Meet The Single Parents: Yes, We Do Read
Why is it that single parents get dumped on all the time? In the first installment of Meet The Parents, it seems as though ALL kids from single parent homes were portrayed as saggy pants wearing, gum smacking, trouble causing, future inmates while the mothers (because the fathers disappeared after inception) were MIA as well. In the second installment, Steve Malanga’s City Without Fathers article was referenced, in which he makes the link between unwed mothers and poverty absolute. “Single parenthood is a road to lasting poverty in America today,” wrote Malanga.
Will someone please tell former President Bill Clinton, Sen. Barack Obama, Oprah and NBA player LeBron James, because apparently their single moms didn’t get the memo about everlasting poverty.
This is a broad statement (especially considering a third of all families in this country are being raised by single parents) that doesn’t take into account the many variables about single parenthood or poverty. It’s lazy journalism at best, racist at worst, and irresponsible for anyone to keep promoting this stereotype. That’s like me saying we should keep an eye on all anti-social white, teenaged boys because they have a propensity for planning massacres on school grounds. I mean, hey, 90% of the school shooters have been white males who felt bullied (and many of them came from two parent homes mind you). It’s inflammatory and insulting and so is the perception that unwed mothers are incapable of raising productive and self-sufficient kids.
Let’s face it, when the word unwed mother comes up, the faces of Elizabeth Hurley, Brynn Cameron (Arizona Cardinals’ Matt Leinart’s baby’s momma) actress Bridget Moynahan or Heidi Klum don’t come to mind. It’s the stereotypical welfare mom with too many kids that’s often preceded by buzz words such as “low income” and “urban.” Go ahead and say it, you mean black.
In case you couldn’t tell by my indignation, I’m a single mother and I lived in Maplewood, NJ, which is only a few miles away from Newark. According to Malanga’s and Hanscom’s assessment, my daughter will more than likely grow up to be a violent, poverty stricken baby machine likely to become a single mom with multiple baby daddies…except, I own my own home in Maplewood, my daughter’s been in private school for the past three years and already at the age of five understands that she will be going to college. Am I different? Am I the exception to the rule? Nope. Unfortunately, it’s easier to stereotype single parents and assume the worst rather than recognize that unwed moms have infiltrated the mainstream. Our kids are in your private schools, in your ballet classes and they even go off to Ivy League Universities! Imagine that!
Many times the reporting of a sub-par existence for children from single parent homes is lopsided because mainstream media likes the shock value. They don’t venture to examine the complexities of the American family. Malanga throws out these numbers to back up his claims, “In Newark, single parents head 83 percent of all families living below the poverty line.” Take it at face value and it seems that Newark is over run with poor single mothers sucking up the resources of the county.
Putting the numbers in context tells a different story. Let’s take a look at Newark, New Jersey shall we? According to the Census, there were 91,382 households out of which 35.2% had children under the age of 18 living with them, 31.0% were married couples living together, 29.3% had a female householder with no husband present. The average household size was 2.85 and the average family size was 3.43. Now out of the 91,382 families, 25.5% are living beneath the poverty level. Now let’s examine the poverty level in NJ.
According to Serena Rice, managing director of Legal Services of New Jersey Poverty Research Institute, “The other reality about who experiences poverty is that it includes a lot of working people. Of all New Jersey families and individuals with income below poverty in 2005, more than 45% included at least one working adult, and many had three or more working adults.” Wow, this would lead one to believe that NJ is a very expensive place to live and that many residents are struggling, not just single parents.
Tom Hester (Newark Star-Ledger, 2006-01-24):
“The average rent for a two-bedroom apartment in New Jersey climbed to $1,085 per month, leaving the state’s rental market far too expensive for low-income households, according to a report planned for release today by a non-profit housing coalition. For the third straight year, New Jersey remains the most expensive state in the nation for a low-income wage earner to rent an apartment. … Furthermore, affordable housing advocates say, 53 percent of the renters in the state cannot afford the cost.”
What does all of this prove? Nothing except that the issue of poverty goes beyond whether or not a woman has child and is not married. There are education factors, background, number of children, so many things to go into how and why there is an epidemic of fatherless children and that’s another can of worms that I’m not going to attempt to address in this piece.
