 Good morning. I am Dr. Jagruti Angopadhyay and I am an assistant professor at Manipal Centre for Humanities at Manipal Academy of Fire Education. And the title of my presentation is Single Parenting, Challenging Traditional Famillial Norms in Urban India. I want to thank Dr. Mareena Tattari for reaching out to me for this topic and for giving me this opportunity to present at this conference. I also think it is very important to this very important panel which I am a part of on single parenting is resistance etc to understand that how this is gradually coming up across as a new form of parenting. Particularly I will be talking about the case of India because in India it is a very, very new phenomena. So with this I start my presentation. In India there are two common family structures in India. The first one is of course the multi-generational family system and there is sufficient literature to show that there is a lot of work by family sociologists on kinship structures then joint family network ties and the media and the family. So there is a lot of scholarship on that. Now with this there are many prominent scholars such as Dr. I. B. Desai, A. M. Shah, T. N. Madan, Petri Sivarai worked in different parts. So for example in Amitabhaad has been extensively researched on the family structures of different how kin networks, kin network ties etc they actually behave in different context in different social context. T. N. Madan's work on Kashmiri pundits has also extensively demonstrated how grandparenting etc support systems, they play a very big role in the multi-generational family setup. Petri Sivarai's work on media have a particularly joint family system in the sense of popular films such as, we are your Haikon, then Dilwale Dhulani, and we are trying to make some very popular Bollywood films and how they play a significant role in channelizing joint family system values across India. In a nutshell what has been primarily shown is that grandparenting and elderly care are two of the main reasons. Also legally it is the norm that adult children will actually provide elderly care to their children. So these are the main reasons why multi-generational family system is very popular in India. Nuclear family system is also in fact one of the, it is the leading family structure in India currently and it is often viewed as an outcome of globalization, changing migration, etc. Patterns within India and the employment requirements. These are the reasons why it is understood that nuclear family system is on the rise and in fact it is often blamed that nuclear family system was the reason why the nuclear, the joint family system gradually started breaking up. However the point is that the focus is on heterogeneous couples who are a man and a wife, who has a wife and has one child or two children. That is the normal family structure, that is that is what India follows and single parenting against this backdrop is resistance and that is how I'm going to be showing through my study. So I'm going to be dark start talking about some recent family changes. One is that there is a rise in only couples. So for example that is 8 percent, single parents are 6.3 percent and single mothers are 5.4. The reasons of course are high divorce rates, desertion and the desire to become a single parent are the reasons for the rise in single parenting in India. But what does it mean in that sense? So this is why I'm asking a few questions and these are the basis for my research. Are our traditional family forms actually changing in India? What do single parents face stigma and what are the challenges that they navigate on an everyday basis? And also the reason why I chose to focus on single parents also because there's lack of academic scholarship. Like I said that most of the scholarship revolves around there is particularly there is a lot of scholarship on multi-generational family system and the media in fact celebrates single parenting and there is also some amount of scholarship on single mothers but single parents generally as a category is a miss in the academic narrative and the media narrative. So for instance if we see that even all the films, Mother India of course is a slightly older film but even the recent other films have tried to choose one film from every decade and to show that they actually focus on single mothers. Though not any film in that sense particularly highlights except for a little bit of Neel Bhattisanatha where there is some focus on how single mothers the challenges that they face every day but not necessarily there is a focus and stigma on the problems that single mothers face. So there is also media generally celebrates single parenting. So I'm actually going to be talking about the many challenges of single parenting and also what are the reasons that people still opt for single parenting despite the various this very traditional family structure setup that exists. How do the people navigate that? So how do people navigate traditional value systems against this very new form of family resistance that is coming up? I used a qualitative approach to do my study and this is narrative style of interviews and face-to-face interviews. The questionnaire was semi-structured and it was semi-structured interviews. I covered major cities of Kolkata, Bangalore, Delhi input and I did a total of about 25 interviews. I interviewed single parents for the last three to five years and meter reasons were divorced, widowed desire to be a single parent. I reviewed 15 single mothers and 10 single fathers and average age group were 35 to 40. Here I must also add that I myself I'm in a living apart together arrangement. My husband lives in Rajasthan and I live here alone with our child in Karnataka Manipal. So I have some experience of single parenting. So because of that it was easy for me to draw the questionnaire to relate to some of the findings. However at no point did I probe or did I of course some of the sample were actually through I used an advertisement on social media websites and I did the interviews but I was also aware of some groups etc where I knew a few people. So I also used snowball sampling and etc and but the primary reason why I could connect also was that this is kind of a semi auto ethnographic study. However it did not influence the findings is what I want to