‘I’m really feeling the squeeze’: single mothers on the living costs crisis

theguardian.com:

Half of all children in lone-parent families are now living in relative poverty, according to the Institute for Fiscal Studies, whose findings are published today by the Guardian. After a decade of cuts to welfare, these families – most of them headed by women – have been left without the buffer they need to manage the impact of soaring inflation. Often ignored, and sometimes deliberately targeted by government policy, single mothers have a big role in raising raising the next generation, caring for just over 3m children in Britain today. They represent a quarter of all families with dependent children.

Here, four mothers talk about the daily challenge of feeding and caring for their children.

I’ve been a single mother since my son was born. He’s now five. We live in a house together in Kent, and I work as an NHS associate practitioner – helping to plan and facilitate discharges from hospital.

I was working in learning disabilities, and we had such a heavy drop in case load because of the pandemic they couldn’t take me on and made me redundant. That was very difficult. I was unemployed for four months and had to use food banks because universal credit payments just didn’t catch up with my income.

There was a sense of shame in it. Almost a sense that you can’t provide the very basics you should be able to for your child. I contacted Single Parent Rights and they signposted me to the benefits I was entitled to. You see in the comments all the time on social media, people saying things like: “Well don’t have children if you can’t afford them.” But life isn’t like that. Circumstances change. You can’t predict the future like that.

I still rely on universal credit despite working full-time now, and I am really feeling the squeeze.