Basically, you can skew the numbers however you want to make a point but the bottom line is that bad parenting crosses all racial and economic lines, from the predominantly white, male high school shooters with an upper class background to the recent crop of befallen starlets, married couples have struggled just as much as single parents when it comes to raising their kids. The success does not depend on how many able adults are in the household or even how much money is made, it comes down to the quality of consistent parenting by the adult that is in the house.
When Malanga wrote his article about fatherless kids and violence, it was assumed that the killers who executed the three college kids in Newark where the typical black gang-affiliated boogeymen. What a surprise that one of the killers happened to be an illegal alien from a predominately Catholic country… hmm, how do we do turn his behavior into a stereotype? Perhaps all Peruvians who move to Newark will become cold blooded killers. Right, that makes sense.
The problem with the general assessment about single parents is that it excludes those that chose to be single parents, those parents who may be unmarried but living together. And it makes the large assumption that living in a single parent household means that the other parent is automatically excluded from participating in the child’s life. While this may be true in some cases, the danger is applying this theory to all families.
In regards to Hanscom’s open house experience in the first Meet The Parents, it is assumed that many parents did not attend because they didn’t care. Maybe the reason was financial. What time was the open house? I’ve noticed that many of the events at my daughter’s school took place before 5 pm, when many parents were still at work and for those events that are in the evening, some people may have night jobs. Who knows? Sometimes a parent’s lack of involvement is more of a financial choice as opposed to apathy. Don’t ever think that parents in low-income neighborhoods don’t care about their children’s education. Unfortunately, because of their location, they are acutely aware of the shortcomings in our public school system.
Our schools in Maplewood were often over-run with kids from Newark and Irvington being creative about their address so they could attend. All too often, in the neighborhoods that need it most, they have the least resources when it comes to school. Do I believe that parents have a responsibility in being an active participant in their child’s education? Definitely! Is there a disparity between certain public schools in low income areas and affluent areas? You bet.
Rather than point fingers and blame the parents or just blame the administration, we need to come up with a plan to fix the schools so that all children have an opportunity to receive a top-rate education and to be looked upon as equals and treated as such. Not written off as gang bangers and bangettes. Didn’t anybody see %%AMAZON=B000NOK1KC “Freedom Writers”%% or %%AMAZON=6305133514 “Lean On Me”%%? Or better yet, the “Primetime” report that said the American school system on a whole was a joke when compared to international schools .
And one more thing, don’t tell me whether or not my child will be success, you don’t know me like that.
What I do know about you is that the biggest social problem in the US is that kids are not getting proper parenting. It takes a man to set a proper male role model, and without it, girls don’t know what kind of guy they should get (no benchmark, or a low benchmark thx to mom’s dating habits), and boys need to see first hand what kind of man they need to be. Women raising boys alone usually go overboard on teaching empathy and staying safe, and omit risk taking, self-reliance, and courage. I taught high school, and the boys and girls who had decent fathers in the home out-performed and were much more socially adjusted than the kids without.
Great blowback. I too, am a single mom. I never wanted my kids to be raised in a broken home, but a fatherless home was better for my daughters than a home with a bad dad. My income increased after my divorce, not due to government help or child support, but because I worked my way into a better position with my company. I own my home, I have no debt. My daughters are now both college graduates with great jobs and are paying taxes. The three of us are bored with the tiresome single mom = subpar citizens attitude of journalists.
Speaking for myself, I am also a single mom. Raising children on your own is a daunting task but it is always better to raise children in a loving home verses a home filled with abuse. Oh not to forget to mention that a single parent often takes up the raising without child support because the missing parent refuses to assist in raising the children. Ya a low blow for all single parents is when so called society dares to look down on single parents…try walking in our shoes sometimes and then lets make an opinion again!
I think that it’s unfortunate that women usually get a bad rap when it comes to single parents. The major issue here is that kids gravitate to what cool, what’s in, the who’s who and that really has nothing to do with parenting. It’s choices! If you choose to live your life certain way does that reflect on what you were thought as a child? There are so many kids who grew up in two parent homes and end up much worse then those in single parent homes. Not to name call but Lindsay, Brittney, Paris and many others like them with money and both parents are pretty jacked up! Were they not thought morals? I think that people (kids, teenagers) make choices and it’s not because of single parent home training. Ignorance will be the down fall of this society as a whole. Until people truly begin to educate themselves and reach for the truth we will continue to witness idiots speaking out.
