Research Report: The Situation of Lone Parents

The Supermom partnership is proud to announce this collaborative report that details the situation of lone parents in each partner country--Germany, Italy, France, Poland, and the UK (Northern Ireland specifically). Each of the partner organisations contributed to the research, and the report was then compiled by Possibilities NI.

The research report reveals that there are different levels of support for lone parents among the partner countries, and that the demographic details of lone parents can vary between countries and change over  time. Several similarities that do stand out, however, portray the many financial and societal barriers that lone parents face across all the partner countries. For example, every country reported that a main barrier for lone parents seeking work is that childcare is either not available or too expensive to afford. Another common issue was discrimination or a negative societal stigma against lone parents, which leads to social exclusion and increased poverty. These difficulties are reflected in the rest of the monoparental family as well: across the EU, children in lone parent families are at least twice as likely to live in poverty as their peers from two-parent families. These statistics show the very real need for transnational programmes and projects, such as Supermom, to support lone parents as they seek to balance their home lives with employment and the expectations of their society and government.

Click on the link at the bottom of the page to access the report.