Lone mothers and the puzzles of daily life: do care regimes really matter?

Kröger T. Lone mothers and the puzzles of daily life: do care regimes really matter? Int J Soc Welfare 2010: 19: 390–401 © 2009 The Author, Journal compilation © 2009 Blackwell Publishing Ltd and the International Journal of Social Welfare. This article studies childcare patterns and day‐to‐day strategies of 111 working lone mothers from Finland, France, Italy, Portugal and the UK, and asks whether their arrangements are prescribed by care regimes. Lone mothers' arrangements are grouped into five based on the availability and use of different formal and informal childcare resources. The article argues that, even though lone mothers have a more favourable starting point in Finland and France compared with Britain, Italy and Portugal where formal childcare coverage is patchier, childcare arrangements are not very dissimilar within different care regimes. Instead, similarities across care regimes are highlighted. Formal provisions have their limitations in all the countries studied and in all cases significant expectations are placed on informal childcare. The availability of informal childcare cannot, however, be taken for granted in any country, and working lone mothers whose informal and formal resources do not adequately meet their childcare needs were located in every care regime, facing care poverty.     

Money Isn't Everything. Fiscal Policy and Family Policy in the Child Support Act

One of the explicit aims of the 1991 Child Support Act is to ensure that parents honour their financial obligations towards their natural children to a greater extent than they have hitherto. An equally important underlying objective is that of reducing the costs to the state of supporting lone parents. This paper examines the extent to which these two objectives are compatible within the framework of the Child Support Act through an examination of the impact of the Act's implementation on lone mothers and their children. It presents some of the key findings of a study of lone mothers on means-tested benefits, interviewed almost one year after the implementation of the Act. The paper concludes that the Act is failing to meet its stated aim of increasing the extent to which parents honour their financial obligations to children, because of an excessively narrow conception of the ways in which financial obligations are met combined with too strong an emphasis on maximizing savings in state expenditure on lone parents. The implementation of the Child Support Act, far from enhancing the welfare of children in lone parent families, has brought with it considerable financial and emotional costs for children and their mothers.     

Weaving cohesive identities: New Zealand women talk as mothers and workers

Abstract

This exploratory study examines the discourses which construct women as mothers and workers and explores the strategies the women use to weave these sometimes contradictory identities together. Discourse analysis was used to explore the talk of two focus groups of first‐time mothers, all New Zealanders of European descent in stable heterosexual partnerships with babies aged less than six months. The women deployed an intensive mother discourse which privileged their maternal role and positioned the babies as needing parental care and mothers as the natural providers of that care. However, they also felt the pressure of successful woman and economic rationalist discourses in which paid work is essential to wellbeing and good citizenship while motherhood is devalued. The women's decisions about re‐entering the paid workforce were characterised by conflict and constraint. The analysis focuses on the strategies of resistance that the women used to warrant their life choices, including constructing motherhood as a job, and deploying an independent mother discourse which serves to facilitate their striving for the best of both worlds. Also explored are some of the structural barriers that serve to further limit women's choices.     

Mothering after child removal: Living under the rule of Greek gods

Many women who experience mental illness are mothers. Evidence suggests that the role of mother is of great importance and value to these women, yet they are more likely than other women to have their children removed from their care. Little is known about the experiences of these mothers after their children are removed. This paper presents a phenomenological analysis of in‐depth interviews with 8 women to answer the following question: How do mothers living with severe mental illness experience mothering after removal of their children by child protection services? The analysis showed that mothering continued to be a major life role for these women, but the way they enacted this role was transformed. Their mothering was now constrained and prescribed by external agents, likened to Greek gods, which imposed both boundaries to what they could do and an obligation to prove themselves worthy. Like Greek gods, these external agents were seen as all powerful, unpredictable, and flawed. The study highlights the need for child protection services and support services to recognize and support noncustodial mothering activities.     

Reversing "the inadvertent nationalization of fatherhood": The British Child Support Act 1991 and its consequences for men, women and children

During the 1980s, with the growth in divorce, remarriage and births outside marriage, men's responsibilities for children and their mothers have been reviewed. In Great Britain, the Child Support Act 1991, following a decade in which the number of lone parents increased by 50 per cent and the proportion claiming state benefit increased from one-half to two-thirds, is attempting to shift lone mothers from dependence on the State to dependence on the biological father of their children. This has raised controversial issues concerning women's and children's claims on the State as citizens in their own rights; the balance between a man's private duty to maintain and provide care for children (by maintaining their mother) and his public duty to reimburse the State for doing so; and the legitimacy of trade-offs between claims on family "property" and claims to maintenance previously exercised in the courts. The individualistic system of English family law, in contrast to the law in Scotland and continental Europe, is part of the context within which these changes are taking place. So, too, is the fall in economic activity rates of lone mothers, which are among the lowest in the European Union.     

