Social Policies for Lone Mothers in Europe

Abstract

Abstract This chapter examines how previous research on lone mothers in the welfare state contributes to understanding systematic differences in how welfare states structure life courses. It contributes both an analytic framework and its application in three countries: Germany, the Netherlands, and the UK. Following a careful review of previous approaches, and building on Leisering’s model of life-course policies, the new analytical framework contains three core elements. First, the structuration mode of welfare states defines order, sequencing, and duration of employment-dominated and care-dominated episodes in lone mothers’ life courses. Age thresholds and work requirements in unemployment benefit systems are exemplar policy elements. Second, welfare states integrate lone mothers’ life courses by providing cash transfers or services for bridging economically difficult periods. Third, welfare states prescribe normative models of how motherhood and employment should be organized across the life course. These ideas are particularly obvious in parental leave regulations, and in whether lone mothers are addressed as a separate claimant category. Exploratory analysis shows a shift toward policies prescribing more employment-dominated life courses of lone mothers in all three countries, but distinct patterns in the modes of integration and normative modelling. Germany and the UK increasingly introduced childcare services for employment-care integration in lone mothers’ life courses, but a general shift in normative modelling of work-family trajectories was less visible in the UK. In the Netherlands, the work-focused life course structuration was not aligned by cash or service-based integration measures, and a care-focused motherhood norm prevailed in policies.