Following an article it ran last summer about the dangers of being raised by a single mother, Slate invited its readers to defend  fatherless households. Sometime D Magazine contributor and Park Cities resident Pamela Gwyn Kripke, who is likely still eagerly counting the days until she can escape having to live in Dallas, is herself a mom raising two daughters solo.
 We are surrounded by huge homes and the other accouterments of wealth. Kids here, and in similar bubbles of affluence, find gift-wrapped cars in the driveway when they turn 16, as well as one of the greatest predictors of success: support. In the recently published How Children Succeed, author Paul Tough argues that rich kids get the encouragement and poor ones get the grit, and he claims that one without the other gets no one very far. It is hard to spot the millionaire’s kid who mows the lawn or the middle-schooler on a free-lunch program who sees his parents before nine at night. I would maintain that children with a single parent get the winning combination.
Myself raised by a single mother who worked a full-time job and handled three children while attending college in the evenings to complete the degree that my unexpected birth had long prevented her from finishing, I concur that I’ve learned a thing or two about grit.
