I am a single mother by choice. Why am I hit with a ‘solo parent’ penalty?

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Georgie Dent’s National Press Club address this week helped move an important conversation about families forward. One observation from Dent, the chief executive of advocacy body The Parenthood, has stayed with me: our workplaces, schools and broader economy can still operate as though there is a “spare adult” somewhere in the family, ready to absorb the gaps.

I am a single mother by choice. There is no spare adult. Yet economically, partnership still offers protections one-adult families do not have.

I have a seven-year-old son I adore, a career, family and friends around us, and a life that feels full. We increasingly say marriage is not a prerequisite for a complete life. Economically, however, pooling income, care, housing costs and risk with another adult remains a powerful advantage.

Dent’s broader argument is that raising children reaches into workforce participation, productivity, housing and Australia’s falling birth rate. We understand part of this through the “motherhood penalty”: the fall in women’s earnings after they have children. But there is another layer when the mother experiencing that penalty is also the only economic adult in the household. Call it a solo-parent penalty.

It is not simply the absence of a second income. It is the concentration of income, care and financial risk in one person. A sick child. A school call. An appointment during working hours. Twelve weeks of school holidays against four weeks of annual leave, to which Dent put a number: two full-time working parents with primary-school-aged children face an estimated 814-hour annual gap between school hours and working hours. That is difficult enough in a two-parent household. For a single parent working full-time, there is no other parent with whom to divide those hours.

On Thursday my son was home, sick, from school. He shared my desk, climbed onto my lap and made occasional cameos in Teams calls.

I am fortunate. I can work from home when he needs me, and I have a boss who understands parenting. But the care still has to be provided and the work still has to be done. Sometimes the same person has to do both at once.

Housing makes the economics harder to ignore. A single-income family can be stable and financially responsible. But if I take a less demanding job because my son needs more of me, there is no second salary in the background. If I want to buy a home near the family and friends who help make our life possible, one income has to carry the debt.

Australia had about 1.2 million one-parent families in June 2025. Among one-parent families with dependants, 71 per cent of single mothers were employed. These are not families sitting outside the economy. They are working, caring and contributing within it.

Of course, a partner does not guarantee shared care, financial security or an equitable division of labour. Nor do I think every additional cost faced by a one-adult household can, or should, be solved by government.

I earn a good salary and have choices many others do not. I chose single motherhood knowingly and wholeheartedly. But freely making a choice does not mean its structural consequences should escape scrutiny. Some things are simply easier and cheaper when two adults can share them. That fact should sharpen the policy conversation, not end it.

When we assess whether a family is financially secure, income tells us only part of the story. It does not tell us who provides the care, who leaves work when the school calls, or who absorbs the shock when nobody else is available.

We have spent decades expanding the choices available to women: to work, own property, leave relationships, not marry and, increasingly, become mothers without partners. That is real progress. The next question is whether the systems surrounding those choices have evolved at the same pace.

Freedom is not only about being able to choose a life. It is also about whether the world around you has made room for that choice.

Katherine Danks is a public affairs adviser and a solo mum by choice.

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