Child Care Costs and Women's Employment: A Comparison of Single and Married Mothers With Pre-School-Aged Children

Objectives . The effects of child care costs on the employment of single and married mothers with pre-school-aged children were analyzed. Methods . Both demographic and employment data from the March Current Population Survey were used, supplemented by child care data from various sources. Results . We find that child care costs have strong effects on employment for women with pre-school-aged children and that these effects are larger for single mothers than for married mothers. Conclusions . Our simulation results suggest that policies that reduce the costs of child care could raise the employment rate of married mothers by 3 to 14 percentage points and the employment rate of single mothers by 5 to 21 percentage points.     

The Long-Term Effects of Adolescent Childrearing

Data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Mature Women are used to explore the effect of adolescent childrearing on the hourly wages of women in the labor force. Women who were adolescent mothers earn less than other married or previously married women because of a persistent inability to achieve comparable educational levels. Adolescent mothers from more favorable socioeconomic backgrounds do better than other adolescent mothers in terms of education and income but, relative to women from the same background who postponed childrearing, their losses are substantial. Adolescent mothers are also more likely than other women to be or to have been single heads of households, with the economic disadvantages of that status. Public policy approaches to the prohlems of teenage parenthood must consider rhe provision of income resources and child care supports to enable young mothers to complete high school in order to further their chances for eventual self-support.     

Social Policy for Poor Rural People in Colombia: Reinforcing Traditional Gender Roles and Identities?

This article provides a 'situated' gender analysis of the Colombian conditional cash transfer programme, Familias en Acción, offering empirical evidence from a specific rural setting. This 'located' approach shows that generalizations about gender implications of conditional cash transfer programmes in Latin America do not always fit neatly with realities. The article shows how the implementation of these programmes in a specific rural context, the municipality of Paipa, reflects a reinforcement of traditional gender allocations and responsibilities. At the same time, the local authorities, official workers and the mothers adapt the social programmes to recent gender trends. For example, men may carry out some domestic activities single-handedly, take care of children without their wives, women may leave men, and women and men may work together in off-farm activities, with husbands and wives taking joint decisions about domestic issues. In other words, the gender effects of the Familias en Acción programme in rural settings currently move between old gender customs and practices and changeable gender conditions. In Latin-American terms, it is possible to say that these conditions range between 'machismo' and 'feminist liberalization'.     

Following Families: Working Lone‐Mother Families and their Children

Analysis of poverty dynamics based on large‐scale survey data shows that there is limited mobility across the income distribution for most individuals and families. This includes lone parents, who are one of the groups most likely to stay poor over time. This high income poverty risk is reduced for those lone parents who are in employment and who receive state financial support through tax credits to supplement their wages. But income security in work can be difficult to achieve. This article reports on longitudinal qualitative research which has involved repeat interviews with lone mothers and their children over a period of three to four years. The analysis explores the experiences of sustaining employment while living on a low, but complex, income and highlights the challenges faced in seeking financial security in this context.     

Family Configurations and Child-Care Patterns: Familes with Two or More Preschool-Age Children

Objectives . This article examines the extent to which mothers must find child-care arrangements for more than one preschool child and, when they do, the strategies they adopt to juggle their work and family roles. Methods . We use national data from numerous studies with information on fertility and child care among employed mothers with children. Results . We find that it is a common life-course experience for mothers to need child care for two or more preschool-age children. Employed mothers' preferred strategy for child care for their multiple preschool-age children is to place all preschoolers in the same type of arrangement, choosing parental care more often and center care less often than employed mothers with one preschooler. Conclusions . Previous child-care research has ignored the complexities parents face when they must make child-care decisions about all their preschool-age children simultaneously. Child-care decisions need to be studied within the family and household context.     

“Never enough hours in the day”: Employed mothers’ perceptions of time pressure

Finding sufficient time to meet work and family commitments poses immense challenges for employed mothers in 21st century contemporary life. Understanding how employed women with children manage their finite time resources requires deeper investigation of how time pressures accrue across work and home contexts. This study draws on data from in‐depth interviews with 18 working mothers from diverse occupations (professional, sales, service, clerical, technical and trades) and across a range of employment hours (full and part‐time). The findings from this study show that employed mothers endure high levels of time pressure related to time poverty (insufficient time for necessary or discretionary activities), time intensity (multitasking and merging work and home boundaries) and time density (familial emotion and organisation work). When women use strategies to increase time efficiency, it does not necessarily reduce their perceptions of time pressure. Juggling multiple tasks simultaneously distorts women's temporal experiences and diminishes the quality of time. Workplaces and policymakers need to find better ways to encourage employed fathers to share the responsibility for home‐ and family‐related care and organisational work. Such measures may reduce the time stress and time inequity women endure, particularly in the time management control centre of the home.     

