Articles on the plight of single mothers in last week's Royal Gazette raised a number of issues which Coalition for the Protection of Children chairwoman Sheelagh Cooper is addressing this week.

Today Mrs. Cooper looks at why young mothers who struggle to feed and clothe their children splurge on unnecessary items. Tomorrow she will be looking at how the situation can be improved.

Single mothers who buy expensive clothes and jewellery and pay for elaborate nail designs and hairdos while their bills mount up garner little sympathy from the public at large.

However community activist Sheelagh Cooper points out that while their decision making is flawed, there could be accepted medical reasons behind it.

"People are very critical when they see a single mom in a beauty salon or getting false nails or when they find they spent their money on a gold bracelet for their 18-month-old daughter or put gold studs in her ears while their arrears in rent mount by the month,'' noted Mrs. Cooper.

"They ask `why are they making these kinds of decisions? Why have cable TV when they cannot provide decent meals?' "Those are legitimate questions and the answer is not a simple one,'' she said. The critics had to put themselves in the mother's shoes to begin to see what they were experiencing, said Mrs. Cooper, and how short-term comfort became more important than the long-term bleakness they faced.

"My experiences with people in seriously disadvantaged situations has shown that when they reach a point of hopelessness or helplessness, they tend to make decisions that are simply a matter of making one day at a time feel better than the last.

"They try to bring some small amount of beauty or comfort into their life.

They have no regard for the long term.'' Mrs. Cooper agreed that the behaviour was dysfunctional and served to drive the mothers deeper into despair but added: "The bottom line seems to be that short-term pleasure seeking becomes the norm when the level of despair and hopelessness reaches a certain level.'' And it was not particular to Bermuda, she continued.

"It is seen anywhere there is an underclass of people who feel helpless,'' she said.

"Sometimes it appears that they lack any motivation and it's true. They have lost the capacity to see beyond the next day. This is the kind of thing that makes them buy fast food instead of making dinner from scratch for half the price and with twice the nutritional value.'' Mrs. Cooper pointed to a psychology experiment that shed some light on the mothers' behaviour.

"I often refer to an experiment that every first year psychology student learns about,'' she said.

"If you put a mouse in a maze and you close off the exit completely, the mouse will run around frantically searching for the exit at first but eventually it will lie down and give up.

"If you then open the exit to the maze after a long period of time, the mouse will simply look at the exit and will not even get up and try to walk out.'' Mrs. Cooper continued: "What that demonstrates is that sometimes no matter how many opportunities we believe exist for people, they sometimes are no longer able to see them or take advantage of them.'' However, it was not too late to help the children before they were caught in the cycle of "children having children'', she stressed. "It takes a great deal more effort to empower someone who has been down so long it looks like up to them but it is certainly not too late to do that for the children. We must keep their hopes and dreams and not close the maze while they are still young.'' As for the adults, many were probably depressed and therefore unable to think clearly, argued Mrs. Cooper.

"From a clinical standpoint there are plenty of individuals who meet the criteria for chronic depression and would benefit from some medication even in the short term to give them a new perspective or more reasonable perspective.'' Sadly, she continued, many people who exhibited these traits were left undiagnosed and untreated.

"This is possibly because they mistake their malaise for a normal reaction to a set of circumstances that are untenable, but it may also be that chronic depression has played a role in their demise in the first place,'' said Mrs.

Cooper.

Sheelagh Cooper HEALTH HTH