1.1. Common characteristics
- The arrangement is most of the time assumed by the lone parent; - Qualification and income are often lower than average;
- The family resources and the availability of support (informal or formal) are weak or non-existing;
- The balance between work and caring is difficult to achieve. Self-care may strongly evidence this difficulty;
Cases: Italy (10); Portugal (14, 22, 27); France (16); UK (16, 18, 19); Finland (23). To begin with we should note that all the stories linked to this subtype are about women, which means that gender inequalities are to be taken into account. Especially income inequalities have strong effects here, as all the subjects of the sample are in low- paid jobs.
For all these women whose trajectories combine highly difficult starting points like a low qualification, a low-paid job, a conflict in the family, constrained mobility, etc., such a process of deep impoverishment - and slipping into situations of chronic and entrapping hardship - is practically taken for granted. The general lack of informal help limits the possibility of detours or changes of course while constituting at the same time a common invisible guiding thread. The necessary and exclusive use of the services (public or private) does constitute almost a special form of poverty trap, consuming a disproportionate part of a scant revenue. Impoverishment of social relations is much more insidious, because it is hidden and slow in its manifestations (Martin, 1996). The major sign that indicates its presence consists above all of a closed-circuit of the caregiver who progressively isolates him/herself (more out of necessity than by free choice) from the rest of the world.
What we often find, in these examples, is a spiral social impoverishment that involves various aspects of our respondents' daily lives, but that in the long term is measured above all in terms of reducing or thinning of the network of family and friends. In a number of cases, perverse mechanisms are triggered that cannot easily be reversed. Here we have a process of symbolic/social impoverishment that progressively reproduces itself. It may be triggered by such banal circumstances as old friends who do not forgo their old habits, paying fewer and fewer visits to their friend all wrapped up in his/her new task of being a mother (and who is completely alone to boot). Or, vice versa, it may be the lone parent her-/himself who, literally worn out by the burden of a double work, manages with progressively less ease and enthusiasm to conciliate the different worries and interests that separate the role as a “friend” from the role as a “lone mother”, as there is practically nothing left of “time for self”.
In this context we should once again recall that most lone parents put their children into crèches/schools, where the hours during which curricular activities are conducted, do not fit in with their working hours. There are cases where even the extra-curricular activities are not sufficient to cover the gaps in the operation of normal curricular activities. This is particularly true of the mothers who fall into the “lone lone parent” model. The combination of this constraint with the severe restrictions in the availability of informal support often places these mothers in front of the dilemma of leaving their
children on their own or of reducing their weekly time of work. Some of our respondents speak of the costs of employment and the conditioning it induces not only on them but on their children. Often, the repercussions of jobs and working hours that are incompatible with the needs and hours of the work of care may lead to a precocious “adulthood” and “responsibilisation” of the child.
1.2. National variations
Income
The national variations of income among this group of lone mothers has a major effect on their situation. The Portuguese and Italian lone mothers of this type are in low-paid jobs (except P 14). They also are less supported by the state than the others, as housing support is low and state allowances hardly compensate for child care fees. Another major factor of this economic precariousness concerns, like in the UK, the difficulty in getting any maintenance allowance from the children's fathers. This leads these Southern lone mothers to solve their problem of low income in different ways.
The first option is to claim the maintenance allowance from the ex-partner. This is somehow the most uncertain way, as the procedural fees may not be compensated by the execution of the judicial decision. In one case (P 22), even though the mother obtained the decision from court, the maintenance was never paid by the ex-husband. In two other cases (It 10, P 27), the mothers did not intend to obtain anything. Only one Portuguese lone parent (P 14), the mother with the highest income within this group of cases, benefits of a substantial financial support paid by her ex-partner, a secondary school teacher.
The second way is to work on an informal basis while receiving the unemployment benefit. This is the way chosen by a 35-year-old Portuguese woman (P 22) separated from her ex-partner after co-habiting for 10 years. She obtained nothing from the father of her child (see above) and only a low child benefit from the state. She works as a cartography technician but does not have any kind of labour contract. Her salary is low and the fact that it is moonlighting allows her to benefit from the unemployment allowance.
The third way is to work shorter hours and to ask for more support from the state. That is what an Italian lone mother (It 10) did: in her precarious and oscillating financial conditions, she had to pay almost half of her wages for services in order to work a normal schedule. As a result, she reduced her working hours and earmarked the entire help from social workers (and even integrated it) to private services. Doing so, she increased her dependence on a system of social welfare that still pays too little attention to emergent needs.
In the UK, the situation is quite different. All these mothers are supported by a large range of allowances, such as housing benefit, child allowance, working family tax credit or income support. However, these mothers are the ones who are and have been caring for a greater number of children (4 in UK 16 and 3 in UK 18 and UK 19), including also older children, pre-teenagers, teenagers and young adults. In these families, the mothers face the process of impoverishment by incurring financial debts, which is another specific way to make up for the lack of income (for the time being). This national specificity has to be linked to the high cost of living in this country, which makes it very difficult to bring up many children when being a “lone-lone” parent. Thus, the English banks seem to support and benefit from these situations involving isolated full-time workers caring for teenagers.