The Time‐related Underemployment of Lone Parents during Welfare Reform,Recession and Austerity: A Challenge to In‐work Conditionality?

Reforms to UK social security benefits introduced between 2008 and 2012 that increased lone parent obligations to enter employment coincided with economic crisis and government austerity. Increases in underemployment in the broader population during this period both in terms of unemployment and time‐related underemployment raise questions regarding the extent to which lone parents not only managed to enter paid work but obtain a sufficient number of employment hours. Activation policies have increased labour market exposure at a time of greater underemployment. At the same time, high levels of economic hardship, in the context of stagnant real wage growth and benefit cuts linked to broader austerity policy, could place additional pressures on lone parent time‐related underemployment where a desire for greater employment hours to improve household income is not met by availability. We present findings showing disproportionately high growth in time‐related underemployment among lone mothers with, at peak, around one in five employed lone mothers with a youngest dependent child aged over five experiencing such underemployment. The implications to in‐work conditionality policies and the roll out of the UK's new working age benefit Universal Credit are highlighted.     

The ‘good mother’ struggles: Obstacles to the attainment of motherhood ideals among adult women formerly placed in residential care

We analysed narratives of motherhood produced by 13 women who were involved with the welfare system or the justice system during adolescence. The original contribution of our study was its focus on mothers who were turning age 30, so they were not in that period of generalized instability that characterizes the transition from care and into adulthood. This qualitative study was part of a larger study on French‐Canadian adolescents with a history of residential care. Semi‐directed interviews were conducted with 13 women, more than 15 years after their admission to residential care. Our data highlights that motherhood can contribute to the vulnerability of women who were involved with the welfare or the justice system as adolescents. Our results suggest that in order to shed a perceived deviant label and to compensate for the adverse events they experienced, they pursue internalized ideals of “good motherhood” that translate into restrictions and strain. Furthermore, they tend to refrain from allowing people into their lives and asking for help for fear of being judged. Yet, as their children are getting older and exhibiting problem behaviors of their own, the questioning of their parental practices and skills only becomes more intense.     

Dual conditionality in welfare and housing for lone parents in Ireland: Change and continuity?

This article focuses on multiple conditionalities in benefits and housing from the perspective of lone parents in Ireland. The Irish case echoes historical experiences elsewhere and is offered not as an exceptional or extreme case but as an in-depth single case study and a lens for comparison. Although contemporary forms and combinations of conditionalities are new to Ireland, the experience of multiple conditionalities in benefits and housing is not new. Hence, a historical perspective is used to examine contemporary multiple conditionalities in benefits and housing. In the past, conditional regimes for lone parents were justified in terms of moral reformation for first time mothers and avoiding moral contagion of mothers with subsequent pregnancies. In contemporary times, in the case of employment, lone parents are problematised as working part-time and “nesting” on in-work-benefits, and in the case of homelessness, lone parents who prioritise the security of tenure embedded in social housing are accused of “gaming” the system. While acknowledging ambiguities, the paper finds the overlap of welfare and housing discourses contribute, intentionally or unintentionally, to epistemological foundations or understandings of lone parents, shifting public perceptions, and framing them as “problems” to be solved. They simultaneously temper lone parents' expectations. Increased precarity and disempowerment is associated with dual conditionality, and ontological uncertainty is multiplied when experienced cumulatively across employment, social protection, and housing regimes in a context of generally poor public services and labour market precarity and in the historical context of stigmatisation. Nonetheless, lone parents demonstrate considerable agency.     

Lone Motherhood: the Impact on Living Standards of Leaving a Violent Relationship

This paper presents findings from doctoral research which looked at the social support of women leaving domestic violence. In this paper the focus is on one aspect of that study: the living standards of women who have left a violent relationship. An exploratory, area-based study using in-depth interviews and participant observation with twenty white working-class women examinedthis issue. This exploratory study makes visible the links between violence and living standards. Debts incurred during the violent relationship when women had little if any control over finances, rent arrears incurred as a result of leaving, when women were temporarily housed in a refuge or hostel, and increased housing, travel and communication costs all contributed to the women'sexperience of poverty. If findings of previous research are correct, that between 20 and 40 per cent of lone parents (overwhelmingly mothers) experienced domestic violence in their previous relation-ship, then more extensive research in this area is indicated.     

