ORIGINAL RESEARCH article
Front. Educ.
Sec. Teacher Education
Volume 10 - 2025 | doi: 10.3389/feduc.2025.1494413
This article is part of the Research TopicNavigating Trends and Challenges in Educational ProfessionalismView all 15 articles
Single-parents and their Adolescents' Education: Call for Educational Professionalism
Provisionally accepted
- 1Department of Social Work, Amrita School of Social and Behavioural Sciences, Amrita Vishwa Vidyapeetham, Coimbatore, India
- 2Liberal Arts Department, Alliance University, Bangalore, India
- 3Department of English and Humanities, Amrita School of Engineering, Amrita Vishwa Vidyapeetham, Coimbatore, India
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Adolescents in single-parent families frequently encounter academic challenges amplified by financial, temporal, and emotional constraints. Guided by Family Systems Theory this study explores the lived experiences of single-parents in India and identifies implications for educational professionalism-that is, the capacity of teachers, counsellors, and school leaders to respond proactively to diverse family structures. In this study, semi-structured interviews with 12 single-parents of eleven to eighteen year old adolescents were analysed using reflexive thematic analysis. As a result, five inter-linked themes emerged: (1) challenges of adolescents' academics (Effects of Gadget Addiction on Academic Performance, How Bullying adversely affects Academic Performance, Competitive Curriculum - a major hurdle in the uneven playground of competitive academics); (2) challenges of single-parentship (Financial strain and its adverse effect on academic performance, Responsibility Overload and its adverse impact on academic performance, Adverse effect of Social Stigma and Stereotyping in Academic Performance, Importance of Time management in Academic Performance); (3) communication patterns; (4) emotional well-being; and (5) planning and monitoring. These findings underscore the need for flexible, stigma-free school practices, such as after-hours conferences, scholarship pipelines, and anti-bias training to ensure single-parent families are true partners in schooling and implies that embedding these recommendations within professional standards can help operationalise inclusive, context-sensitive education.
Keywords: Educational professionalism, Single-parent families, Family systems theory, Adolescent academic achievement, professional collaboration
Received: 10 Sep 2024; Accepted: 28 Aug 2025.
Copyright: © 2025 K.P, Sulur Anbalagan, Kalapatapu and Thangavelu. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
* Correspondence: Rajalakshmi Sulur Anbalagan, Department of Social Work, Amrita School of Social and Behavioural Sciences, Amrita Vishwa Vidyapeetham, Coimbatore, India
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