ABSTRACT
Recent government policy on family life has stressed the importance of paid work as a means of improving the life chances of family members. The new ethos, which focuses mainly on lone parents, supports the idea that mothers can and even should work to improve the circumstances of their families. This is at odds with a more traditional view, which suggests that mothers should be full-time carers (although there has never been an unequivocal policy that has supported lone mothers outside the labour market). As Land and Lewis (1998) argue, there has been a shift from defining lone mothers as mothers to defining them as workers:
We are offering a New Deal for Lone Parents receiving Income Support, which will help them to improve their families’ lives, by helping them to overcome barriers to work through advice, … training and help with finding a job.
