Advice Books for Single Mothers Raising Sons: Biology, Culture and Guilt

Abstract

The number of single mother-households has risen steadily in the US in recent decades. This has led to an increase in advice books aimed at single mothers, particularly single mothers raising boys. These books promise to teach them how to raise ‘successful’ or ‘strong’ sons. Presenting themselves as sympathetic and supportive helpers, many of these books instead invoke guilt and fear, suggesting that single mothers are likely to damage their young sons not only emotionally but also physically. Placing the books in a context of changing societal notions of family and parenthood, as well as a supposed ‘boy crisis’, this chapter analyses the strategies employed to perpetuate the traditional notion that a woman, particularly on her own, is incapable of raising a boy to become a man.