Casework with the Unmarried Mother in a Family Agency

Abstract

The degree of self-understanding achieved by these young women differs in relation to the psychodynamics of their individual personalities and capacity to make use of casework treatment. Like other human beings in conflict with themselves and/or their environment, unmarried mothers are many different kinds of people, socially, economically, intellectually, and psychologically. Social attitudes toward unmarried parenthood have not sufficiently changed to alter the need of the unmarried mother for concealment. Thus she frequently flees in panic from her own community to a large city where she is unknown. Those young women who are financially able to support themselves and to meet hospital and boarding home costs are able to carry out their plans without endangering their desire for concealment. When an unmarried mother requires assistance from public funds, she becomes involved in an investigation of resources and the possibility of correspondence with her home community, about which she is apprehensive, at times more so than the facts warrant, since public welfare departments make investigations as confidentially as possible. The protection and service provided to mother and child by authorized agencies may not seem to the mother of sufficient worth to risk the danger of possible embarrassment or disclosure, when the possibility exists of placing her child directly from the hospital, with all bills paid by the adoptive family or by some interested intermediary. 4 We need community services, public and private, geared to the optimal meeting of the psychosocial and health needs of unmarried mothers and their children. The extent to which adoptions take place outside of the control of qualified agencies, and the number of unmarried mothers who receive no casework guidance, suggest the desirability for agencies working with unmarried mothers to review critically their procedures and policies to determine whether services are as useful and as accessible as resources of personnel permit. Adequate facilities for shelter care and medical care, adoption, and child placement are essential for casework with the unmarried mother. The unmarried mother should not be exposed to a fragmentary approach focused on the symptom of her personality disturbance. Because of initial resistance and panic and need to break former social relationships, she particularly needs diagnostic appraisal and a treatment plan formulated in one agency with access to specialized services at appropriate times.