Single mothers and the budget

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.