Besides these rough ways of life, the cases linked to the subtype lone-lone in France and Finland are more favourable. Though these lone mothers also have no informal support, they earn more money from their jobs and benefit from many formal supports (housing benefits, child benefits, maintenance allowances). A good indication of their better conditions is the fact that they manage money. The Finnish one has got shares in the local telephone company, worth about 1700 €, and the French one is the owner of her flat because she benefited from advantageous loans as a bank employee. Nonetheless, these lone mothers are not self-sufficient as they suffer a great deal psychologically from their isolation and from the fact that the fathers of their children are unreliable. Thus, both two feel that they make big sacrifices for their children.
1.3. Individual variations
In this subtype, individual variations are linked to the major difficulty of being poor and/or isolated, which sometimes provokes decisive breaks in individual trajectories.
Abandonment of children
One major trauma, linked to the variations of income we stated, is the fact that some of the lone-lone mothers of our sample have had to take heartrending decisions about the care of their children. In two cases, these mothers only care for their youngest child, while the two older ones are cared by other people.
The Italian woman (It 10), is a 42 years old unmarried mother with a 6 years old son, divorced from a former marriage with two grown-up children. She had got no help at all from her family because of many types of conflicts. She lives in the outskirts of Florence. The father has never seen nor acknowledged the baby and has no relationship with the interviewee. The care arrangement is extremely poor, almost non-existent, because the mother has experienced a deep impoverishment of the network of relationships, together with an economical one, resulting from her choice of having the child alone. Therefore she had to adapt herself to a very stressing occupation as a domiciliary aid for a disabled elderly person, after having been a disco dancer and a fortune-teller. It was possible to compress this underpaid type of job in the school hours of the child, reducing of course the income too. But the interviewee seems to have a high regard for her maternal role (‘he has nobody except me’), because she had in her past given up the custody of her first two children in order to keep the long hours jobs previously mentioned. These grown up children live in other towns and she feels very guilty to have left them.
The Portuguese lone mother (P 27) is a 34 years old cleaning woman at an airport. She has four children.She cares herself for two of them (12 and 6 respectively) but, because of her economic situation, she has had to entrust two older children to the care of an aunt and a childminder. Like the Italian mother, she feels very unhappy to have been led to this separation. Her present care arrangement also illustrates the entrapping hardship of her situation. Her weekdays are far from typical as her working hours are very irregular and include night shifts. The children are at school from 9 a.m. to 3 p.m. The school (public) does not provide lunch. The children come home for lunch, the oldest child prepares lunch, they go back to school and come home from school alone and stay alone until their mother arrives. When she works at night, she leaves the children alone at home. The day after, in the morning, they go to school alone and the oldest child prepares the meal. After lunch they return to school, and at 3 p.m. the respondent picks them up from school. She never works with a peaceful mind. She is always thinking about her children and what may happen when they are alone at home. Though she got
separated from her two previous children, she still cannot manage the care of the other two, whom she has to leave alone every day in order to ensure her low wages.
Experiences of psychotherapy
In two other cases, lone mothers felt so badly isolated that they needed to be treated by psychotherapists, which was then reimbursed by social security. In both cases, the need for a therapy occurred over 5 years after the separation from the father of the children.
Armelle (Fr 16), a 42-year-old bank employee, who has had a kind of restricted shared care arrangement after the split of the couple. She got divorced when her husband faced a business fall and had an extra-conjugal relationship. She left her town of origin and came to Rennes, where her brother lived at the time. First, she spent time at her brother's in order to evaluate the situation. The brother left to the United States after a while. Then, she decided to live alone with her two sons in a rented flat, though she did not work. She found temporary jobs, the first child went to school and the second one to a crèche. Finally, Armelle took a job as a bank employee. As her working hours were not compatible with the timetables of the formal care services, she recruited baby-sitters. The father, who lived 100 km away from Rennes, cared for the children on Wednesdays every week for five years. He was a good tennis player and taught the children his sport. However, he moved away and Armelle had to fill the children's needs alone. As the children seemed to have special abilities, she managed to negotiate a special price for tennis lessons at a club. She thinks that "it was worth overlooking (her) self-esteem". Now the children are teenagers, they play tennis every Wednesday and every weekend, and the older one is in a special school for young athletes. Armelle has got no financial help from her ex-husband and no help at all from her parents or friends. Five years ago, she had a serious nervous breakdown and had to take a therapeutic leave. Now, she is back to work in a therapeutic half-time job at her bank. She is still very vulnerable. Yet, she is planning to leave because the little flat she bought is now too small for the teenagers. This is a trouble for her. She also fears that she may need to work full-time soon. She says that she has no future in the company. She would like to quit her training for a profession which would be closer to her literary qualities. She feels her lack of qualifications is a disadvantage. She laments about the fact that it is impossible for her to have seriously qualifying continuous training without having to take long-term university courses. As her paid job is the only good thing she has, she feels entrapped in it, with no way out.
The Portuguese mother (P 22) is, as previously said, a woman who works on an informal basis and has experienced many conflicts with her ex-husband, a riding teacher, whom she got separated from ten years after the beginning of their joint life and two years after the birth of their child. She feels very stressed by all these conflicts with her ex-husband and also because her mother died recently. That is why she is going to start her psychotherapy provided by social security. Her feeling of being torn emerges when she says that there should be a service where the mothers could leave their children for short periods of time and where specialised people could help mothers to cope with the children’s psychological problems that occur due to the separation.