The theme I’m noticing is that the narrative the media likes to throw out there is based on a lot of stereotypes that fit an agenda that usually points to a larger role for government to play. This narrative obviously doesn’t describe Sibylla, nor does it describe me in my experience as a single dad. It also runs counter to many of our own conservative leanings; mainly that it’s personal responsibility that should drive the solutions to society’s problems not more government.
“What’s that” you say? “Single Dad?” I must mean “deadbeat dad,” right? See how strong those stereotypes are?
From where I stand, at least, there’s a lot of us single dads out there who are anything but deadbeats. I’m not going to sit back and be labelled any more than Sibylla is.
I’m sure there are a lot of true deadbeat dads out there just as there are deadbeat moms, but my experience leads me to believe that many of the single dads out there weren’t wanted around beyond their biological contribution. Narcissism is gender-neutral.
All black men …
All muslims …
All white people …
All jewish people …
All evangelicals …
See what I mean? How about we all lay off the single parent, single mom, “deadbeat dad” stereotypes, m’kay? We’ve come too far and certainly know better even from our own experiences.
This is so right on!
I mean, there’s no doubt that single moms face extra challenges (mostly of the financial kind), but there are some of us who are doing much better financially and emotionally and whose kids are quite happy and well-fed. Don’t know about you but I can apply myself to my career a lot better now that I don’t have to waste all that energy cleaning up after a grown man any more!
single parent are never treated fairly…its awful
C’mon. I’m sure that there are many great single parents out there, but all other things being equal, does anyone seriously doubt that a child would generally be better off with both an intact mother and an intact father?
And conversely, that the large proportion of single-parent households in the US, while by no means a guaranteed doom for the children, is still a fact worthy of our concern and a likely factor in the social breakdown we see?
Well said Sibylla! Thank you! It is this type of backwards thinking that reinforces many of the sterotypes that exist.
Thank you! Thank you! Thank you! This needed to be said. I work in a company full of upper middle-class intact family units and guess what? Their kids are screwed up! Why is that? Especially when they shake their heads in sadness for my unwed single parent situation. I also know that many of the “single parents” in my company are divorced women who married for the wrong reasons and suffered years of agony dealing with that one bad decision. So maybe having a child out of wedlock was not the smartest thing to do but 13 years later I’m happy I didn’t compound the mistake by getting married just because that is what strangers with their own problems expect. I’m a good parent. I’d challenge anyone to prove otherwise.
There is often some truth to stereotypes. My mother was a single parent and my childhood was an absolute nightmare. I would have given a lot if my father had been able to stick around. Of course, my story is just another anecdote here.
God bless all single parents doing a good job. I know it’s not easy. However, returning to the macro level of the original article, consider some of the statistics the Hanscom brings up:
Fact: 90 percent of all homeless and runaway children are from fatherless homes (Source: U.S. Bureau of the Census).
Fact: 85 percent of all children that exhibit behavioral disorders come from fatherless homes (Source: Centers for Disease Control).
Fact: 85 percent of all youths sitting in prisons grew up in a fatherless home (Source: Fulton County, Ga., jail populations, Texas Department of Corrections 1992).
We can conclude that single-parent upbringing is far from ideal and generally a significant risk factor in the lives of children.
As a product of a single parent household, I can certainly say that I made the choice (around age 12) to never subject my child to a single parent household intentionally. I feel that anyone who subjects a child to such purposefully, as a means of fulfilling their own life, is sickingly self absorbed.
With that said, I’m rather disappointed about the argument on both sides. It’s not as simple as “all single parents are horrible” and the “not all single parents are bad – look at me the exception” arguments are very weak. The issue is with the lack of attention and rearing children of single parent households get. It doesn’t necessarily follow that a single parent spends less time or is able to give less guidance. But considering children are time consuming, careers are time consuming, and dealing with normal everyday life is time consuming, one of those is going to be neglected in a single parent household. huxley’s comments are absolutely correct. These are not statistics that are really up for much interpretation. Either 90% of runaways are from homes without fathers or not. Either the majority of juvenile offenders come from fatherless homes or not. How can these be spun? I would think that if 90% of a problem population came from one demographic group, it would be intellectually dishonest to not admit there’s a causal relationship. Children from single parent homes represent, disproportionately, crime statistics in America.
