Single mothers and the budget

This year's Commonwealth Budget sees a number of initiatives focussed on long-term welfare dependency (some seeking to prevent it, some to overcome it), along with the identification of ten disadvantaged regions, in which specific targeted programs will operate.[1]

These range of initiatives are to 'help people living in communities with high rates of entrenched disadvantage', and to 'tackle the challenge of intergenerational welfare dependence.'

The focus on teenage parents will cost $47million over four years, and seeks to ensure 'teenage parents finish school and support their children.'

For 'teenage parents' read 'teenage mothers'. The program seemingly has no focus on the fathers (some of whom, of course, may not be teens).

The young single mum receiving Parenting Payment, with a child six months or older, will be required to attend compulsory support and engagement interviews with Centrelink until they complete Year 12 or equivalent, or until the youngest child turns six.

Teen parents will be required to undertake compulsory activities from when their child is one year old. Throughout, they will be required to work with Centrelink to develop a participation plan that includes compulsory education activities designed to support them in their parenting role or to help them gain a good education.

If they do not engage with Centrelink when required, without a reasonable excuse, they will have their income support payment suspended until they re-engage.

For other (older) single mums, outside these ten areas, there are to be incentives to do more work through the easing of taper rates on withdrawal of benefit.

There are other programs to be put into place in the ten regions identified. For example, parents who have been on income support for more than two years, or who are under 23 and are not currently working of studying full time, will be required to meet regularly with Centrelink through interviews and workshops to plan for their return to work. They will, as will the teenage parents, be able to access Communities for Children services, and assistance with the costs of child-care for up to 52 weeks.

It isn't clear how adequate the supply of child-care is in these regions, but it is also clear that these are regions with high levels of unemployment, and a potential shortage of jobs suited to the needs of these young people.

There is a great deal of sense in developing targeted initiatives in areas of disadvantage in preference to universal programs. A suite of coordinated measures can be brought together to complement each other. Ideas can be tested and evaluated. Special collaborative arrangements with government and non government agencies can be brought together.

In some of these disadvantaged regions there may well be patterns of inter-generational welfare dependency, and an associated lack of familial role models with regular employment.

Some will have a high incidence on Aboriginality. Others may include migrants from non-English speaking backgrounds and some may come from communities that have experienced long periods of war, trauma and social upheaval.

There will likely be differences in scale and the type of disadvantages between the various regions. Most of the identified regions will include numerous family groups well known to health and law enforcement and child protection authorities.

It is sound policy, as well as common sense, to differentiate between the targeted teen mothers in these disadvantaged regions and the generality of single mothers, and to ensure that different needs are approached differentially.

The assumption that any teen mother constitutes a social problem is curiously ahistorical. Seventy, eighty, ninety years ago, most first time mothers were in their teens. It was common for young women until the early 1950's to leave school aged fourteen or fifteen, work for a couple of years, and marry and start having babies soon after they turned eighteen.

A pregnancy out of wedlock was source of immense social stigma. Such a pregnancy really had only three possible outcomes; illegal abortion, adoption, or a shot-gun marriage.

Not until after the 1974 introduction by the Commonwealth Government of the Single Mothers Pension did the collapse of (domestic) adoption occur, and the growth of single women keeping their children, though still frequently in the face of considerable social stigma.

A few years later the Widow's Pension was rolled in with the Single Parent Pension to become the Sole Parent Pension (to the great dismay of 'respectable' formerly married women, either those divorced or those de jure widows).

In 2011 many couples co-habit without benefit of a formal marriage, women retain their maiden name and children may take either or both parents' surnames. Life for a sole parent raising one or more children without a partner is still not easy.

But policy makers should not conflate the 'normal' difficulties faced by a family with a single parent, with the situation of families that are genuinely dysfunctional, for whatever reason.

Moreover, the insistent refrain that all children of single parent families are worse off if the parent is not work-force attached has consistently ignored the fact, that for many years, departmental statistics showed that most such families were welfare benefit dependant for relatively short periods of time, usually when children were preschool or primary school age.

Most of the single parent mothers were trying hard to re-enter the workforce to which many of them had been previously attached, and for which many had excellent educational qualifications and work ethics.

We have reached a point where publicly expressed social attitudes towards 'sole parents' are curiously reminiscent of the negative stereotypes of unwed mothers of the 1930's and 1940's through to the 1970's.

Much of the social policy discussions of sole parents (single mothers), is based on that stereotype. This is a completely inappropriate bundling together of entirely different groups of female parents.

There is no doubt that there exists in various parts of society, young women who do not manage their sexual relations to avoid pregnancy or STDs and who regard pregnancy as a means of escaping from school or dull work, or irritating families.

They anticipate that a baby will ensure they get 'paid' by the Government, potentially a public housing flat and an opportunity to dump the infant with another family member while they continue their lives.

It is entirely appropriate to develop strategies to assist these young people to re-engage with education and society, to learn parenting skills and to become good parents. If they come from a family with a similar persistent behaviour pattern, it is important to intervene to try to break the damaging cycle.

But the vast majority of single parents (even teenage single parents) are not similarly dysfunctional.

We should devise policies that are enabling, and most importantly, which avoid stigmatising these women.

[1]Playford (SA), Hume (Vic), Shepparton (Vic.),Burnie (Tas.),Bankstown (NSW),Wyong (NSW), Shellharbour (NSW), Rockhampton (Qld), Logan (Qld), Kwinana (WA).