Abstract
Many lone mothers experience significant hardship in their lives, yet some appear resilient in the face of adversity. Understandings of lone mothers' resilience are necessary to develop effective policies and programs; however, research in this area is lacking, including understanding factors that both create hardship, and protect against it. Grounded in a feminist, participatory methodology this study addresses these gaps by engaging 38 Canadian lone mothers' in interviews and focus groups to explore their understandings and experience of resilience. Lone mothers identify a breadth of risk and protective factors organized here into a social exclusion framework so that their compounding and intersecting nature may be more readily identified. The findings shed light on important risk and protective factors in the lives of low income lone mothers and such improved understanding perhaps contests the negative and too readily made judgments about these families.
Highlights
There are 1.1 million lone mothers in Canada [1], many of whom experience significant hardship
This study yielded a substantial data set on lone mothers’ perceptions of risk and protective factors in their lives, which are summarized in Table 2 below
We frame our findings using the four spheres of social exclusion discussed above, which we suggest broaden and enrich our understanding of critical risk and protective factors and their interconnections
Summary
There are 1.1 million lone mothers in Canada [1], many of whom experience significant hardship. Poverty results in significant material deprivation, the impact of which is compounding with far-reaching consequences for the lives of low-income lone mothers and their children. This is substantially addressed across a range of literatures that discuss lone mothers’ own health and mental health challenges as well as the impacts of poverty and stress on their children [1,2,3,4]. This article makes several important contributions to scholarship across a range of subject areas It contributes to our knowledge of the impacts of family poverty and does so through the employment of a social exclusion lens. This research identifies the need for further exploration of these ideas with other population groups and with lone mothers and their children through a longitudinal study
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