(Not) Taking Account of Precarious Employment: Workfare Policies and Lone Mothers in Ontario and the UK

Workfare is, at least in part, a policy response to changing labour markets and the expansion taking place in jobs that are low‐paid, irregular and insecure. For lone mothers, increasingly the focus of workfare policies, precarious employment creates special challenges. However, the nature of the jobs that are available to women on social assistance has received relatively little attention in the workfare literature, which focuses more on individual characteristics, supports to employment, and programme impacts. Drawing upon both primary and secondary sources and using Ontario, the province with the most developed workfare programme in Canada, this article examines the ways in which policies support and enforce precarious employment. The article also considers the implications of precarious employment for UK policy, which has not (yet) adopted workfare for lone mothers, although incremental steps in that direction are taking place as employment is increasingly viewed as the appropriate objective of income support programmes for lone mothers.     

How do immigrant parents of children with complex health needs manage to cope in their daily lives?

Daily life with children who have complex health needs can be stressful for parents. Immigrant parents are vulnerable to stress because they may lack language skills and knowledge about the health care system and have limited social networks. In this study, we focus on how immigrant parents of children with complex health needs use emotion‐focused and problem‐focused coping strategies to manage their daily life, and how their self‐efficacy and the immigration process may affect their coping. This qualitative study had an exploratory design with individual and focus group interviews. The sample comprised 27 parents—18 mothers and 9 fathers—from Pakistan, Poland, and Vietnam. The findings indicated that the parents' love for their child helps them to cope in their daily life. Newly arrived migrants, single mothers with a severely ill child who lacked support and migrant parents with language difficulties struggle to cope. Some of the stress is related to personal, social and structural problems, and to the insufficient resources available to meet the child's needs. The parents used both emotion‐focused and problem‐focused coping strategies. The parents noted that access to both universal and selective welfare services is an important factor that contributed to their self‐efficacy and coping.     

Substance‐dependent women becoming mothers: breaking the cycle of adverse childhood experiences

Parenting may be particularly challenging for substance‐dependent mothers who have grown up with parents who themselves had substance use disorders (SUDs). The aim of this study was to explore how substance‐dependent mothers describe their childhood experiences with substance‐abusing parents and the association between these earlier experiences and their own role as caregivers. Using purposeful sampling, mothers admitted for 1 year to a family ward at a substance abuse clinic were approached. Through in‐depth, qualitative interviews, nine substance‐dependent mothers described their lives in the form of present, past and future tense. The findings indicate that substance‐dependent women, who have experienced SUDs in their families of origin, face several major challenges when they become mothers. Some describe having lived their whole lives ‘on the edge of society'. This makes their rehabilitation process more complex. All mothers work to abstain from substances, process traumatic experiences and integrate their family into society. They need help to build supportive social networks and to establish a safe and predictable family environment for themselves and their children. The therapeutic implications of these findings will be discussed.     

The bumpy road to ‘becoming’: capturing the stories that teenage mothers told about their journey into motherhood

Understanding the experience of women who become mothers during their teenage years is central to ensuring that the support that is offered is appropriate to meet their needs. This paper reports on a small part of a larger ethnographic study that captured the lived experience of young mothers who were between the ages of 16 and 19 years that potentially typifies and illuminates the experiences of young women who become mothers in their teenage years. By collecting data from narrative interviews as well as participant and non‐participant observations over an extended period of time it was possible to identify how the young women experienced a range of difficulties as they made their transition into motherhood. Drawing on the findings, this paper argues that this transition for teenage mothers can be significantly different from the experience of older mothers, and it identifies the importance of appropriate support to mediate the challenges that they face. Understanding the young women's journey to ‘becoming’ is critical when planning services because if their experience of support is negative, it can lead to increased levels of maternal stress and reluctance to engage with support services.     

Employment and Wage Trajectories for Mothers Entering Low-skilled Work: Evidence from the British Lone Parent Cohort

UK government policy encourages mothers of young children in low-income families to enter or return to work, via tax credit subsidies and support for childcare. Maternal employment is seen a central plank in the campaign against child poverty, both because it raises income immediately and because working now is seen as paving the way to better employment prospects in the future. But there is little evidence about medium- and long-term outcomes for mothers entering low-skilled employment. We know little about how likely such women are to remain in work, let alone how likely they are to progress to higher-skilled and better-paid jobs. This article uses the British Lone Parent Cohort, a data set which tracked lone mothers from 1991 to 2001, to examine employment trajectories for up to 560 mothers with a youngest child under five at the start of the period. It creates a typology of trajectories over the decade, identifying the share of women broadly stable in work, those remaining at home and those following unstable pathways between the two. It goes on to explore the factors associated with different pathways, asking whether individual and household characteristics, job characteristics, or changes in circumstances such as new health problems are most important. Finally, the article examines differences in wage progression across groups of women following different pathways, and similarly tries to identify the main factors associated with faster progress.