As a single mom, you worry about your kids, you strive to protect them, and you want desperately to make everything better. Your call to nurture is fine and good until you start babying your children.

This is a typical single mother mistake and it's easy to see how it happens. If you've survived death or divorce, you've been through a lot of painful struggles, and because they've been so painful, you do whatever it takes to protect your kids from this kind of pain. You walk ahead of them every step of the way, smoothing the path so they don't stumble, fall, or get lost. You pull up every thorny bush, kick away the sharp rocks, and fill all the potholes before you let your kids out of bed in the morning!

The problem with your plan is that you're keeping your kids too safe, which means that as they grow up, they don't find out how to solve their problems and move the roadblocks along the way. If everything is done for them and life is easy, they're living in a fairy tale world -- or a fairy tale jail -- that they never have the strength to break out of as they grow older. So, even though your loving single mother heart is well intentioned, please don't baby your kids -- you're just creating emotional midgets who never mature and can't fend for themselves when you're not around. They whine their way through their adult lives, expecting others to pick up the pieces, fix things, and make their lives better.