Across Latin America and the Caribbean there is a growing consensus that “single mother” households are at disadvantage, yet systematic evidence on their conditions has been missing. How prevalent are these households? How have they changed in recent years? How do they fare in terms of work and wellbeing? Who supports these homes and how? We have set out to answer these questions on a new comprehensive study for the region. In this blog post we share three key facts from our findings and some suggestions for the design of effective policies.
Fact 1: Lone-mother households in Latin America and the Caribbean are on the rise. A quiet demographic shift is reshaping family life in the region. Over the past fifteen years, the share of households with children where the mother is the only adult (i.e. lone mother households) has grown from 7% to nearly 10%. Today, close to one in ten children in the region is growing up in a lone-mother household — a 46% increase in just one and a half decades.
This regional average varies across countries, from 5.3% in Honduras to 14.1% in the Dominican Republic. Behind these statistics are millions of women raising children largely on their own, navigating challenging labor markets, poverty, and inadequate social support with remarkable resilience.
Fact 2: Poverty hits lone mothers and their children hard. Lone-mother households face a poverty rate of 45.5% compared to a regional average of 26.8%. In Brazil, Colombia, Honduras, and Peru over half of lone-mother households are poor. This is not simply because lone mothers earn less; it is because they face a combination of disadvantages that public policy has so far failed to adequately address.
Fact 3: Lone mothers work hard, but the quality of their jobs is below par, so they need to compensate with other income sources. Women are not disengaged from the labor markets, quite the opposite. More than four in five lone mothers participate in the labor force, compared to about three in five women who count on other adults at home to raise children. The problem, nonetheless, is about the quality of the jobs that lone mothers hold.
Without access to quality childcare, lone mothers often cannot take on better-paying formal employment, which regularly requires full-time commitments and extra hours. They are 10% more likely than women who raise children with other adults to work in the informal economy, in jobs that offer low wages, no benefits, and no job security. More than one in four lone mothers are “working poor”, meaning they have a job but still cannot make ends meet.
Lone mothers are essentially on their own, and far more dependent on transfers. On average, nearly 60% of household income comes from the lone mother’s labor earnings. The other 40% comes from private transfers — from non-resident fathers, relatives, and others — and public assistance (the latter actually contributes only 7%). By contrast, in households where women raise children with other adults, nearly 80% of household income comes from jobs.
read more: https://blogs.worldbank.org/en/latinamerica/raising-childrena-alone-latin-america-caribbean
