Putting Single Moms at The Center of Economic Policy

As the economy shifts, single mothers are being left behind, family advocates warn. At a recent panel on economic mobility, two New York family advocates urged politicians to adopt policies that lift single mothers out of poverty by expanding access to child care, workforce training and affordable housing.

Despite many single mothers qualifying for the Child Tax Credit, it is not enough for these parents to obtain affordable child care and provide enough food for their children, according to Chastity Lord, president and chief executive officer of the nonprofit Jeremiah Program, and Elanie Waxman, senior fellow at the Urban Institute, a think tank.

At a recent panel discussion on the economic mobility of single mothers, Lord said policymakers need to focus on what she calls the gender tax, or the price disparity of goods and services on females. 

“When we think about gender tax, that means that women will get the flu, and single moms are going to get pneumonia,” Lord said.

Recognizing and acknowledging that the stigma around single mothers is a problem, Lord said she is on a mission to change it. The gender tax plays a part in feeding the narrative of the single-mother household, she added.

“When you talk about the number of single moms that find themselves in low-range jobs, it’s not because they have bad resumes, and it’s not because they are not aspirational,” she said.

Waxman, one of the authors of the report Policy Levers to Support Single-Mother Economic Mobility, explained that the term  “single mother” comes in many variations. 

“The first thing I’ll say is that single moms might live alone with their children, they might have a partner, they might live in an extended family, or they might live in a multi-generation family,” she said.

She added that the children experience different kinds of families within their lives. 

“[The children] might have experienced married or upward families, they might have experienced divorce, they might have step-siblings. This is the reality of our world, so that a single mother can appear in a lot of different contexts,” Waxman said.

She also highlighted the fact that 37% of single mothers are white; a fact, however, that “is not the image we’re being sold,” Waxman said. 

“Back in 1995, when the country was on the brink of Welfare Reform, the New Republic put out a shocking magazine cover. An unflattering picture of a Black mother smoking a cigarette while sitting with a child, who was lighter than the mother, with a headline that read, ‘Day of Reckoning Past Welfare Reform.’ It played every trope we can think of,” she said.

When public policy is created through the lens of single moms, gender, and economic mobility, everyone succeeds, the advocates agreed. 

“When women win, single moms win, and our communities win,” Lord said.