Arabella Weir

When I was first approached to become involved with One Parent Families I had recently 'come to' parenthood myself. So, fresh with the keen awareness of how difficult it is, I was eager to share my newfound knowledge.

However, it wasn't until I gave it some real thought that I realised that I already had experience of parenting, from the other side of the fence, as it were. I was brought up in a one-parent family and didn't realise it. That may sound a bit odd but it's because my parents split up and my father stayed in regular contact with us, his kids. Therefore, I thought of myself as coming from a divorced home more than anything else.

Now that I'm a parent, I realise that a one-parent family home is any home in which one parent is trying to cope alone with the day-to-day juggling, some of it nightmarishly complicated, that caring for children entails.

In my case, while the absent parent hadn't abandoned his children he was, nonetheless, no longer there in the middle of the night when one of us was ill and the others still had to be got to school in the morning. He wasn't there to help after school; he wasn't there to pick one of us up from a friends, while the others stayed at home with mum. She had to do everything alone; she had to juggle the lot.

Seemingly tiny, even manageable, tasks become mammoth, mountainous, insurmountable chores when one person is trying to negotiate them: a visit to the supermarket, a doctor's appointment, a school trip, after-school activities. And that's just the stuff most parents are trying to make possible for their kids. It's a whole other ball game when you're trying to do stuff for yourself - with working being one of the, if not the, most difficult tasks of all.

If you don't have round-the-clock, reliable, trustworthy childcare, how on Earth is a parent alone supposed to embark on any sort of career - be it a vocation or a money earner? And even if you chose to stay at home and look after your kids how are you supposed to manage it all? It ain't a day at the beach, after all. It's a slog, granted often a rewarding slog, but all the same parents, and, in particular, those trying to manage alone, need practical advice, constructive help and consistent support.