A new study finds that single parents are still finding the time to date.
Credit: Creatas
Ask any single parent and they’ll probably tell you that balancing a social life and child-rearing is difficult, to say the least. But a new study suggests that the single moms and dads out there are still finding time for love.
The Kinsey Institute, the think tank devoted to researching sex and gender, has just released a new report on the sex lives of single parents. While it’s a common misconception that single parents are either too stressed out or too busy to have sex very often, the researchers found that the moms and dads of small children are getting busy as often as single adults without children. Interestingly, the single parents of kids under 5 also have more sex than single parents with older children (who presumably have more time and energy to date).
“Singles have relatively less sexual activity than coupled people — singles tend to have lower rates of sexual frequency likely because they have to first find a partner to have sex with,” Justin R. Garcia, one of the study’s co-authors, says in a statement. “And, for single parents, there is only so much time and so much energy to be used for a variety of competing demands in their life. Without the help of a partner, singles often have to divert more energy to parenting — so in theory, one might think single parents would not be dating as much. But that’s not what we found.”
Follow Lakshmi Gandhi on Twitter @LakshmiGandhi.
