A term describing children raised in a single parent household?

Since there are terms describing children born during some periods, like millennials, or with some ethnicities, like African American, or how long they've stayed in the US, like first generation immigrant, or those who have experienced a lot, like a third culture kid. Is there a term for children raised in a single parent household? I know there are single parent, single mom, single dad, how about the children?


You can simply say single-parent children or single-parented children:

  1. The single-parented child has become a focal point of attention for many educators (https://scholarworks.wmich.edu/dissertations/2222/).
  2. Single-parent children behavior... (https://www.privatewriting.com/blog/single-parent-children-behavior).

An orphan is someone whose parents have died; when the responsibility of nurturing a child is borne by a single parent it could be said that the child is either motherless or fatherless, although many would presume that he or she is orphaned of a parent. The expression is used by an author whose biological father had not deceased

My mother got full custody of me, and I later learned that my father had a habit of driving to St. Louis, then up and down my grandparents’ street, hoping to see me. My grandmother was adamant—she sent him away. I remember his arriving only one time. Perhaps I was seven. I was happy to see him, …. I sat on his lap on the front porch of my grandparents’ house for a bit while he chatted with my grandfather in the other chair. ….

As the years went by, I stopped listening to stories about my father, stopped paying attention to the murmurs of compassion for me as a fatherless girl. I took my uncle to father-daughter night at school, and I viewed the fathers of my friends with some skepticism—….

My Absent Father
By Jane Smiley, October 3, 2014

The formal equivalents would be maternal orphan, and paternal orphan. If a child never sees a parent, even if he or she is alive, that child to all intents and purposes is a half-orphan. A writer might prefer this term for its emotional impact on the reader. Whereas an adult might arrive at this logical conclusion after a dispassionate analysis.

An absent father or absent mother is a biological parent who is still alive but sporadically or rarely participates in their child's life.

Absent parents
Parenting can be a little more challenging when there isn’t another parent around to help you share the load. This can be because of a variety of reasons, perhaps the absent parent has died, is in prison, or lives in another country or you don’t know where the father is.

FamilyLives.org.uk