Ms. Nash has trouble with my ‘link’ between single parenthood and poverty, though the academic research on this, some of which I quote, is quite startling.
That research doesn’t say (nor did I), that the children of all single parents are condemned to poverty. Her contention that my link between the two is ‘absolute’ is a typical rhetorical device of misrepresenting an argument in order to make your own counter-argument easier.
But what the research does say is that kids from single-parent households are far more likely to wind up growing up in poverty, failing in school, and failing in the job market. While it’s absurd to believe that those statements apply to all single-parents, the research also makes it clear that the percent of kids raised in single parent households who wind up in poverty, or in jail, or as drop-outs, is much higher than the percent of kids from two-parent families, and that there is clearly some link.
To consider this situation as it applies to the Newark case, let’s look behind some of the numbers that Ms. Nash provides us on the nature of poverty, because they are most revealing.
She quotes the Poverty Research Institute as reminding us that 45 percent of families in poverty in NJ have at least one working adult, suggesting that much of poverty is more probably a result of a failure of our economic system, and specifically in Jersey, of high costs.
But what neither she nor the poverty institute point out is that the majority of those folks they cite as “working poor” are only working part-time. In fact, in NJ, only 21 percent of all households in poverty feature an adult working a full-time job.
Now most Americans would agree that part-time work is hardly the road out of poverty. But why are these folks not working full-time? Well, the demographic statistics of the poor in NJ might give us a hint. Many families in NJ in poverty are headed by an adult without a HS education, and two-thirds of impoverished NJ families are headed by single parents. Without a HS education, a person can only get started in the workforce at an entry level job. While there’s certainly opportunity to lift yourself up, that becomes pretty hard if you are also a single parent. Paying for child care on an entry level salary is pretty impossible, for one thing, and that makes full time work pretty tough.
Yet despite such an obvious problem, thousands of women in Newark every year are choosing to have children out of wedlock, with little prospects for themselves or their kids. The out of wedlock birth rate in the city is 65%, and more than a third of these women choosing motherhood without a father don’t have a HS education. Even more startling, nearly 70 percent of all women in Newark having out of wedlock births are already in poverty at the time of their birth, meaning their kids are born straight into poverty. It doesn’t take a genius to figure out that these kids face really tough odds in life.
Moreover, this is not a failure of our economic system, not a problem of high prices for housing in NJ; it is a cultural failure. As sociologists who have been studying this problem for years will tell you, there are three basic things that you need to do to stay out of poverty in America: Finish high school, don’t have a child without a husband, and work in a full time job–any full time job, even at the minimum wage. 97% of all adults who do this do NOT wind up in poverty.
Ms. Nash deflects the point of my piece when she begins speaking about suburban single-moms sending their kids to private schools. That’s the subject for a whole other discussion by people who can speak much more authoritatively than I can. Ms. Nash says that “Our kids are in your private schools, in your ballet classes and they even go off to Ivy League Universities! Imagine that!”
Yes, they are, and their future is certainly looking brighter than the future of the poor kids from Newark growing up without fathers.
However, I also suggest that Ms. Nash and other commentators on this thread read the groundbreaking work of Princeton sociologist Sara McLanahan, co-author of the breakthrough book Growing Up With a Single Parent. McLanahan, herself a single mom, has become the foremost researcher on the subject, and after a decade of research she concluded that children in single-parent homes were not doing as well as children from two-parent homes on a wide variety of measures, from income to school performance to teen pregnancy. Just what the odds of success are, are all laid out by McLanahan. Lots of people don’t like the conclusions she reached, and for years she was attacked for being so politically incorrect, but the basis of her research has turned out to be irrefutable and is now widely accepted.
Finally, in her piece, Ms. Nash weirdly points out that the killer in Newark actually turned out to be “an illegal alien from a predominately Catholic country.”
I’m not sure what her point is here, though in fact single-parent rates and out of wedlock birth rates are rising for Hispanics, too (all of the alleged assailants were Hispanic) There was not one assailant in the Newark case, but six alleged perps who have been arrested, including four teens, at least two of whom we know from press reports are growing up without fathers (the identities of the others have been withheld because of their ages).
