Lone mothers, poverty and social exclusion

Abstract

Lone parenthood has had an increasingly high profile as the focus of research and policy over the last 40 years. This is partly because lone parenthood has been increasing, and has continued to do so in recent years. Between 1991 and 1998, the proportion of all families headed by a lone parent rose from 18% to 26% (Marsh and Perry, 2003). Between 30% and 40% of all children in Britain will spend part of their life in a lone-parent family (Rowlingson and McKay, 2002; Marsh and Perry, 2003). The degree of public, political and academic attention that lone-parent families have attracted presumes that they have both a special and a common status, based either on an assumption that they have distinctive problems, or that they constitute a distinctive problem for social policy. In this chapter, we focus on the situation of lone mothers, compared with that of mothers in two-parent families, and with that of women of working age living alone without children2. Data from the Poverty and Social Exclusion (PSE) Survey is set in the context of wider research on lone parents, especially the large new government data set, Families and Children in Britain (FACS). The PSE Survey findings underline the extent of material deprivation among lone parents, and demonstrate that benefit rates in 1999/2000 were inadequate to prevent poverty and social exclusion. The PSE data also look at a range of forms of social exclusion, including exclusion from the labour market, from access to services and from social relations. It raises questions about the extent to which the social exclusion that lone parents face, particularly from common social activities, is to be understood as the product of poverty or of worklessness – and thus whether labour market participation, the government’s solution of choice, is an appropriate one, or whether other measures need to be taken to raise lone mothers out of poverty by amendments to the benefits regime.