I DIDN’T THINK much about lone parents until I became one. It was one of those issues that inflamed the Right and excited the sympathy of the Left, without ever getting anywhere. After their poisonous moral crusade in the early 1990s against single mothers who “get pregnant just to jump the housing list” backfired so spectacularly, it became a no-go area for the Tories, politically uncontroversial. The Conservatives, desperate to appear compassionate, dared not raise “single mums” again; Labour insisted upon viewing their problems as purely financial and refused to debate the nuclear family because it was “a Tory thing”.
They are going to have to debate it now. The single mum as a political issue is back. Every contender for the Conservative leadership has made speeches about the importance of supporting two-parent families. Even David Davis, one Tory whose views on the issue I wholly respect, as I know him to be a passionate champion of single mothers and was brought up by one himself, emphasises the two-parent family as “the building block of society”.
The consensus never was. The issue wasn’t dead, it was only sleeping.
Which may be no bad thing, for if ever there was an issue crying out for debate, this is it. Children of single parents are poorer, less healthy, have more trouble at school, are more likely to become criminals, unemployed or homeless, and then to repeat the cycle by having children outside wedlock themselves. Report after report has confirmed it. What is essential is to understand what causes this disadvantage.
By insisting that all the problems associated with lone parenthood are caused purely by financial distress, people on the Left have been able to shy away from considering some of the harder social issues.
It is all but impossible to disentangle the effects of poverty and poor health, or of domestic violence, traumatic divorce or parental separation, from a child’s lack of a mother or father. Much of the evidence about poor outcomes relates to children from “disrupted” families, rather than stable lone-parent families. And a lot of the statistics cited in Britain are from the US, where the welfare state in all its guises provides less of a safety net.
I am not sure how researchers even define what a “child of a lone parent” is. A child may be raised by his two parents until he is 10, say, then see them divorce, live with his mother for six years, then she remarries and he lives with her and his stepfather, all the time maintaining regular contact with his father. He would be defined as the child of a two-parent family at primary school, of a lone parent for his GCSEs, then a two-parent family when he fails to get into university and if he later becomes a criminal — anyone’s guess.
One cannot simply state that lone parenthood is an ill in itself, rather than viewing poor results as the consequence of a variety of factors contributing to the relative deprivation of the child. Yet the Right tends to condemn single motherhood per se and to insist that it should be discouraged — for which read penalised.
Last week, for instance, the right-of-centre think-tank Civitas, whose work is usually impressive, published a report comparing tax and benefit policies in France, Germany and the UK. Civitas argued that British government policy “provides financial incentives” for couples with children to break up and that Labour “is undeniably pro-single parents” at the expense of two parent families. The Daily Mail happily splashed with a story about “Labour ’s tax on the family”.
I wonder if they read the report, or just the press release. Look, for instance, at the section entitled “Treatment of single people who have a baby (and become lone parents)”, a heading surely designed to hark back to those jumping-the-housing-queue myths: “People working at the minimum wage actually see a modest increase in their standard of living.” But look at what it doesn’t spell out: the same is true, according to the tables on the next page, for couples who have a child when one stops work!
It gets worse. The following section — “Incentives or disincentives for mothers to partner or separate” — claims that within low-earning couples, a mother can be better off by leaving her partner. But the graph to which it refers shows nothing of the sort. It shows that if a mother of a three-year-old leaves her minimum wage-earning partner, she is about 4 per cent worse off. The only example that Civitas could show to back up its claim is where two adults are working 35 hours a week on the minimum wage and have one 12-year-old child, and they part, then the mother and child are better off by £1,000 a year. Talk about cherry picking. And what world do these guys live in that they think someone is going to decide to have a baby, or to leave a partner, for at the very most £1,000?
Not that the £1,000 is even true. For the figures, Civitas admits, do not take into account the cost of childcare, or of nappies, milk, clothes, food, ie, all the costs of raising the child — which would make the mother substantially worse off. It is a report at best extraordinarily disingenuous and at worst dishonest. Yet while the Right has been playing merry hell with it, no one on the Left has bothered to challenge it.
Oddly, when I tried to talk to the person named as the author of the report, Rebecca O’Neill, Civitas told me she had moved to the US and didn’t want to speak about it.
Which is a shame because I wanted to discuss an earlier Civitas report she wrote that concluded that many of the poor outcomes associated with disrupted family backgrounds can be explained by poverty or reduced income. Poverty, O’Neill said three years ago, “tends to explain more of the risks associated with educational and employment outcomes”. Why, I would have asked her, is she letting Civitas use her very impressive research to fuel a right-wing agenda to cut benefits to the people who, by her own admission, would benefit most from them?
Not that money is by any means the only issue. It cannot correct the stress and shock caused by an unhappy marriage and a divorce. Nor, perhaps, can it correct an absence of paternal attention.
Right and Left have different images of single mothers. The Right tends to view them as immoral, sloppy and slobby products of bad neighbourhoods. A few months ago a Times colleague looked disbelieving when I said I’d never come across a single mother who had got pregnant to jump the housing queue. Why would I have done? The exchange demonstrated two things: that the old stereotypes do still exist, and that single mothers are seen as a class apart and a uniform group. The Left views them as something to patronise — distressed, needy and emotionally abused supplicants.
I prefer the Right’s look of embarrassment when they find I am a single mother to the Left’s smile of sympathy, but perhaps that’s because I don’t need their money. I want to tell them how much fun it is, and how easy, and how much easier and more fun it is for me than for many married couples, because raising children within a marriage often looks like hell.
But the lingering stigma and the entrenched positions of Left and Right make it impossible even to have the conversation, let alone a fruitful argument. And unless we argue, and argue honestly, about it, we will not find the answers, millions of children will continue to face startling disadvantage, and society will keep paying the price. Oh, and the Right will win.
