Lone mothers and child support receipt in 21 European countries

With increasing trends in divorce, separation and multi-partner fertility, more families have become subject to child support policies. This paper explores child support receipt in 21 European countries using 2017–2018 European Union Statistics on Income and Living Conditions data. We investigated: (1) cross-country differences in the prevalence and amount of child support received and (2) the determinants of child support receipt among lone mothers across countries. We found that the proportion of lone-mother families receiving child support ranged from 16 per cent in Luxembourg to 75 per cent in the Czech Republic, with large variations in the amount of child support received. Our results suggested that the socioeconomic characteristics of lone mothers, including marital status, education, employment status, number of children and income, were associated with the likelihood of receiving child support in most countries but these associations varied significantly across countries.

Using a Resistance Lens to Understand Performative Compliance of Low-Income Lone Mothers

The agency of lone mothers who rely on government income supports is often erased by the discourse of dependency, especially under welfare-to-work eligibility criteria. Here we apply the concept of small acts of micro-resistance in constrained circumstances, augmented by conceptualization of resistance as conscious oppositionality and intentionality to understand the agency of lone-mothers who receive income-assistance (IA) as they make-do and raise children under state- and market-enforced rules. Using a resistance lens reveals the interconnected importance of everyday acts like “talking back” to income-support staff, surreptitious gleaning of goods for resale, and re-storying the self. We describe these in three modalities: resistance as evasion and subterfuge; resistance through asserting positive identities; and resistance in forging their own path. Using a conceptual framework of resistance reveals the extent to which women’s survival and capacity to raise children are contingent on a performance of compliance, demonstrating the impacts of welfare-to-work on female-headed lone parent families.

‘I’m Mum and Dad in One, Basically’: Doing and Displaying ‘Good Lone Motherhood’

Popular discourse continues to equate ‘good’ motherhood with middle class, heterosexual coupledom and lone motherhood with dysfunctionality, despite ever-increasing diversity in family life. Drawing on interviews with lone mothers in two locations in the north of England, this article introduces the concept of ‘good lone motherhood’ to capture a process whereby women internalise nuclear family ideology while simultaneously resisting stigma and taking pride in their achievements in fulfilling practical and emotional demands of lone parenting. Application of a family practices framework is expanded through insights into what ‘doing’ good lone motherhood entails in everyday life and how it is ‘displayed’ to different audiences. Taking a comparative approach involving women in areas with contrasting socio-economic profiles highlights the contextual nature of display. Analysis of agential reflexivity and structural constraints demonstrates ways in which gender and class disadvantages can undermine capacity to ‘successfully’ convey a positive maternal identity.

Women, Mothers and Citizens: Lone Mothers' Narratives in the Context of New Zealand Welfare Reform

<p>As in other late modern societies with a history of liberal welfarism, 'lone mothers' in New Zealand occupy contested subject positions. On the one hand, lone parenting is understood as the outcome of broader changes in family life and gender relations, and in particular, the emergence of new forms of intimacy as people seek relationships to sustain individual identity projects. On the other hand, in the context of neo-liberal welfare discourses, lone mothers are constructed as a problematic Other, categorically different to 'ordinary' women, mothers and citizens. In New Zealand, welfare reform discourses have constructed women who parent alone as 'particular types of people', and subjected lone mothers to welfare reforms that have had real material effects in their everyday lives. The construction of lone mothers as Other is not only a product of neo-liberal welfare reform discourses. Rather, the ways in which women who parent alone are 'made up' as particular types of people is historically specific. This thesis situates current discourses around lone mothering in New Zealand in the context of a hierarchy of maternal legitimacy that has produced historically specific subjects through a number of traditional, modern and late modern subjectification discourses. Discourses have effects, both materially and in terms of the subjectivity and experience of the people 'made up'. This thesis offers an analysis of the narratives of twenty-one lone mothers in the context of New Zealand welfare reform. In particular, the ways in which women who parent alone make sense of becoming lone mothers, of being 'different' in negotiating the social identity of mother, and of the materiality of the experience of parenting alone are examined. The thesis argues that when narrating experience, women who parent alone enact particular narratives in the form of validation stories. Validation stories are drawn from an amalgam of discourses that both construct lone mothers as particular types of people and shape the material conditions of lone mothers' lives. In enacting validation stories, women who parent alone negotiate these discourses, producing narratives to make sense of their experience and position themselves as ordinary women, mothers and citizens. In this sense, validation stories are narratives that ameliorate the oppressive effects of welfare reform discourses that relentlessly shape lone mothers' lives. The thesis concludes that although validation stories make the lives of lone mothers more 'liveable', sociological theorising around changes in family life must critique claims of individualization as a benign tendency of late modernity, and attend empirically to the ways in which persistent gendered inequalities in family life are both discursively legitimated and reproduced, and continue, for example, to discriminate against lone mothers.</p>

