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The segment of the ICME-13 Opening Ceremony that was dedicated to the ICMI Awards was presided over by Carolyn Kieran, Chair of the Felix Klein and Hans Freudenthal Awards Committee, and by Jeremy Kilpatrick, Chair of the Emma Castelnuovo Award Committee.

The purpose of this book is to approach lone parenthood from a life course perspective. Its chapters address the interdependence of multiple life domains across individuals and between individuals and institutions, as well as the relevance of individual agency and historical context. This introduction describes the phenomenon of lone parenthood across Europe through an account of the changes in prevalence and duration of lone parenthood across cohorts and contexts. Secondly, without any pretention to be an exhaustive review of the literature, it presents an overview of the main topic debated in the literature on the causes and consequences of lone parenthood. Third, it portrays the position of lone parenthood within various forms of social and family policies. It ends with an overview of the chapters included in the volume, highlighting their specific contribution.

The growth of lone parent families has been one of the most striking changes in family forms in European countries over the last 50 years. Although it is now well documented that children are significantly more likely to be poor if they live with only one parent, few analyses examine the changes in lone parent profiles and therefore the challenges of the change in lone parenthood regime for both social research and social policies. This paper compares the prevalence and characteristics of lone parents in Europe with a specific focus on France. The paper explores how lone parents concur to the diversity and complexity of family forms. It also explores how their development and changing patterns tackle not only the concepts used to define lone parent families but also the concepts of parenthood and parental responsibilities. Social policies are also questioned by the poverty and deprivation risks incurred by children living with a lone parent and the policies’ ability to reduce this poverty.

Lone parents have historically been depicted in the UK press as a homogenous mass, criticized for their economic dependence on the State and for their less than perfect parenting. This chapter seeks to unpick this simplistic stereotype using an intersectional lens to discover the actual identity of the individuals subject to such scrutiny. The discourse analysis has focused on articles from newspapers from both ends of the political spectrum to minimize bias. In addition, articles have been selected from two years, 20 years apart, in order to discover if there have been any temporal changes to this discourse. The results of the analysis indicate firstly, that the discourse has changed little over time and secondly, that there are more similarities between the discourses of the two newspapers than expected.

In 2014 in the UK, there were two million one-parent families. Women accounted for 91% of lone parents with dependent children (ONS 2015); the rates have only marginally changed since 2001. Two per cent are young parent families.

The country has over 18 million families (18.6m) with dependent children (ONS 2015) and it is estimated that one child in four (24%) is raised in a lone-parent family.

In an initial qualitative study carried out between 2001 and 2005 in England and Scotland through semi-structured in-depth interviews, a hundred young lone mothers were consulted on the circumstances of their pregnancy and their daily lives; what it is like emotionally and practically to be a young parent managing without assistance from the father and/or the family.

It appeared that for some, the relationship with the child’s father had ended even before the young woman knew she was pregnant, or the break-up occurred in the first weeks or months of her pregnancy; some others had already made up their minds not to pursue the relationship with the partner or even that the relationship was no longer an option due to the biological father’s substance abuse, previous or current convictions, or even abusive behaviour, putting the mother and child at potential risk.

In an ongoing follow-up survey of which the first phase was held from early September 2013 to November 2014 in England, more young mothers or pregnant young mothers being interviewed appear to be living under the same roof with the father of their child, or with another man who has become a ‘stand-in father’ to the child. Some have an on-and-off relationship, either with the father or with someone new, whilst some prefer, or have no other option, than to bring up the child on their own.

The paper will give the latest official figures on young parenthood in Great Britain, and data on the samples of both qualitative studies carried out by the re-searcher. It will then look at how young lone parents fare financially, and cope emotionally and socially. Other than attending a young parents’ group session in a children’s centre once a week, where they have the opportunity to meet peers and share their experiences, worries, hopes and fears and can be given advice, help and support, many have no other support network available to them. The chapter will address the concerns they voice.

The identification of lone-parent households is a challenging task in an era of new family forms and related changes in the legislation regulating parental care and financial responsibilities. Official statistics hardly reflect the composite reality of households between which children circulate and in which relationships with biological and non-biological parents change during the life course. On the basis of an explorative qualitative study in Switzerland, we focus on the blurry boundaries used to define the transition to lone parenthood. We analyse the life course of individuals whose entry into the lone-parent state fits one of these patterns: (a) becoming a lone parent despite beginning parenthood within a couple (separation, divorce, or widowhood); (b) becoming a lone parent coinciding with becoming a parent (contraceptive failure, partner refusal of parenthood, or lone parenthood as a life choice). We explore the way in which individuals describe their transition to lone parenthood and to which extent they identify themselves as lone parents. We conclude that such transitions are often non-linear processes and are often characterized by much ambivalence. They involve an array of heterogeneous and multidirectional transitions that are not always captured by current surveys, and we suggest how we could improve future measurements of the timing and occurrence of lone parenthood.

