No one wakes up one morning and declares that being a single parent is a goal they had set in mind. Raising children by oneself is tough. There are numerous trials and tribulations a single parent goes through raising their children on their own. As a child of a single parent, I’ve learned many lessons from my mother.

The best thing you can do for yourself is to be comfortable being independent.

Independence is key. Being a single parent means that all the decisions fall to you, whether that is disciplinary choices or whether we really need a fourth cat. Learning how to take charge and be confident in your choices becomes second nature. By watching your parent navigate life making careful decisions on their own and rely on their own intuition instills a sense of independence.

Being a child of a self-sufficient, confident, and independent single parent makes it clear that the knowledge of oneself is of the utmost importance.

Dare to defy the stereotypes.

As a teenager, I was faced with preconceived notions about how I should act as a child of a single parent. It was an expectation that by being raised by a single parent, I would be more likely to act out as a teenager. It was a commonly misunderstood opinion that children who were raised in single-parent households experienced harsh home life situations and would, therefore, be the stereotypical emotionally damaged child missing some large piece of their life. While everyone experiences their lives in their own unique ways, there doesn’t seem to be a correlation between single parent households and traumatic home lives, at least in my experience. I rarely fought with my mother as a teenager and thought of her as one of my best friends.

Hard work always pays of.

My mother is one of the hardest working people I know. She owns her own business which she runs from home. She has never complained about her work load and always takes care of her clients—she’s a bookkeeper—as well as makes time for my brother and me. We may never have super fancy vacations or own the latest and greatest material items, but we do have a mother who works hard to make sure we always have food in our bellies, a roof over our heads and clothes on our backs.

Being the child of a hard-working single parent allows for an even deeper appreciation for sacrifice and dedication. No matter how hard times may become, the dedication a single parent has for their children will not falter.

As hard as it may be, you know if you had to, you could be a single parent, too.

None of us want to raise children by ourselves. The thought is terrifying. As much as we will love our future children and will enjoy the experience of raising them, we’d much rather do it with our life partners.

However, we also know--as we’ve seen it firsthand--that if things ended badly with the mother/father of our children, and we were forced to raise them on our own, we’d be able to do it. We’d do everything in our power to give our children everything they’d possibly need.

We take love and marriage more (or less) seriously.

This could go either way for some children, depending on their experiences, but for me, love and marriage are much more important. I am aware of how fragile they both are, and I pay attention to that fragility. I fall harder, love harder, and experience heartbreak harder. I date for the future, not just for fun because the loss of love hurts too much. I think about my future husband, and dream about how our children will love him. I imagine how he will love them.

I take it all seriously, because I want what my mother didn’t have. I want to give my children everything I had growing up and more. I want them to have a complete family. But I also know that, sometimes, life works in strange ways and I’ll be able to handle whatever it throws at me. I have my mother to thank for that.