Our guest blogger is Sarah Jane Glynn, a policy analyst at the Center for American Progress Action Fund.

Today is Mother’s Day, the day reserved for children and fathers to lavish the moms in their lives with praise and attention. The news is, of course, full of beautiful and heartrending odes to mothers.

Yet there is one group of moms that are not usually beatified in the press, in fact they are vilified more often than not: Single mothers. The press has unleashed an onslaught of articles in the past few months bemoaning the fact that an increasing number of births are to single moms.

Whether one approves of single parenting or not, the fact is that the majority of births to women under the age of 30 occur outside of marriage. It is in our best interests as a nation to support these women and their children.

Families headed by a single mother are more likely to live in poverty than those headed by a married couple or a single father. Increased employment among single mothers helps in reducing their poverty rates, but the inflexible nature of most workplaces presents unique challenges to single moms. Single mothers who experience work-life conflict are less likely to be employed and less able to maintain employment stability.

A lack of flexibility and paid leave can make keeping a job nearly impossible for many single mothers already struggling to make ends meet. Without a partner to share childcare responsibilities with, single moms must often choose between going to work or staying home with a sick child.

A single mother with no paid sick days, working full-time earning $10 an hour (the average wage for a worker without paid sick days), would fall below the poverty line if her child caught a bad case of the flu and she had to miss three days of work without pay. This doesn’t even take into account the fact that she may be fired for having to miss work in the first place.

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JP Morgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon this week announced that the bank he heads lost $2 billion making risky trade under the guise of “hedging” (which is meant to reduce risk). Dimon has been one of the biggest critics of the Volcker Rule, which is meant to prevent banks from making massive bets with federally insured dollars.

Dimon appeared today on NBC’s Meet the Press, where he was asked by host David Gregory if JP Morgan’s massive loss shows that the banking system — just a few years after a financial crisis that nearly brought the global economy to its knees — is still too risky. Dimon replied, “I don’t think so”:

GREGORY: Have you given regulators new ammunition against the banks?

DIMON: Absolutely, this is a very unfortunate and inopportune time to have had this.

GREGORY: But if the best of the best can’t manage a risk like this, does it not tell you that the banking system is still several years after the financial collapse, too risky?

DIMON: I don’t think so. It’s a question of size. This is not a risk that is life threatening to JP Morgan.

Watch it:

Of course, the point isn’t whether JP Morgan, the biggest bank in the U.S., can survive a trade like this. It’s whether the financial system can sustain this sort of trading by all of the big banks, many of which are not in the same financial shape as JP Morgan.

As the New York Times detailed yesterday, JP Morgan and the rest of the nation’s biggest banks have been fighting to widen exemptions to the Volcker Rule that would allow banks to continue making risky trades of this sort. ”I hope that the final [Volcker] rule will prevent this,” said Rep. Barney Frank (D-MA), whose name graces the Dodd-Frank financial reform bill, on ABC today. “The Volcker Rule is still being formulated.”