Policy makers across the world confront issues relating to lone parents and employment, with many governments seeking to increase the participation of lone parents in the labour market. This book offers an analysis of policies and provisions in several countries, identifying policy lessons. Chapters are written by experts on lone parenthood.

Policy makers across the world are confronting issues relating to lone parents and employment, with many governments seeking to increase the participation of lone parents in the labour market. This book is based on an up-to-date analysis of provisions within particular countries, examining whether and how policies support and encourage employment, and drawing out policy lessons. The countries examined are the UK, USA, Australia, France, the Netherlands and Norway. Unlike other studies which have considered this issue, this book includes both country-specific chapters and makes thematic comparisons across countries. Chapters are written by leading experts on lone parenthood in each country.Lone parents, employment and social policy is essential reading for students in social policy, sociology, human geography, gender and women's studies, as well as policy makers and practitioners in the field of lone parents and employment. It will be of interest to those who want to know more about these policy developments but also to those interested in broader issues about gender and welfare states.

Lone parenthood is an increasing reality in the 21st century, reinforced by the diffusion of divorce and separation. This volume provides a comprehensive portrait of lone parenthood at the beginning of the XXI century from a life course perspective. The contributions included in this volume examine the dynamics of lone parenthood in the life course and explore the trajectories of lone parents in terms of income, poverty, labour, market behaviour, wellbeing, and health. Throughout, comparative analyses of data from countries as France, the United Kingdom, Ireland, Germany, Belgium, Sweden, Switzerland, Hungary, and Australia help portray how lone parenthood varies between regions, cultures, generations, and institutional settings. The findings show that one-parent households are inhabited by a rather heterogeneous world of mothers and fathers facing different challenges. Readers will not only discover the demographics and diversity of lone parents, but also the variety of social representations and discourses about the changing phenomenon of lone parenthood. The book provides a mixture of qualitative and quantitative studies on lone parenthood. Using large scale and longitudinal panel and register data, the reader will gain insight in complex processes across time. More qualitative case studies on the other hand discuss the definition of lone parenthood, the public debate around it, and the social and subjective representations of lone parents themselves. This book aims at sociologists, demographers, psychologists, political scientists, family therapists, and policy makers who want to gain new insights into one of the most striking changes in family forms over the last 50 years. This book is open access under a CC BY License.

Single parents face countless hardships, but they can be boiled down to a triple bind: inadequate resources, insufficient employment, and limited support policies. This book brings together research from a range of disciplines from more than forty countries--with particularly detailed case studies from the United Kingdom, Iceland, Sweden, and Scotland. It addresses numerous issues related to the struggles of single parents, including poverty, employment, health, children's development and education, and more.

This book is a comparative study of family change, parental employment and social policy in the five Nordic countries, the Netherlands, Germany and the United Kingdom. In all these countries family forms have been profoundly affected by lower fertility rates, lower marriage rates, increased cohabitation, higher risks of relationship breakdown and episodes of lone parenthood. These changes have also been linked to an increase in the proportion of mothers participating in the labour market.

This book offers an innovative account of social-control and behaviorist thinking in social policies and welfare systems and the impact it has had on disadvantaged groups. The contributors review how controls have been applied to individuals and households and how these interventions have narrowed social rights. They illuminate the links between social control developments, welfare systems, and the liberalization of economics, and they highlight the negative impact that behaviorist assumptions--and the subsequent strategies that have grown out of them--have had on the disadvantaged. Overall the volume provides a cutting-edge critical engagement with contemporary policy developments.