The “single-parent family” card must make it possible to “respond to the cumulative difficulties” of these families, argues Senator Colombe Brossel

Invited on Thursday on franceinfo, socialist senator Colombe Brossel calls for “recognition” of single-parent families.

“This would be the way to respond to the accumulation of difficulties which are characteristic of single-parent families in our country”, pleaded, Thursday March 28, on franceinfo Colombe Brossel, senator from Paris, member of the socialist, environmentalist and republican group, and member of the delegation for women’s rights and equal opportunities between men and women. The Senate women’s rights delegation proposes in a report to test a card of “single parent family” opening up to advantages, even preferential rates, in order to better support and accompany parents “solo”.

“Today, one in four families” is a single-parent family, recalls Colombe Brossel, one of the two senators, with Béatrice Gosselin, to have written this report. “It’s really a normality in our country. But they have the particularity of being in a more precarious or precarious situation.” Colombe Brossel calls for “recognize” these families, because the two senators noted that “the word stigmatization” was the one they had “the most heard in all the auditions”. A single-parent family card, “like the large family card, it is the first step in recognizing the existence of single-parent families”.

“An accumulation of inequalities”

But it is also the way “to see rights attached to it or to be able to benefit from services which would be useful to single-parent families”. Colombe Brossel takes the example of companies that would like to “to be able to propose doubling the number of days of leave for sick children for their employees”. With this new card, this would allow the employer, according to the senator, to “to be able to implement this type of progress”.

“Being a single parent, and eight times out of ten a single mother, means having a combination of inequalities: the price of mutual insurance is too high, access to the school canteen, to leisure centers”, underlines the senator from Paris. “We could, with this card, be entitled to preferential rates or privileged or reinforced access to public policies“, explains Colombe Brossel.

During their work, the two senators realized that “single-parent families were really the blind spot of public policies.” “The only public discourse that existed on single-parent families was often very stigmatizing”, notes Colombe Brossel. But she has “good hope” that the report “contributes to the emergence of a new public policy, new rights, and a more ambitious policy to fight against inequalities, and especially the accumulation of inequalities and the difficulties which are not sufficiently taken into account today in our country” .