There are many two parent households where the parents are so busy with their careers, chores, hobbies, etc. that they do not spend more time with their children than a single parent does. Of course, a two parent home is the ideal and I’m sure it’s what we all prefer. I’m also sure we also all prefer homes where there are no abuse, infidelity or anger management problems. But guess what folks? The preference isn’t always the reality, so we deal with our situations the best we can. And some of us single parents are doing an excellent job of it, all the while being looked down upon by those who believe the stereotype and fancy themselves as our betters.
Men can’t be mothers. Women can’t be fathers.
Next.
Well Mr. Malanga,
I can clearly understand both sides of the argument here(poverty and the reasons for poverty are not a pretty sight!),but…
While I was not as upset with your attitude as to write a rebutal,I found your original article to be insulting also. Just not for the same exact reason as Ms. Nash.
I thought that you were rather insulting to parents all the way around,and were just repeating the line from all of the “educators” in this country. Specifically that PARENTS are not doing their share!
Of course seeing that I have an eight year-old that started 4th grade today,I have a slightly different perspective than yours.
When 2nd and 3rd graders are weekly bombarded with homework that takes on average two hours a day you have to wonder what they are bothering to cover in the 5 hours a day that they spend in school. You also have to wonder why it is that you are told that 6 and 7 year-olds can learn to spell 20 words a week(perfectly) along the complexity of “uncontrollable”,and do 2-3 worksheets of math that consist of beginning algebra and geometry in 15 minutes a day.(The STAR tests given here in California in early May contain algebraic and gemometic formulas for 3rd graders!)
And then you find out that most of what comes home as homework is not even being covered in class! So, then the parents are made to feel responsible by the schools,for them not knowing what the students were not taught at school.The only way they can learn the material is for their parents to spend about 2 hours a night teaching it to them. The ONLY possible way that these kids could do this work in 15-20 minutes is if they already know the answers,in which case they are probably in the wrong grade!
So, you just go right on ahead and BLAME the parents if you want,they are the easiest target after all,(THEY don’t have a union!)It couldn’t possibly be that the schools ARE NOT doing their job could it!
I read Ms. Nash’s piece; Mr. Malanga’s piece; and subsequently Mr. Malanga’s rebuttal, and it re-enforces to me the fact that Mr. Malanga appears as “clueless” as those he pretty much implies are attempting to help Newark regain control of its city.
Of the many points which Mr. Malanga uses in his piece, I had to laugh aloud at Mr. Malanga’s rebuttal in which he states that Ms. Nash “weirdly” pointed out that the killer in Newark actually turned out to be “an illegal alien from a predominately Catholic country.” Well that’s no more “weird” than beginning an expose about Newark’s execution-style murders, then jumping right in on the “evils” of single parenthood. Why oh why would a single parent such as Ms. Nash feel offended after reading something like that?
Although I agree that it “doesn’t take a genius to figure out that [kids of young, unwed mothers already living in poverty] face really tough odds in life,” it also doesn’t take a genius to see why single mothers such as Ms. Nash would feel a bit insulted by Mr. Malanga’s finger-pointing expose.
For the record, Ms. Nash does not employ the ‘typical rhetorical device of misrepresenting an argument,’ by drawing an absolute link between single parents and poverty in order to make her own counter-argument easier. Mr. Malanga creates the insulting direct link for her himself
with his own black and white statement that “single parenthood is a road to lasting poverty in America today.” Ms. Nash, a single parent obviously placing herself and her child on a path away from poverty, seems insulted by this dead-end stigma that Mr. Malanga places on single parenthood. And as well she should. It’s hard enough for young black women to make it in America without having the negative stigma of being a single parent added to that.
Mr. Malanga writes “in Newark, we are seeing what happens to a community when the traditional family comes close to disappearing.” I disagree. I
believe that in Newark, we are seeing what happens to a community when our own country fails in its social policies and programs. There seems to be something wrong when inner city schools don’t have the funding they need to acquire much needed resources, or communities devastated by Hurricane Katrina don’t have the resources to rebuild, meanwhile I’m surrounded by headlines about our President asking for $50B additional dollars for Iraq; athletes and entertainers making millions in pay; or Congress making decisions to close military bases to save money — only to realize that they are now asking for additional funds (in the billions) in effect negating any savings they initially proposed.
I feel that I’m starting to go off on a tangent but by the very fact
that I seem to be going off on a tangent tells me that it’s not a cut
and dry problem as Mr. Malanga seems to point out. Too many additional factors exist to be able to pinpoint the problem to single parenthood.
