Lone Parents Poverty And Public Policy In Ireland

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.

It is ten years since the first edition of this well-established text was published. The second edition contains an almost entirely new selection of readings, to bring the publication up-to-date, and to develop themes that are likely to remain topical into the late 1990s and beyond. Where possible and relevant, much of the material has a comparative (particularly European) perspective. The book is an essential text for students and teachers of social policy and women's studies.

International development policy-makers of the industrialized countries are focusing on understanding and tackling northern poverty. The articles in this collection examine the phenomenon of the globalization of poverty and unemployment as it relates to gender identity.

This study of Ireland examines the increasing risk of poverty among female-headed households; the interaction of low pay and household poverty; and the incidence of hidden deprivation experienced by women within households. It draws extensively on the 1994 Living in Ireland survey, a national survey of over 4000 households undertaken to explore the extent of poverty in Ireland.