone knows one such child, mother or father, as they are present everywhere, whether in our family, among our friends, next door or at work.

The aim of the initiative is to notice these people, to notice if they need help, even in a shopping spree, but a word of support or conversation can also give them a lot. Whether we decide on them as a landlord, as a friend, or as the other parent, keep in mind that the family is in one hand: in theirs.