The Challenge

Lone parents face complex and interrelated challenges. Our position as a trusted, independent organisation, working on behalf of lone parents, and our role in developing innovative projects, ensures that our services are valued by lone parents.

One Parent Families Scotland already plays an enormous part in enhancing the lives of parents and children, but it needs to do even more – the special challenges it deals with are still there and increasing.

Lone Parents play a vital role in Scottish society as parents, carers and contributors to their local community. That so many feel outside the mainstream of economic and social activity, means that Scotland misses out on the potential contribution of citizens who bring valuable insights and experiences.

Some parents will choose to stay at home and look after their children during their vital childhood years or during a period of family change. That is a positive choice and we should support them in that choice.
Equally, when they want to take up new skills or enter the workplace, parents should be encouraged and supported to do so.

In addressing the obstacles faced by lone parents, we should recognise their diversity. Some will have had their children, before they were able to take up training, education or employment. Others will have already been in paid work all their adult lives or they may have spent recent years doing unpaid work in the home. Most are separated after living with a married or unmarried partner, divorced or widowed.

Lone Parents, however, do share the same constraint - that there is only one potential "breadwinner" and one carer to share the load of family responsibilities. The majority are women, averaging 36 years of age, and who therefore face the inequality and disadvantages many women face in the workplace.

These disadvantages are important in creating risk factors which make lone parents vulnerable to poverty triggered by certain life events or transitions – separation; divorce; pregnancy; ill health; homelessness; into/out of employment.

Key Issues

OPFS has identified several key issues which create obstacles to lone parents planning to move on:

• childcare availability, flexibility & cost;
• the benefits trap;
• low skills & education levels;
• low paid, temporary and inflexible employment;
• poor housing;
• isolation & lack of social networks;
• low self confidence and ill health.