Maybe it’s a next-door neighbor who sets the alarm at dawn to take care of the house before the kids wake up? A friend from the office who sneaks away discreetly at night and never talks about her private life? A friend we no longer know how to invite to “couple dinners”? Maybe it’s you, that single mother who sometimes feels lonely or overwhelmed? The journalist’s investigation into Release Johanna Luyssen gives a face and a sense of belonging to the more than 1.5 million women who raise their children alone.
First of all, it is a striking portrait. One in four families is single-parent in France and 82% of these single parents are mothers. For them, precariousness is sometimes a threat, often a reality: as Johanna Luyssen writes, 22% of children in single-parent families with their father were poor in 2018 (a proportion close to the average), compared to 45% of children in single-parent families with their mother.
Chapter by chapter, the author lists the difficulties these women face in their daily lives. Of course, there is housing. Johanna Luyssen, a single mother, says that after two years of waiting for social housing in Paris, a counselor explained to her that according to social housing regulations, a single father and one child get a two-room apartment, a single father and two children a three-room apartment, etc. In other words, “You are ordered to sleep in the living room”Then there are the issues of employment and professional life (67% of single mothers work, compared to 81% of fathers in the same situation), childcare and physical and mental health. The picture is overwhelming.
Unpaid child support
This is undoubtedly why, in the second part of the book, Johanna Luyssen tries to give reasons for hope: ways to affordable housing, for example community housing initiatives; ways to convince her company to finance childcare at a lower cost… However, most of the actions that could transform the lives of these women rely on political will and reforms that are not available today.
The most revealing example is that of alimony: in 2019, non-payments rose to 40%. The objective of the public body responsible for collecting them is to reduce this rate to 21% by 2027. That is still one in five unpaid debts…
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