The Stories We Tell Become the Policies We Fund

Every society tells stories about who deserves investment. Those stories shape public opinion and influence political debate; eventually, many become public policy. Long before governments allocate dollars, they allocate deservingness. The stories we tell become the policies we fund.

Few stories have been more enduring — or more damaging — than the stories the U.S. tells about single mothers. For decades, single mothers have been portrayed not as workers, caregivers, taxpayers, and builders of the nation’s future but as symbols of personal failure. We have told these stories so often that they have come to feel like common sense rather than ideology. And because we have accepted these stories as truth, we have built a policy system that underinvests in the very people who contribute to our country and are raising millions of America’s children.

The dominant American stories about single mothers are not simply that they are raising children alone. The stories share a common thread: These mothers are alone because they have failed. In this telling, single motherhood is the predictable consequence of their poor decisions: choosing the wrong partner, failing to complete their education, or avoiding work. The circumstances surrounding a family’s formation are typically excluded from these narratives; instead, the stories are about morality, in which individual choices explain family outcomes. The message is clear: Single mothers are where they are because they made bad decisions, and, as a result of their actions, children suffer and communities fall into decay.

Like all powerful cultural narratives, these stories have been repeated so often that they no longer feel like stories at all. Over time, what began as a set of stereotypes hardened into assumptions, and assumptions became public philosophy. Once that happened, policymakers no longer ask, “What do families need to thrive?” but instead question, “How much support do people who made poor choices deserve?” That shift from understanding single motherhood as a structural reality to treating it as a personal failure has shaped family policy for decades.

The first step in telling a different story is recognizing that there is no such thing as THE single mother; there are many journeys to single motherhood. The category encompasses women whose lives, resources, and paths to parenthood are remarkably diverse. They include women who are divorced, widowed, escaping domestic violence, caring for children while partners are incarcerated or deployed, women whose relationships ended, and women who intentionally chose to build families on their own. To speak of “the single mother” as though she represents one kind of woman with one life story is itself part of the problem.

Single mothers are not a monolith. They include women who chose this path on purpose and women who didn’t. Over half have never married. Most have finished high school. A third hold a bachelor’s degree or higher. They are not undereducated stereotypes. They are workers, students, and graduates raising children alone.

Policymakers no longer ask, “What do families need to thrive?” but instead question, “How much support do people who made poor choices deserve?”

Three Core Myths

As to their economic engagement, the public narrative thrives on three core myths.

Myth #1: Single mothers don’t work.

Perhaps the most persistent misconception is that single mothers are economically disengaged. The opposite is true. In 2025, unmarried mothers participated in the labor force at a higher rate than married mothers, 78.1% compared with 72.1%, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. Single mothers are not absent from the workforce; they are among its most active participants. They are working while carrying the responsibilities of caregiving, often without another adult to share the demands of child care, transportation, illness, or the countless interruptions that accompany raising children.

Myth #2: Single mothers are poor because they don’t earn.

We must ask: If single mothers work at such high rates, why doesn’t it show in their income? The answer lies less in their effort than in structural inequality. Gendered economic disparity is more pronounced for single mothers. The U.S. Census Bureau reports that women working full-time year-round earned just 81 cents for every dollar earned by men in 2024, down from 83 cents in 2023. The gap widened for the second year in a row. That disadvantage compounds when one adult must provide both income and care. The costs of child care, housing, health care, and transportation that may hurt a two-person income can severely overwhelm that of one person. The result is not evidence of personal failure but of an economy designed to overlook a third of the parenting population.

Myth #3: Single mothers are dependent on government.

The stereotype of dependency also collapses under scrutiny. Single mothers contribute to the economy not only as employees but also as entrepreneurs. They launch businesses, create jobs, generate tax revenue, and sustain local economies. Research from GoDaddy’s Venture Forward initiative shows that single mothers own a substantial share of America’s women-owned microbusinesses, demonstrating both economic ambition and resilience despite structural barriers.

False stories rarely remain confined to public opinion. They become embedded in institutions.

When False Stories Become Public Policy

If policymakers accept the premise that single motherhood reflects individual failure rather than structural reality, public investment begins to look like an undeserved reward rather than sound economic policy. Child care becomes assistance instead of workforce infrastructure. Housing becomes charity instead of economic stability. Paid family leave becomes generosity instead of labor policy.

If policymakers believe poverty reflects bad choices, welfare becomes a mechanism for discipline rather than investment. That assumption has already reshaped government cash assistance. In the 1980s, Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC) and its associated programs provided a family stipend, educational benefit, transportation, and housing. However, President Clinton took office in early 1993, having run on the promise to change “welfare as we know it.” The policy that lifted so many out of poverty became focused on “personal responsibility,” and those social and economic supports were removed or reduced. Signed in 1996, the resulting bill became known as the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act, and welfare became Temporary Assistance for Needy Families.

