Over the last two decades there has been a marked increase in the percentage of all households with dependent children that consist of children with a lone mother (from 7 per cent in 1971 to 18 per cent in 1991, with lone fathers remaining at 1 per cent; Burghes 1993). This means that the appeal […]

In July 1993, John Redwood, then Secretary of State for Wales, made a speech against lone mothers that set the tone for a major theme of the Conservative party annual conference at the beginning of October 1993. At that conference, various British Secretaries of State attacked lone motherhood in away that echoed sentiments expressed in […]

A case of competing discourses Ann Phoenix Since the 1980s, the media in Britain and the United States have made many negative pronouncements on lone mothers. The notion of ‘feckless mothers’, who get pregnant in order to obtain welfare payments and housing and then rear children who are likely to become criminal, has been much […]

Research into the outcomes for children who have or have not experienced family disruption and the accompanying debate is complex, contentious and controversial. On the one hand there are those wary of the quality of the data available and what can safely be said about children’s outcomes as a result. On the other hand, there […]

Researchers have looked to a range of social, financial and psychological factors to account for differences in outcomes where they exist. These factors may have preceded the disruption, occurred afterwards or both. They illuminate the reality and variation in the lives of children caught up in family change and disruption. On the psychological dimension, family […]

A short-hand summary of the research findings suggests that, on the one hand, nothing can with certainty be said about how any child will develop merely from knowing that he or she comes from a lone-parent family or a two-parent family—second or intact. On the other hand, if the data are reliable, on average, the […]

It is often easier in social enquiries to pose concerns and ask questions than to answer them. To what extent can the data available be taken as telling us definitively and with surety about the relationship between children’s experience of family life and family change and their well-being and achievement in childhood and adulthood and […]

The way in which the concern for children and their outcomes is often expressed in public debate is in terms specifically of their being the children of lone parents. Similarly, their experience of this family life in a lone-parent family is implicitly characterized by two facts: first, that all lone-parent families and all experiences of […]

What happens to the children of lone parents1 Louie Burghes It is tempting to say that society is and has long been concerned about the well-being of children who experience family disruption, or grow up in a lone parent family, or both. While historically many children lost a parent through death, it is parental separation […]

Two sides of the same coin Mary McIntosh Over recent years, the media in the United Kingdom have been reflecting a concern about lone mothers that amounts to a moral panic. Even the broadsheet newspapers have articles like ‘Alarm over teenage baby boom’ (Sunday Times, 8 January 1992), which seems to assume that all teenage […]