Women, Mothers and Citizens: Lone Mothers' Narratives in the Context of New Zealand Welfare Reform

<p>As in other late modern societies with a history of liberal welfarism, 'lone mothers' in New Zealand occupy contested subject positions. On the one hand, lone parenting is understood as the outcome of broader changes in family life and gender relations, and in particular, the emergence of new forms of intimacy as people seek relationships to sustain individual identity projects. On the other hand, in the context of neo-liberal welfare discourses, lone mothers are constructed as a problematic Other, categorically different to 'ordinary' women, mothers and citizens. In New Zealand, welfare reform discourses have constructed women who parent alone as 'particular types of people', and subjected lone mothers to welfare reforms that have had real material effects in their everyday lives. The construction of lone mothers as Other is not only a product of neo-liberal welfare reform discourses. Rather, the ways in which women who parent alone are 'made up' as particular types of people is historically specific. This thesis situates current discourses around lone mothering in New Zealand in the context of a hierarchy of maternal legitimacy that has produced historically specific subjects through a number of traditional, modern and late modern subjectification discourses. Discourses have effects, both materially and in terms of the subjectivity and experience of the people 'made up'. This thesis offers an analysis of the narratives of twenty-one lone mothers in the context of New Zealand welfare reform. In particular, the ways in which women who parent alone make sense of becoming lone mothers, of being 'different' in negotiating the social identity of mother, and of the materiality of the experience of parenting alone are examined. The thesis argues that when narrating experience, women who parent alone enact particular narratives in the form of validation stories. Validation stories are drawn from an amalgam of discourses that both construct lone mothers as particular types of people and shape the material conditions of lone mothers' lives. In enacting validation stories, women who parent alone negotiate these discourses, producing narratives to make sense of their experience and position themselves as ordinary women, mothers and citizens. In this sense, validation stories are narratives that ameliorate the oppressive effects of welfare reform discourses that relentlessly shape lone mothers' lives. The thesis concludes that although validation stories make the lives of lone mothers more 'liveable', sociological theorising around changes in family life must critique claims of individualization as a benign tendency of late modernity, and attend empirically to the ways in which persistent gendered inequalities in family life are both discursively legitimated and reproduced, and continue, for example, to discriminate against lone mothers.</p>

Constructing the “good” mother: pride and shame in lone mothers' narratives of motherhood

PurposeThis paper aims to explore how lone mothers define “good” mothering and outlines the extent to which feelings of pride and shame permeate their narratives.Design/methodology/approachThe empirical data on which the paper is based is drawn from semi-structured interviews with 32 lone mothers from Northern Ireland. All the lone mothers resided in low-income households.FindingsLone mothers experienced shame on three levels: at the level of the individual whereby they internalised feelings of shame; at the level of the collective whereby they internalised how they perceived being shamed by others in their networks but also engaged in shaming and at the level of wider society whereby they recounted how they felt shamed by government agencies and the media.Originality/valueWhile a number of researchers have explored how shame stems from poverty and from “deviant” identities such as lone motherhood, the focus on pride is less developed. The paper responds to this vacuum by exploring how pride may counterbalance shame's destructive and scarring tendencies.

Beyond the Economic-Need Hypothesis: A Life-Course Explanation of Women’s Extended Family Living Arrangements in Chile

Previous research has mainly understood household extension as a family strategy to face economic deprivation, giving little attention to other factors affecting it. Using 2017 data from the National Socioeconomic Characterization Survey, this article evaluates the role played by economic and life-course factors in extended family living arrangements among women in family units in Chile ( n = 60,111). Results indicate that economic needs are an important driver for those seeking refuge in someone else’s home, but they are less important for those hosting other relatives within their household. Importantly, the likelihood of living in an extended household—and the position that family units occupy within the household (as head-families or subfamilies)—changes over the life span. Young women (15–34 years) are more likely to live in extended households as sub-families, while middle-aged women (45–64 years) tend to live in extended households as household heads, hosting young cohabiting couples, or lone mothers.