n recent years, the labour force participation rate of sole parents has been of growing concern in Australia and in some overseas countries. Wilson, Pech and Bates (1999:4), for example, showed that the labour force participation rates of sole parent mothers remained about 10 per cent lower than those of partnered mothers during the 1990s. While their analysis suggested a marginal increase in the labour force participation rates of both groups during the 1990s, it is clear that the pronounced increases in female labour force participation rates have been due primarily to growing participation by women without children. The labour force participation rates of sole parent fathers, while higher than for sole parent or partnered mothers, are still well below those of partnered fathers. The creation of new longitudinal datasets has challenged the perception of mobility among the sole parent pensioner population. For example, Barrett (2001) analysed four years of longitudinal data and found that 18 per cent of recipients were ‘short-term’ and received Parenting Payment Single (PPS) for six months or less; 15 per cent remained on the program for the entire four years and 25 per cent experienced multiple episodes of Parenting Payment Single receipt, thus cycling on and off the program. Using similar data, Gregory and Klug (2003:21) found that, while it was difficult to be precise, ‘the average cumulative use of income support over the period for which parents have dependent children may be as much as 12 years’. They found that sole parents frequently cycle through different income support payments, moving from PPS to Parenting Payment Partnered and back again. This has raised concerns that the current structure of Parenting Payment Single may be a ‘tender trap’, promoting long-term dependence on welfare and discouraging active participation in the labour market and the community (Saunders and Tsumori, 2003). Low labour force participation has adverse consequences both during the prime age years and later in life during retirement. Research by NATSEM and AMP, for example, has shown that the savings of many baby boomers are not sufficient to finance a comfortable retirement. The problem is particularly acute for baby boomer women and sole parents (Kelly and Harding, 2002; Kelly, Percival and Harding, 2002; Kelly, Farbotko and Harding, 2004). As a result, in Australia and New Zealand, ‘the direction of policy has moved towards promoting self-reliance through paid work’ (Goodger and Larose,