After dance instructor Sandip Soparrkar adopted a boy in 2007 and became the first single man in India to adopt, many single men started to look up at the idea of adoption.

The bond that a single parent shares with his/her children in rather unique. While owing to the popular rhetoric we tend to label a single parent as a father or mother as per their gender, there is a need to rethink this labelling.

Our society has segregated parenting roles for both a mother and a father but the two coexist when it comes to single parents. We still at the idea of single parents with apprehension and it gets even more intense if the single parent is a man.

That doesn’t, however, change the fact that there are single men who adopt babies and win at the ultimate challenge of parenthood as efficiently as a couple. Aditya Tiwari who adopted a special child on January 1, 2016, and became the youngest single parent to adopt a single child has proved the same.

Aditya was 27 when he first met Binny who suffered from Down’s syndrome at an orphanage. Binny’s parents had left him because he was a special child. Aditya expressed the desire to adopt him but was refused, owing to the law that made it mandatory for the adoptive parent to be at least 30 at the time of adoption.

Aditya, however, did not give up on the idea, started bearing the expenses of Binny’s treatment, saved him from an illegal foreign adoption and approached Maneka Gandhi for the adoption. While the adoption agency kept advising him against the adoption he fought all the odds to adopt Binny and that paid off. He named him Avnish.

“Avnish is one of the names of Lord Ganesha. I always prayed to Bappa for Avnish and he helped me,” shared Aditya with The Better India in 2016. Since the day of his adoption, Avnish has been the axis on which Aditya’s world revolves.

Filmmaker Karan Johar also became the father of two adorable twins through surrogacy. Following the birth of his kids, he shared on Twitter: “I am ecstatic to share with you all the two most wonderful additions to my life, my children and lifelines: Roohi and Yash. I feel enormously blessed to be a parent to these pieces of my heart who were welcomed into this world with the help of the marvels of medical science.”

On the occasion of Mother’s day, he took to Twitter to express his love for motherhood and how he is “proud to be a mother.”

Here is his tweet:

Karan Johar on Twitter

I love mothers ….I love my mother ….am proud to be a mother…#HappyMothersDay ❤️

Last year in an interaction with Hindustan Times Sandip also made a statement on similar lines as he said, “For me, each day is Mother’s Day and Father’s Day — the only special thing about these occasions is that I get extra hugs and kisses, handmade cards/song and dance, dinner at a restaurant of my choice, to thank me for all that I do.”

These fabulous single parents are establishing a commendable example of how you can win at being a single parent. Instead of being just the fathers to their children, they are serving as both the mother and the father and are totally acing it.