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1 – 10 of 178Lone mothers commonly face social stigma alongside practical challenges in fulfilling both principal breadwinner and primary carer roles. This chapter draws on findings from…
Abstract
Lone mothers commonly face social stigma alongside practical challenges in fulfilling both principal breadwinner and primary carer roles. This chapter draws on findings from qualitative research involving a sample of lone mothers in the north of England to discuss how they negotiate competing employment and parenting demands within a socio-political context characterized by “worker citizenship”. This model positions them firmly as workers while increased benefits conditionality is reinforced by media stereotypes that conflate lone motherhood with welfare dependency.
A comparative research design was developed to explore experiences of mothers in two nearby locations with contrasting socio-economic profiles using a Bourdieusian approach to class analysis. Factors affecting lone mothers’ subjective perceptions of a historically de-legitimated identity were investigated during semi-structured interviews with women in diverse situations.
The interviews revealed that participants across the sample viewed being in paid employment as the most significant factor in mitigating stigma. They emphasized their work orientation and saw this as an aspect of responsible parenting. Most mothers in the more affluent location used the cultural capital of educational qualifications to secure work that could be balanced with parenting. In contrast, most mothers in the deprived location expressed frustration at being unable to access jobs that are compatible with childcare and consequently felt stigmatized for claiming benefits.
The chapter is of value in illustrating the significance of avoiding stigma as a consideration in lone mothers’ deliberations on work/family interface. It also highlights the impact of class and location on lone mothers’ ability to balance employment with childcare.
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The association between income distribution and measures of health has been well established such that societies with smaller income differences between rich and poor people have…
Abstract
The association between income distribution and measures of health has been well established such that societies with smaller income differences between rich and poor people have increased longevity (Wilkinson, 1996). While more egalitarian societies tend to have better health, in most developed societies people lower down the social scale have death rates two to four times higher than those nearer the top. Inequities in income distribution and the consequent disparities in health status are particularly problematic for many women, including single mothers, older women, and women of colour. The feminization of poverty is the rapidly increasing proportion of women in the adult poverty population (Doyal, 1995; Fraser, 1987).
Madeleine Leonard and Grace Kelly
This paper aims to explore how lone mothers define “good” mothering and outlines the extent to which feelings of pride and shame permeate their narratives.
Abstract
Purpose
This 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/approach
The 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.
Findings
Lone 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/value
While 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.
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Sanna Moilanen, Vanessa May, Eija Räikkönen, Eija Sevón and Marja-Leena Laakso
The purpose of this paper is to particularly focus on lone-mother families, comparing the childcare-related challenges experienced by working lone mothers and coupled mothers in…
Abstract
Purpose
The purpose of this paper is to particularly focus on lone-mother families, comparing the childcare-related challenges experienced by working lone mothers and coupled mothers in three European countries in the context of a 24/7 economy and non-standard working hours (e.g. evening, night and weekend work).
Design/methodology/approach
This study utilises survey data from Finnish, Dutch and British working mothers (n=1,106) collected as part of the “Families 24/7” research project. Multivariate regression analysis is used to analyse the associations between childcare-related challenges, maternal non-standard working, lone motherhood and country of residence.
Findings
The results indicated similar results across the three countries by showing that working lone mothers experience childcare-related challenges more often compared with coupled mothers. Furthermore, an increase in maternal non-standard working associated positively with increased childcare-related challenges in both lone mother and coupled families but lone motherhood did not moderate this association. The findings suggest that, regardless of family form, families in all three countries struggle with childcare arrangements when the mother works during non-standard hours. This possibly relates to the inadequate provision of state-subsidised and flexible formal childcare during non-standard hours and to the country-specific maternal work hours cultures.
Originality/value
This study responds to the need for comparative research on the reconciliation of maternal non-standard working and childcare with self-collected data from three European welfare states. The importance of the study is further highlighted by the risks posed to the maintenance of maternal employment and family well-being when reconciliation of work and childcare is unsuccessful, especially in lone-mother families.
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Susan Gill and Marilyn J. Davidson
Investigates the problems and pressures facing lone mothers in management and professional occupations. Qualitative data were gained from semi‐structured interviews with 20 lone…
Abstract
Investigates the problems and pressures facing lone mothers in management and professional occupations. Qualitative data were gained from semi‐structured interviews with 20 lone mothers, and the sample also completed the Pressure Management Indicator questionnaire. The interviews revealed that the lone mothers experienced some of the problems and pressures previously reported by women in dual career couples, including difficulties with childcare, work overload and role conflict, but to a much greater degree. Finds also that the death of a partner, separation or divorce affects the career aspirations and career development of the women in the sample and that the lone mothers were less able to take advantage of job‐sharing and part‐time working because of greater financial pressures. The lone mothers reported higher levels of pressure from workload and the home/work balance than comparative normative groups. However, as stress moderating strategies they employed better use of problem‐focussed coping than other women and made more use of social support than other managers.
