The need to decrease parent isolation is especially crucial for single parents.

At Dewey Elementary School's child care program, in San Diego, single parents described their sense of isolation and time-poverty: how they spoke with one another only briefly in the morning and the evening when they dropped their kids off or picked them up. A few had never talked with any other parents in the program.

"It's nice to know that there are other people like this, that I'm not the only one that's out there," said one mother, sitting at a school table for this rare meeting with other single parents. "It's nice to know there are other people out there going through it."

The connection between time and money creates an almost unbearable challenge. One single parent, a 36-year-old woman who works as a hairdresser, spoke with intensity: "Sometimes you don't feel like a real person, you don't feel like you're doing your job as a parent no matter how much you love them, because of money. You don't have any time with them because you're working all the time. It's going so fast. Suddenly your child is walking and talking, and you've missed it. But then there's the child-care bill, and you have to put it off with excuses, and your child runs a fever for three days and you haven't the money to pay for a doctor's visit. When they get sick, you stay home with them, and you miss work, which means you don't get paid and aaaahhhhhh . . . it's like a chain reaction."

Only 4 out of the 12 parents in the room were covered by any kind of health insurance. They consider day care, unlike health insurance, a necessity if they're going to stay off welfare. The hairdresser said she considered herself lucky. Her children go free to the elementary school's sliding-scale day care program, sponsored by the school district and the state. A long list of other parents are waiting to get their children into the program. The hairdresser has two children. In private day care, she could be paying $500 or $800 a month, which illustrates one reason so many single mothers remain on welfare: She brings home $800 a month.

"The best thing about being a single parent is that there's no interference, or at least less interference, from the other parent in raising the child," said Joan, at 45, the oldest of several single parents I spoke with at Dewey. She said she was proud of making it alone, with a child, and proud of the engine grease beneath her polished fingernails, grease from fixing her own car. "But sometimes you don't think you're going to make it. There's the child care payments, you have to put them off until the end of the month, the excuses you have to make up."

Like all working parents, but with more intensity and inventiveness, single parents devise time-tricks. First comes time-shifting. "I do everything at night," said Sophia, another single mother in the parent group I interviewed at San Diego's Dewey Elementary School. "Wait till they're in bed and then clean all I can until late at night and then get up early and start all over again." Then comes time-compacting. One of the younger single mothers said she never does just one thing at a time around the house. "When I'm cooking dinner, my daughter sits on the counter next to the microwave and we talk. When she's in the tub, I'll jump in and join her. And when I vacuum the house, I put her on the vacuum. She likes to ride the vacuum, and that's a time when we can talk."

"But once they get past 5 years old," said another single mother, smiling, "you can't ride them on the vacuum anymore." These parents had no time, they said, to take advantage of any psychological services or networking programs. "There are parenting classes that I'd love to attend," said one, "it's a question of priorities. Is it more important to cook my son's dinner or see that the laundry is done?"

I asked these single parents if any of them ever picked up the phone and called a friend for parenting advice. "I called my mom," said one woman. Another mother said, "I don't have any other friends who are single parents, or even parents right now. But I can call my sisters. They adore my daughter. And my boyfriend will help out when I run out of patience and I can't handle it. But I don't know any other single parents. They're too busy, I'm too busy."

This isolation and lack of time translates into a lack of political power. "Recently, we had to put a freeze on our enrollment here," said the director of the preschool, "So typically, I'll get a single parent on the phone who is desperate for child care and tell her, 'Look, the governor vetoed the bills that would help us and if you want to do something, write the governor.' But the parent will say, 'I don't have time to write the governor! I've got to find child care!'"

Isolation among parents helps create isolated kids -- or more specifically, kids isolated from the adult world, more vulnerable to their peers.