Children of Single Parents: In the Poverty Trap

Almost half of all children of single parents in Germany experience poverty. This means that they and the parent with whom the roughly one million girls and boys affected live have to make do - for a certain time or permanently - with an income below the at-risk-of-poverty threshold. The financial plight of many single parents, 90% of whom are women, has several causes: structural negligence on the part of the legal system, too few all-day childcare places, discrimination on the labour market and, last but not least, a lack of maintenance payments by the ex-partner. "The social law framework does not adequately support single parents," says Dr. Eva Maria Hohnerlein, a researcher at the Max Planck Institute for Social Law and Social Policy.

Press Release (German)