say. So it is a very neutral objective research that I'm going to be presenting. So one thing I found was that 70% of the single parents live with their parents and 30% live alone like only with the child. All the respondents working professional men or women. Main harms of support were elderly parents, nannies, daycares, precious schools and 90% of the single parents had a pet after they became single parents. Now also I would want to add here that the single fathers I interviewed they were actually either divorced sorry either widowed or they were the desire to become a single father. So some of them have also become through surrogate and they don't want to marry but they wanted to have a child but I could not interview any single father who has been divorced and has custody of the child. I could not find any such respondents. So I would say that that is a bias and also I all my respondents are Hindus, upper caste, upper middle class and these are some of the biases and I think also it is because of my own background as a researcher and I want to state this at the very beginning because these are some of the limitations of small sample slides, qualitative studies, snowball sampling etc. So I but I want to add that at the very beginning. Battling stigma is one of the biggest issues that all the single parents highlighted and they said that though now there is gradual rise of single parenting and people at least know but they often face this question you know where is the father, where is the mother mothers face this question that how do you manage everything alone and doesn't the child miss the father and the father in fact and that is what was I was found I found that the father often is questioned whether he is at all able to do a good job with the parenting because you know he most of the single father said that parenting is still seen as very mother's role and it's not really seen at the father's role. So they there is this very difficult point that they have to justify all the time that they are doing a good job with the parenting. All of them were very worried about the child's mental well-being because they were aware that their child would often face questions and particularly when there would be annual days and when one parent would be presented what about the other parent and they believed that children failed to understand because of this very traditional family structure that they see on a regular basis. So there is this constant problem and in fact with regard to support groups they believed that there is very little support system in not just like there are very few NGOs or online groups and there is nothing for children where children could go and receive counseling and you know it could be made them to understand that how essentially single parenting works and the reasons for single parenting etc because children and often some of them also had children were very young like four to six years of age so it was very hard for them to explain this idea of single parenting and that is the biggest challenge that was highlighted. There were also financial worries because well some of them received support from spouses but there was also financial worries because they argued that some of them also had to take care of their older parents so they were often sandwiched between the child's needs and their parents needs and they always wanted to do more for the child so that the child doesn't feel that it is you know that the parent is not fulfilled by needs etc and they don't they want to also it becomes a problem because they want to fulfill the role of dual parenting so that that is those are some of the major issues that that they actually face the single parents. With this I also want to say that though single parents are rising etc and here most of the single parents also pointed out that they do have their happy moments they do have their joys because the child does give them a lot of joy but it is also important to understand that all my respondents like I said were up in the middle class they had much more access in comparison to other class groups and here I think I could have access to single fathers primarily because you know because of this class truth that I interviewed though of course the single fathers mentioned that they are often questioned about their parenting skills because of the very gender notion of parenting in India and they are like they also find it hard to take leave when the child is sick because this area most companies don't have paternity leave so these are some of the challenges but then the question to ask is that despite these struggles then is it still a form of resistance and yes the answer is yes it is a form of resistance but it is also important to understand the way forward the first one is to that definitely there needs to be a creation of more support and counseling groups for single parents and maybe then later on for the children also also a lot of parents were unhappy with the quality of services they got for outsourced care like the form of nannies, day cares and creches so there could be more training than investment in providing quality care particularly with regard to outsourced care and employers could also be more flexible with timings and leaves because actually in India what the United Nations report also said and I have also written about this is that single mothers are on the rise primarily because a lot of mothers are deserted by their alcoholic husbands primarily in the lower middle class and the economically marginalized groups and most of them are women who are bearing the burden of single parenting and they don't have one child they often have two to three kids so it is important for the government to acknowledge their needs to acknowledge what are the problems and challenges that they face and it is also important to recognize this as a new family form so unless so it's actually a moment to celebrate in the sense that single parenting has gradually gaining ground against the backdrop of tradition in India and however there also needs to be adequate support systems in place so that it survives and thrives in the coming years and in the for the future generations as well. With this I conclude my presentation and I thank you again for this for everybody for this gift for giving me this opportunity thank you