Single parents
March 1, 2017
What are the issues?
Single parents, primarily single mothers, face tremendous challenges and discrimination when it comes to:
- Public housing access – Our housing rules favour married couples, leaving single-parent families with long waits, frequent house moves, and financial drain
- Employment – Many divorced parents are women who left employment to meet care needs of their families. Returning to the job market is a challenge when employers disregard caregiving as work experience and are suspicious of single parents
- Financial stability – Many single parents find it hard to make ends meet and improve their family’s life chances, with little CPF savings and expensive legal fees
- Childcare – Finding reliable, affordable childcare is a major difficulty for single parents, but essential if they are to find and keep employment
- Social inclusion – Children of unmarried parents are stigmatised as “illegitimate” (which carries real disadvantages in terms of inheritance law and tax reliefs) and denied Baby Bonus cash gifts
What changes do we want?
- Housing policies that do not discriminate against single-parent families
- Equalisation of tax reliefs, inheritance laws and Baby Bonus cash gifts for unmarried parents
- Supportive employment opportunities for single parents who also have to manage caregiving responsibilities single-handedly
- Empathetic, judgment-free public attitudes towards single parents and their circumstances
- Improved social support available more widely for single-parent families
What are we doing about it?
- The S.H.E. Project, a research-based service that between 2018 and 2021 provided stable and decent housing, alongside transformational support programmes, for 18 low-income single-mother families. We conducted quarterly interviews with the 12 families whose stay spanned six months or longer, tracking progress in housing access, employment, family well-being and other areas. Read our 2022 report “Why Stable Housing Matters”.
- A public campaign, #asinglelove, launched in 2016. The campaign brought powerful stories of single-parent families into the public eye, at MRTs and commercial districts, and provided single parents with back-to-work support.
- In-depth study with 55 single mothers on their housing challenges. From this, we found that complicated rules that favour married couples leave single-parent families with long waits, frequent house moves, overcrowding, strained family relationships, financial drain, and stress.
- A public petition calling for concrete changes to housing policies, launched in May 2017. Changes include: increasing the $1500 income cap for rental, removing debarment periods for rental and purchase, allowing unmarried mothers to form a family nucleus with their child, coordinated service for single-parent families in HDB and clearer and more accessible housing rules. The debarment rule for purchase of subsidised housing has since been amended.
- A parliamentary petition led by MP Louis Ng, presented on 11 September 2017. The petition was sent to the Public Petitions Committee and Parliament was called to ensure that all parents with any care and control of their children are no longer subject to HDB’s debarment rule, and those with legal custody of a child are not discriminated against on the ground of their marital status.
- Regular advocacy and communications on single parents’ access to housing including eye-catching infographics, case stories of single parents, powerful videos with single mothers, and a series of comics based on real stories of single parents.
- Direct assistance for single mothers, including helping single mothers appeal for housing to MND, and conducting legal training on adoption of children for unmarried mothers