ABSTRACT
Parenting demands both a decent income, usually derived from paid work, and a high level of interaction with children. It is often difficult for dualworking parents to manage both paid work and time with their children, for many single parents it is a continual struggle. Added to this, the bulk of single parents are mothers whose incomes from paid work tend to be lower than those of men. Marsden’s Mothers Alone: Poverty and the Fatherless Family, published in 1969, began to indicate the multiple disadvantages faced by single mothers in terms of paid work or reliance upon benefits, housing, child care and many other aspects. Haskey (1991) has estimated that, in 1989, there were around one and a half million single parent families in the UK containing very nearly two million dependent children. Around 1 in 6 families with dependent children were single parent families, with the biggest growth in numbers among the never married rather than the divorced.
