Sole parents in poverty: it’s time to update the policy paradigm

Abstract

In 2013 there were 201,804 sole-parent families in New Zealand – 84.2% were female-headed, six in ten with a youngest child aged under 15 – compared to around 469,290 two-parent families (Statistics New Zealand, 2014a). Around 90% of sole-parent families had a level of equivalised disposable income below the overall median in 2013, compared with 50% of two-parent families (Perry, 2014).