that working class (and/or ethnic minority) families are the real target of such
interventions’ (Gillies 2005b, p. 80). Congruently, being and getting into
employment is promoted as the main route out of poverty for families, including for
lone parent families (DWP 2007). In addition, as Power (2005) and Lister (2006)
point out, participation in paid work is increasingly conceptualised as the key to full
citizenship. Paid employment thus lies at the heart of both social and economic
participation in society. The requirements of performing as a worker citizen may
often be in tension with being the effective, responsible and involved parent invoked
in the model above, not least for lone parents (Standing 1999; Horgan 2005; Power
2005). Furthermore, the gender-neutral language of ‘parents’ and ‘parenting’ in
government policy discourses has been shown by researchers to obscure the gendered
implications of much family and social policy (Featherstone 2006; Lister 2006).
Women continue to shoulder the lion’s share of responsibility for the care and
education of especially young children on a daily basis, leaving Lister to conclude that
‘insufficient attention [has been] given to the (gendered) relationships between
financial deprivation and the ability of parents to fulfil the parenting responsibilities
expected of them’ (2006, p. 327).
Working class mothers thus have to negotiate their public and private lives within a
plethora of different and often opposing discourses: government policies that advocate
an ‘adult worker’ model, family policies that cast working class families as at risk of
practising inadequate parenting, and a multitude of ‘local’ cultural, societal and
familial attitudes and expectations towards mothers and work.