When poverty knocks on the door: Sharing the story of low income single mothers in Kelantan

Abstract

Single mother households are often associated with financial hardships as they have lost financial support from the spouse upon divorce. This preliminary study presents the story of hardships among 12 selected single mothers with children in Kelantan. A survey questions has been distributed and the descriptive data has been collected and analyzed with their consent. We find that demographic and socio-economic factors play important roles in the financial wellbeing of the respondents whereby the low education attainment seems to cause the respondents to have low paying jobs exacerbated by more than average number of children in the households and an absence or irregularity of child support payments from their former husband. Hence, the findings further highlight the additional burden faced by the single mothers due to unavailability child support payment for various reasons. It is important to note that the income of all of our respondents fall under the minimum wage of the country therefore they are considered poor and very poor from per capita point of view. Poverty and hardships come hand in hand therefore public assistance in the form of cash and housing arrangements have somehow reduced the burden of single mothers in this study. Consequently, we believe that this brief study has invoke more questions that warrant further studies on many topics involving single mother households such as child support, child poverty and financial and economic wellbeing of single mothers households in Malaysia. So where do we start?