Based on interviews of lone mothers with young dependent children. Looks at the economic and social circumstances of a group of lone mothers in north Dublin.

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.

Based on a long-term study of the policies of several European nations' lone mothers, this te×t reveals the contrasting attitudes in Europe towards lone mothers, and how they have been categorized and treated. Also e×amined is the role of men as both carers and cash-providers.

This title was first published in 2000. This is a study which compares and contrasts how lone mothers' relationships to paid work and care-giving are constructed across 20 countries, and with what outcomes for lone mothers' levels of economic well-being. In doing so, the book explores from an international perspective, the implications of the re-orientation of lone mothers' citizenship within the UK policy field from that of care-giver to paid worker. The volume engages with feminist comparative social policy literature concerned with specifying a construction of citizenship appropriate to capturing international variations in women's social rights. By incorporating social rights attached to paid work and care, as well as those which enable lone mothers to move between sequential periods of paid work and care-giving across the child-rearing cycle, the study makes a significant contribution to the literature.