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The main aim of this article is to consider the different representations of lone‐mother families in Japan and Britain and to compare and analyse some of the issues which lone…
Abstract
The main aim of this article is to consider the different representations of lone‐mother families in Japan and Britain and to compare and analyse some of the issues which lone‐mother families in the two countries face in the light of three considerations: social policy, specific forms of support networks and changing family structures in the wider context. The focus on these issues is helpful in understanding a significant difference in the relative percentages of lone‐parent family in Britain and Japan. The paper focuses on lone‐mothers rather than fathers, because mothers in both countries are in general poorer and facing more hardship than lone fathers.
Diana Tarraf, Dia Sanou, Rosanne Blanchet, Constance P. Nana, Malek Batal and Isabelle Giroux
Food insecurity (FI) is an important social determinant of health and is linked with higher health care costs. There is a high prevalence of FI among recent migrant households in…
Abstract
Purpose
Food insecurity (FI) is an important social determinant of health and is linked with higher health care costs. There is a high prevalence of FI among recent migrant households in Canada. The purpose of this paper is to evaluate the prevalence of FI in Sub-Saharan African and Caribbean migrants in Ottawa, and to explore determinants of FI in that population.
Design/methodology/approach
A cross-sectional study was conducted among 190 mothers born in Sub-Saharan Africa or the Caribbean living in Ottawa and having a child between 6 and 12 years old. Health Canada’s Household Food Security Survey Module was used to evaluate participants’ food security in the past 12 months. χ2 tests and multivariate logistic regression analyses were used to measure determinants of FI (n=182).
Findings
A very high rate of FI (45.1 percent) was found among participants. When numerous determinants of FI were included in a multivariate model, household FI was associated with Caribbean origin, low education attainment, lone motherhood, living in Canada for five years or less and reliance on social assistance.
Originality/value
These findings highlight the need for FI to be explicitly addressed in migrant integration strategies in order to improve their financial power to purchase sufficient, nutritious and culturally acceptable foods. Enhancing migrants’ access to affordable child care and well-paid jobs, improving social assistance programs and providing more affordable subsidized housing programs could be beneficial.
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Amber Gazso and Susan A. McDaniel
This paper aims to explore how neo‐liberalism shapes income support policy and lone mothers' experiences in Canada and the USA.
Abstract
Purpose
This paper aims to explore how neo‐liberalism shapes income support policy and lone mothers' experiences in Canada and the USA.
Design/methodology/approach
A critical comparative analysis is undertaken of how Canadian and US governments take up sociological concepts of risk, market citizenship, and individualization, whether explicitly or implicitly, in the design and administration of neo‐liberal income support policies directed at lone mothers. Specifically, the contradictory life circumstances that Canadian and American lone mothers experience when they access income supports that are designed ostensibly to construct/reconstruct them as citizens capable of risk taking in their search for employment and self‐sufficiency are compared.
Findings
The paper finds that the realities for poor lone mothers are remarkably similar in the two countries and therefore argue that income support policies, particularly welfare‐to‐work initiatives, underpinned by neo‐liberal tenets, can act in a counter‐intuitive manner exposing lone mothers to greater rather than lesser economic and social insecurity/inequality, and constructing them as risk aversive and dependent.
Research limitations/implications
The economic and social implications/contradictions of neo‐liberal restructuring of income support policies for lone mothers is revealed.
Originality/value
This paper contributes to broader scholarship on the gendered dimensions of neo‐liberal restructuring of welfare states in late modernity.
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The author’s story of a familial connection on the move was part of the research process of an ethnographic project about a demolished ex-industrial village. Growing up in the…
Abstract
The author’s story of a familial connection on the move was part of the research process of an ethnographic project about a demolished ex-industrial village. Growing up in the 1970s, the author’s fatherless childhood was silently lived out in its spatial geography. The author’s proximate, unknown father was a potent figure that the author would glimpse in the street spaces but was never allowed to acknowledge. Twentieth century accounts of working-class life have little to say on the personal stories of families where ‘father’ was rarely present (Steedman, 1986). Here the author offers a daughter’s emotional geography of fatherlessness. To sketch a socio-cultural backcloth to the personal subplot, the author draws on scholarship about fatherhood, fatherlessness and lone motherhood as a way to discuss men’s involvement in fathering in relation to the author’s own experience of living without a father in a paternalistic company village. Turning to the author’s return in 2015 as a researcher, the author uses autoethnography to explore the personal familial subplot bubbling underneath the main project. The author charts how the methodologies used held affordances which offered a process of coming to terms with the inter-connections of spatial and familial absence and loss: the loss of author’s home-village where memories of an absent father were played out and the revelation of the loss of an already absent father through a DNA test. In this way, it traces the shifting movements of a familial (dis)-connection through memories, photographs and mobile research encounters against the backcloth of the absent spaces of an ex-industrial community.
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