Spend five minutes online and you might believe single mothers are either the ruin of civilization or its last remaining saints.

Spend five minutes with actual research — or better yet, five minutes with an actual single mother — and you’ll realize something else:

They're just people.

Doing their best.

Inside systems built to make "their best" feel like it's never enough.

This post isn't going to varnish the truth. Children raised by single mothers face real risks — and real opportunities.

But if you came looking for either pity or outrage, close the tab now.

We're aiming for something rarer: a clear-eyed, warm-blooded understanding.

What the Social Science Actually Shows (And Doesn't).

Single Parenthood Is a Risk Factor — Not a Death Sentence.

A glass child is typically defined as a neurotypical sibling of a child with special needs, who often grows up feeling overlooked, burdened, and tasked with invisible emotional labor.

The metaphor is intentional — glass because these children are seen through (transparent) or expected to be strong and shatterproof (fragile under stress).

But this meme didn’t emerge from nowhere.

Like most sticky cultural ideas, it has deep roots in psychological research, parental grief, sibling dynamics, and the impossible task of distributing attention equally when one child's needs are extraordinary.

Let’s explore the layered history of this meme — and why it matters more now than ever.

One of the most oddly prophetic scenes in Mean Girls isn’t about social sabotage or cafeteria politics. It’s a panicked health teacher standing in front of a blackboard, warning teenagers:

“Don’t have sex because you will get pregnant and die.”

It played for laughs, but it captured a real chapter in American culture.

Throughout the 1990s, abstinence education reigned.

Sex-ed classes, after-school specials, and even sitcoms like Boy Meets World or 7th Heaven hammered home one message:

Sex = catastrophe. Better not risk it.

The intention was good.

Teen pregnancy rates were high, and policymakers needed a solution. But the execution? Sometimes fear-based, sometimes shame-based, and almost always incomplete.

At a certain point, success becomes its own insulation.
The gestures that once built connection — mistakes, doubts, the unscripted laugh — are replaced by coordination and polish.
What’s lost isn’t love, but access.

A marriage becomes another achievement: admired, functional, and faintly routine.
Many won’t notice.
But a few will.

And for them, the real work begins:
learning how to be human with each other, again.

A fascinating new study published in The Journal of Sex Research (Kruger et al., 2025) suggests that psychedelic experiences may do more than temporarily alter perception—they may also quietly, sometimes dramatically, shift the way people experience sexuality, gender, and intimate relationships.

Surveying 581 adults who had used psychedelics, researchers found that the majority reported noticeable changes in sexual attraction, gender expression, and relationship dynamics—sometimes fleeting, often lasting well beyond the immediate effects.

Grief may not end at the grave.

A new study suggests that the majority of bereaved souls—whether mourning a spouse or a beloved pet—report vivid dreams or waking sensations involving the deceased.

Far from being rare or pathological, these experiences appear to be a common part of the human grieving process, tightly woven into how people maintain emotional bonds after death.

In fact, people who dream of their lost loved ones are significantly more likely to experience their presence while awake.

This overlap between dreaming and waking encounters challenges older assumptions that such experiences are signs of denial, avoidance, or mental instability.

Instead, they may represent something far more ordinary—and far more vital to healing.

Marriage is a contract written in disappearing ink.
You think you know what you’re signing — but identity, culture, and the private terrain of suffering are always amending the terms when you’re not looking.

Nowhere is this more painfully obvious than in marriages where the husband transitions to female.

The research offers a compassionate lens. Reality offers a harder one.

Patterns of Marriage Stability After Transition: Love Is Not Enough

If you’ve ever spent a job interview sweating through your nicest blazer, straining to remember the "right" amount of eye contact, and calculating the microcalories of every smile, you’ve experienced—briefly—what many autistic adults endure every time they apply for a job.

Except for them, it isn’t one uncomfortable afternoon.

It’s a career-long performance.

A handshake. A smile. A little banter about traffic or your favorite coffee shop. For many employers, this is the sacred opening rite of a job interview. But for autistic adults, it’s often the start of a silent dismissal.

First impressions, we’re told, are everything.

They determine who gets hired, who gets promoted, and—let’s be honest—who gets invited to lunch.

A new study published in Development and Psychopathology (Standiford & Hsu, 2025) offers a surprising twist on a long-assumed narrative: that difficulty reading emotional expressions—a hallmark often associated with autism—may actually owe more to alexithymia than to autistic traits themselves.

It’s a sharp, compelling insight. But like most compelling insights, it risks being a little too neat.

Let’s dive into what they found, why it matters, and where we need to tread carefully.

There’s a room in the public health clinic where I work most mornings — quiet, often softly lit — where families sit in a circle of mismatched chairs.

A tissue box rests on the coffee table like a silent witness to what’s about to unfold.

It’s here, in this space that feels both foreign and familiar, that the work of family therapy begins.

At first glance, it might look like just another meeting.

People show up late. They forget to make eye contact.

They sit too far apart, or too close.

But underneath all that is a kind of trembling — a hope mixed with fear. Because family therapy isn’t just about fixing problems.

It’s about stepping into the heart of something raw and tangled. It’s about telling the truth after years of speaking in code.

There’s a particular flavor of burnout no oat milk latte can touch.

It’s the weariness of the parent who’s showing up, day after day—lunches packed, bedtime books read, tantrums soothed—while silently wondering: When the hell is someone going to do this for me?

This is the unparented parent: the adult performing parenthood while still waiting for the nurturing they never received.

Many of them are excellent parents. That is, until they’re not.

Until the cost of emotional over-functioning reaches the edge of collapse, and the emotional ledger they've been balancing since childhood finally overdrafts.

This is family therapy’s unspoken crisis.