If caregiving is viewed as a private responsibility rather than a public good, affordable child care becomes optional instead of essential. Child care costs have risen roughly 210% over the past three decades, nearly three times overall inflation, according to the White House Council of Economic Advisers. Yet, real public investment has not kept pace. The National Institute for Early Education Research shows that state pre-K spending per child, adjusted for inflation, is essentially unchanged in 20 years: $6,532 per child in 2001–02 and $6,571 in 2021–22. Costs climbed. Investment stood still.

If housing is treated as an individual achievement rather than a foundation for family stability, the doors close earliest for those with the least room to wait. The National Association of Realtors reports that first-time buyers made up just 21% of home purchasers in 2025, a record low, down from roughly 40% before the 2008 housing crisis. The median age of a first-time buyer has climbed to 40, up from the late 20s a generation ago. Homeownership has not just gotten harder. It has been pushed later — and further out of reach — for exactly the families who most need the stability it provides.

Deregulation also opened the floodgates for private investment firms, and many have flocked to utility conglomerates, drawn by the promise of guaranteed returns. But once vested,The consequences of these policies are often described in the aggregate: poverty rates, labor-force participation, child care costs. But policies are lived one family at a time. To see why the current framework fails, let’s consider two single mothers.

One works the front desk at a hotel. She qualifies for child care assistance and other government supports, and her work schedule often changes with little notice. A shift is added the night before. A child gets sick. A child care provider closes unexpectedly. The problem is not simply low wages. It is that the systems designed to support working families assume predictability in a life defined by unpredictability. She can qualify for every available benefit and still lose her job because the infrastructure around her cannot absorb the realities of parenting.

The other is a vice president at a large company. She earns too much to qualify for public assistance, so policy assumes she no longer needs support. Yet, she is still the only parent available when school closes unexpectedly and she has a big presentation in front of the board. She still has to make it work even when her child wakes up with a fever, and despite a long day at work, sometimes her boss’s call collides with the limited time she can spend with her child. She purchases what flexibility she can through paid child care, after-school programs, and emergency caregivers, but time remains the one resource she cannot buy. Her challenge is not income; it’s system design. It is the expectation that leadership can be performed as though caregiving responsibilities belong to someone else.

These women occupy different places in the economy, but they confront the same policy assumption: Somewhere, there is another adult. Family policy, workplace policy, school schedules, transportation systems, and even cultural expectations continue to assume that caregiving responsibilities will be divided between two people. Single mothers, regardless of income, are expected to perform both roles simultaneously. One lacks financial resources. The other lacks institutional flexibility. Both are navigating systems designed for families that look different from their own.

The question, then, is not whether America should do more for single mothers. That question is too small. The real question is this: What would public policy look like if we recognized caregiving as essential infrastructure?

What would public policy look like if we recognized caregiving as essential infrastructure?

Our Investments Reflect Our Values

We readily invest in roads, bridges, ports, airports, and broadband because they make economic life possible. We understand that businesses cannot function without physical infrastructure. Yet, the economy also depends on another kind of infrastructure: the daily work of raising children, caring for families, and sustaining communities. Caregiving makes every other form of productivity possible, but unlike roads or bridges, it remains largely invisible in public investment.

Viewed through this lens, affordable child care is not a welfare benefit: It is workforce infrastructure. Paid family leave is not a luxury. It is labor policy. Reliable public transportation is not merely a mobility issue. It is access to employment. Affordable housing is not merely shelter. It is educational stability, workforce retention, and community health. Tax policy should recognize caregiving not as private consumption but as productive labor that yields long-term public returns.

Every budget reflects a story about what a nation values. For too long, America has treated investment in single mothers as charity extended to people who failed, rather than as an investment in the workers, caregivers, entrepreneurs, and parents raising a significant share of the nation’s next generation. If we continue to tell that story, we will continue to fund those assumptions. But if we tell a different story, one grounded in evidence rather than stereotypes, we can build policies that recognize caregiving for what it truly is: one of the most valuable forms of work any society depends upon.

The stories we tell become the policies we fund. If we want different policies, we must begin by telling different stories.

It is often said that budgets are moral documents. They tell us whose labor we value, whose futures we are willing to finance, and whose burdens we expect them to carry alone. For decades, America has celebrated motherhood in speeches while asking millions of single mothers to shoulder the work of raising children with insufficient public support. That contradiction is not accidental. It is the predictable outcome of the stories we have chosen to believe.

Policy change begins long before legislation is written. It begins when we decide that the stories we’ve inherited are not true. It begins when we recognize single mothers not as exceptions to successful families but as workers, caregivers, entrepreneurs, taxpayers, neighbors, and citizens whose success is inseparable from the nation’s own. When we invest in single mothers, we are not rescuing individuals. We are investing in children, communities, and our collective well-being. We are investing in America’s future.

Dr. Janice Johnson Dias Associate Professor of Sociology and graduate faculty in criminal justice at John Jay College, centers her research on mothers and children experiencing poverty. Learn more at thedrjanice.com.

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When you design policies and structures that actually work for a single mom navigating child care, employment, and college simultaneously, you’ve built systems that work for everyone.

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