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Are children from single-parent families living in poverty?

Government policy
One of the new proposed indicators of child poverty is whether the young person lives in a single parent family. However, psychologist Karen Sullivan says the issue is not as simple as that.

So the UK is changing the way it is going to measure child poverty. A consultation has been launched on a new range of potential indicators, including family stability, worklessness and quality of schooling (read SecEd’s report here).

Among the poverty measures proposed by work and pensions secretary Iain Duncan Smith is a focus on family breakdown and those children living in lone parent families. Let’s put this into perspective. In 2007 Unicef published a table of 21 economically advanced countries, with 40 indicators that might affect the wellbeing of children, including poverty, family relationships, health and safety, education and children’s own sense of happiness. At the bottom of the table was the UK, suggesting that children here are the unhappiest in the industrialised world.

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