I always thought that “single mother (or father” referred to people who were raising their children on their own. The word “mother” was operative for me. But it turns out that for most people, the word “single” in the sense of “not currently married” is the key one.
It’s kind of weird to hear a guy who walked out in his family and barely sees the kids every other weekend refer to himself as a single father. He’s single in the sense that he’s dating widely but not in the sense that he’s single-handedly raising the kids. He’s not raising them much at all, unfortunately.
There should be a different term for people who are really raising the kids on their own as opposed to those who are divorced but have a very present and engaged co-parent.
P.S. This isn’t a criticism of anybody but a purely linguistic observation. I feel very tired of my many emotions and hence peaceful towards everybody including the absentee dad who occasioned this post.
Clarissa's Blog 
Ime most people use the terms the way you would. The exception maybe being people like the deadbeats you describe in the post.
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“refer to himself as a single father”
This is either a big shift in usage or weird idiosyncratic usage (caused by a guilty conscience?).
I’ve always understood ‘since (parent)’ to refer to a parent who, for whatever reason, is raising a child without the daily contribution of a spouse/partner (not counting occasional visitations by another parent if they’re alive).
The guy is not a single parent he’s a divorced dad (non-custodial) though dad is maybe too… nice a word.
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No, she’s totally right. This confusion exists. I personally know two guys who, for all the reasons you might expect, are real actual single dads– divorced, got sole custody, mom’s either not allowed to see the kids, or only allowed heavily supervised visitations a few times a year. These guys are raising kids completely on their own.
But because of the way custody usually works after a divorce– if they just say they’re “single dads” it’s assumed that they have their kids on weekends and wednesdays, or maybe only on holidays. This gets confusing when they get out into the dating market, because many women are mostly-ok with the idea of part-time step-parenting, but vanishingly few are OK with dating a man who has fulltime parent responsibilities. A shame, really. IMO that status speaks volumes about their reliability, determination, and strength of character. But it’s rare, and people really don’t know what to make of it.
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It does exist. I know this woman whose ex is extremely involved in raising their daughter. It’s unusual to see him around town without the kid in tow. But she refers to herself as a single mother, so I assumed she had another kid with a man who was actually absent. But no, there’s just one kid.
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You are asking for a level of introspection and honesty most people don’t have 😉
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…I mean, there’s a certain amount of automatic sympathy in the modern US for “single parents”– and yes, that’s because the term implies the other parent abandoned you, and you’re doing all the work. But what if you’re the deadbeat parent? How many deadbeat parents out there are gonna refer to themselves as the “absent parent”, the “genetic material donor” or just be like “oh yeah I abandoned my ex and kids”– is there a neutral term for that? No. So of course they will call themselves single parents. Honesty is too brutal. The moms in my previous comment would definitely refer to themselves as single moms, even though they’re not legally allowed to see their own kids without responsible adult supervision.
I do know divorced parents who simply call themselves “divorced parents” and have standard responsible-adult shared-custody arrangements. So that is a thing too. If you ever encounter divorced parents where one self-labels as a “single parent” and the other self-labels as a “divorced parent”… that tells you who’s doing the actual parenting.
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The guy you describe is single, and a dad, but that doesn’t make him a “single dad,” which would be someone with full-time custody.
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