Lone mothers have often been described from a deficit perspective as women who lack a partner, an additional income provider, and a co-parent. Newer research has focused more on the agency and coping competencies of lone mothers, showing that most deal with their lone motherhood quite well, receiving support from family and friends. However, we still know little about the actual networks of personal relations lone mothers are embedded in: What is the structure and composition of these networks, and how is social network integration related to individual well-being? To address these questions, in this research we a) focus on an especially vulnerable group of lone parents, i.e., single mothers who are long-term unemployed; and b) use a mixed-methods design in order to analyze systematically their network structures, and to perform an in-depth investigation of how their social contacts relate to their well-being. We conducted qualitative problem-centered interviews and collected structured network data on a sample of 26 unemployed lone mothers from eastern Germany. The interview data were analyzed using the strategy of qualitative content analysis, while the social network data were studied by means of social network analysis. The results from both analyses were brought together to develop a network typology. Our findings show that even mothers in the vulnerable group of women who had no partner and were unemployed could not be described as fully socially isolated. The variation in the extent of their social contacts was, however, large, ranging from women with large and heterogeneous networks that provided them with considerable support and contributed substantially to their well-being, to women with very small networks who had little access to support and a very challenging living situation. A typology of networks distinguished between four network types according to their composition: networks dominated by the family of origin, networks centered on a conjugal relationship, extended networks, and restricted networks. These networks had interesting associations with well-being: first, the network composition was not only a precondition for the provision of support, but was also a consequence of the strains the respondents were under; second, the social network types identified fostered well-being to differing degrees. In terms of the structural features, we find that networks that included the woman’s own or her partner’s mother and/or sisters, and heterogeneous relations, were associated with well-being; as were networks of large or medium size and of high multiplexity. However, purely relying on these structural features is not sufficient. Not the pure existence of supportive network matters, but also their meaning to the respondent: only if the ties are not perceived as conflictual and if the support provided is evaluated as adequate, these ties can foster well-being.

Compared to non-migrant mothers in couples, migrant lone mothers face a much higher risk of being out of the labour market, given that both lone motherhood and international migration have been shown to be strongly related to non-employment. In this chapter, we analyse the labour force participation of immigrant women and non-migrants living in Switzerland, and compare them by distinguishing between mothers in couples and lone mothers. We use data from the Swiss Labour Force Survey (wave 2008; N = 6814). These data allow us to account for intra-group variation among the immigrants by distinguishing them by their migrant generation and their country of origin. The analyses include women aged 20–54 who were living with at least one child under age 18. The dependent variable in the multinomial regression analyses is employment status, differentiating between full-time employment, long and short part-time employment, and non-employment. Results indicate that lone motherhood prevalence is similar among migrant and Swiss mothers (11%). In both groups, lone mothers are less likely to be in employment than mothers in couples. However, we find variation among lone mothers by migrant status: migrants have a higher non-employment rate overall. Among the employed women, migrant lone mothers tend to work full time, whereas non-migrant lone mothers tend to work part time. For lone mothers being an international migrant is therefore associated with an increased risk not only of being out of the labour force, but also of facing difficulties linked to work-family reconciliation. These results are relevant for the design of appropriate policies for migrants, lone parents, and work-family reconciliation, particularly in a societal context like Switzerland, where child care services are insufficient and the number of mothers who work full time is relatively small.

Over the last 10 years at-risk-of-poverty rates across Europe have been rather stable or rising only slightly. However, certain demographic groups face comparatively high poverty risks. Lone mothers belong usually to the most affected groups by income poverty – but variations are striking. Though, still little research has been done for explaining this vast variation across Europe. It is argued that institutional arrangements in the labor market and the welfare state shaped by existing gender inequalities have an impact on lone mothers’ poverty risks. For instance, in countries where women’s access to (full time) paid work is low and/or the gender pay gap is high, lone mothers are particularly disadvantaged due to the absent (male) partner. Furthermore, the lack of public childcare and a gendered eligibility to social benefits aggravate lone mothers’ poverty risk. I also hypothesize that gendered institutional arrangements mediate the effect of individual characteristics on lone mothers’ poverty risks – namely the poverty-reducing effect of employment and the poverty-enhancing effect of children. To prove these hypotheses empirically, I compare 25 European countries running several multi-level models based on pooled EU-SILC data (2009–2012). Results show that existing gender inequalities – particularly the access to full time employment for women and gender-specific welfare eligibility – indeed account for country differences in the level of lone mothers’ poverty risk. Furthermore, there is empirical evidence that gender inequalities in the labor market shape the poverty-reducing effect of full time employment. Other specific mechanisms modeled in form of cross-level interactions cannot be supported by the data.

Lone parents, and lone mothers in particular, are a vulnerable group in our society. Divorce is undoubtedly one of the main forces in these processes as most lone parents have been divorced rather than seen their partner decease. This paper uses register data to look at post-divorce trajectories of parents after divorce. First, we describe the demographic evolution of lone parents in Flanders. We give insights in the number and composition of lone parent families after divorce and compare them with other family trajectories after marital breakup. Next, we look at income trajectories after the break-up taking post-breakup relationship histories and labour market trajectories into account.