True it’s tough for a single teenage mother to pull herself out of poverty quicksand, but it’s much easier for her to do so when we’ve got voices shouting at lawmakers and those in positions of power to help create programs to help her find a way out, rather than voices shouting at her about how her situation/ lifestyle is destroying the fabric of our country. I’m not advocating
shifting the responsibility away from the individual, but instead of
pointing fingers and placing blame (and alienating single parents in the process), writers such as Mr. Malanga should try using their voices to help implement much needed programs in impoverished neighborhoods. Let’s not even get started on the factor of race. That’s a WHOLE “nother” argument. (And seeing as Mr. Malanga, as any good investigative writer would be, is fond of statistics, once he starts doing a bit of statistical diving into how race plays a huge factor into the root of the problem, he might come up with a different twist on his expose, or at best, tie up the loose ends of his heavily frayed expose.)
So what exactly is Mr. Malanga advocating? Having government step in and force mothers and fathers to live together for the sake of the ideal Nuclear family? Pardon the pun, but that seems like an explosion waiting to happen.
Nuclear families were the ideal and norm during one era, but times have
changed. It’s great when you have two parents on the same page – yes in most cases it does teach strong family values, but as Ms. Nash points out, not only are many two-parent families just as screwed up as the single-parent families highlighted in Mr. Malanga’s expose, but many single parent families do just as good a job preparing their children to be strong individuals, able to successfully lead independent lives within society. Mr. Malanga can live in ‘TV Land’ and lament the replacement of the ‘Leave it
To Beaver’ family with ‘Blossom’-type tv families, but the reality seems to be the fact that there are many single parent families out there who don’t quite fit the image of the single parent families portrayed by Mr. Malanga. Just as Mr. Malanga draws upon the single mother experience of Sara McLanahan to help state his case, I can turn to my own expert: me. Although I “disgracefully” came from a single parent home on the “wrong side of the tracks,” and I myself was a statistic – a young, unwed mother living in NJ, I’m happy to say that my toddlers are thriving in: daycare; summer reading programs; summer math and science programs; swimming classes; gymnastics, and a whole buffet
of educational and ‘horizon-opening’ opportunities that their little tummies can digest.
And yes, their futures seem very bright as well. But so can the futures of those families highlighted in Mr. Malanga’s expose. Although the situation of being a young, unwed parent is a difficult one to be in, it doesn’t take a genius to figure out that the institution of the same range of “horizon-opening” programs within impoverished neighborhoods are steps towards solving the problem.
So for all of the awesome investigative skills that Mr. Malanga possesses that gives him such amazing insight into what’s driving this country to Hell in a hand basket, I’d have to agree with Ms. Nash – he don’t know me [or the single parent community] like that.
Thank you Sibylla for monitoring and holding these so called writers/journalists responsible for bashing and continuing the negative stereotype of our single parents. They go out and find other like minded thinking people to support their BS. I read what former senator Pat Monyihan wrote years ago about inner city children family. Hell, he voted to cut the head start/title I programs, too.
Aaron and Steve, you didn’t discover America with your articles. If you wrote an article in the true journalist objective manner – you wouldn’t get it published.
The fact is that single parent household children who are taxpayers and excellent contributors to society far out weigh the bad who come from the same poverty/single-parent household. Additionally, there are too many other factors that go into determining the criminals who come from single parent household. These factors include, but aren’t limited too: teachers who dont look like them; inadequate school supplies and schools; after school activities; legal representation, etc. The list just goes on and on.
Those thugs and murderers who executed those children in Newark several weeks ago made terrible decisions. Yes, they came from single parent households, but their siblings go to school and work everyday. Children are told right from wrong. At the end of the day, children make their own decisions and do what they want to do regardless, if a man is in the household.
I’ve seen and read countless situations where children, who come from two parent households, are criminals, too. They are given tons of breaks under the judicial system and the press uses the code phrases like “All American Family” “Look like the next door neighbor” i.e. White.
Those murderers from Newark should get the same penalty as that kid (two-family household) who killed the doctor’s wife and daughter in Connecticut several weeks ago. Bad is bad.
Far more good people and contributors to society come from single parent households than bad. And, I thank you for trying to point this out in your article.
These people just don’t get it because their life experiences are just different.