For too long, the United States has treated poverty as a problem to manage rather than a system to redesign. We have built programs to help children succeed while often overlooking the structural barriers the adults raising them must face. For single mothers, those barriers are not incidental. They shape whether a family can remain housed, nourished, healthy, educated, and economically secure.
Single motherhood is also not a niche issue. In 2023, there were 9.8 million one-parent households with children under 18 in the United States; of those, 7.3 million were mother-only households. When public systems fail single mothers, they fail millions of children and the communities that depend on their stability.
We have built programs to help children succeed while often overlooking the structural barriers the adults raising them must face.
At Jeremiah Program, we work from a simple but often neglected premise: when moms win, families win—and, yes, communities also win. As a sector, we can advance public policy that creates the conditions that make economic mobility possible for families and champion their progress. Economic mobility is more than a question of income. It is central to sustaining the health and wellbeing of families.
The Cost of Survival Has Become a Barrier to Mobility
Too often, conversations about economic mobility focus on individual milestones: a degree earned, a job secured, a promotion achieved. Those milestones matter, but they do not capture the structural barriers on the path to achieving these outcomes.
A mother cannot stay in school if she cannot afford childcare. She cannot maintain employment if one emergency destabilizes her housing. She cannot build wealth if every small income gain then results in the sudden loss of foundational support for food, healthcare, or childcare.
Challenges accessing childcare, for example, reveal the scale of the problem. According to Child Care Aware of America, the national average cost of childcare takes away 35 percent of the median income for a single parent. That is five times greater than the federal affordability benchmark of 7 percent. This means the very service that would allow a single mother to work or attend school is often priced far beyond her reach and is inaccessible for most low-income families.
These statistics illustrate why economic mobility must be addressed from a holistic lens that takes in consideration the entire family and the structural barriers they will likely encounter. Childcare, housing, nutrition, healthcare, education, and community networks are not peripheral supports. They are the conditions that make economic advancement possible.
Policy Can Create Progress or Erase It Overnight
The rollback of pandemic-era family support offered a clear lesson: temporary relief instead of long-term infrastructure destabilizes progress.
The expanded Child Tax Credit helped drive child poverty to a historic low in 2021. After the expansion expired, the child poverty rate more than doubled in 2022. For families already struggling to fulfill their basic needs, that was not an abstract policy shift; it was felt in their day-to-day realities. It meant fewer groceries, delayed bills, and less room to cover emergencies.
Other supports disappeared or narrowed at the same time. SNAP emergency allotments ended after February 2023, reducing food assistance for millions of households. After pandemic protections that had allowed for continuous enrollment in Medicaid/CHIP expired, more than 25 million people were disenrolled in 12 states during the “unwinding” period. Among those disenrolled, 69 percent were terminated for paperwork or procedural reasons rather than sheer ineligibility.
The expanded Child Tax Credit helped drive child poverty to a historic low in 2021. After the expansion expired, the child poverty rate more than doubled in 2022.
For single mothers, these shifts in pandemic support created compounding challenges. As a country, we’ve already demonstrated that we can make continuous enrollment work. Yet, being disenrolled from Medicaid/CHIP for missing unnecessary paperwork can now upend financial supports to cover medical expenses. Further, a salary raise can come with the sudden loss of public benefits with no time to prepare. A mother’s endeavor to return to school to unlock new opportunities for advancement can also create new childcare costs. A better job can jeopardize healthcare access. The National Conference of State Legislatures describes this sudden decrease in public benefits with a slight increase in earnings as the “cliff effect,” leaving families unable to sustain their households despite doing what our economy tells them to do: work more and earn more.
This is particularly true for minimum-wage earners. A single parent whose wage increases from $15 to $15.50 and loses access to childcare subsidies, will see a “a 25% decrease in annual net resources.”
That contradiction should alarm us. A system that punishes progress cannot credibly claim to successfully promote mobility.
When Parent Success Is Supported by Policy
Higher education is often framed as a pathway out of poverty. For single mothers, that pathway is real, but it is also obstructed by policy choices.
Student parents need more than words of encouragement; they need investments and policy reform to help sustain their mobility. If we believe education is a mobility strategy, then we must fund the conditions that allow parents to complete it.
One model that can be leveraged is the Child Care Access Means Parents in School program, known as CCAMPIS. It is the only federal program dedicated to supporting childcare for low-income student parents in higher education. The Department of Education lists more than $73.5M in estimated grant funding for the program in FY26.
The existence of CCAMPIS matters because student parents are not simply students with extra responsibilities. They are trying to move their families through systems that were rarely designed around their lives. A mother pursuing a degree needs tuition support, yes, but she also needs reliable childcare, transportation, housing stability, and the ability to meet her child’s needs while investing in her future.
However, more support is crucial. CCAMPIS currently serves approximately 3,300 students per year, yet the number of undergraduate students with kids in the US exceeds 3 million. Out of these student parents, 74 percent are female and 55 percents are BIPOC students.
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Nonprofit Sector: Combine Service to Create Systems Change
Nonprofits play a critical role in supporting families, but direct service alone will never be enough. Food assistance, housing support, coaching, childcare navigation, and emergency resources matter deeply. Yet, if organizations stop there, without advocacy and an eye toward structural change, we risk helping families survive the systems we should be working to transform.
The nonprofit sector must translate what it sees every day into policy demands. Organizations working with families understand where systems break down: the benefits cliff after a wage increase, the childcare gap that derails a semester, the housing instability that makes long-term planning impossible.
These insights should shape legislation, funding priorities, and institutional practice.
We also need to center single mothers as leaders, not case studies. Mothers living these realities should be included in the rooms where decisions are made. Their experiences should inform program design, public budgets, philanthropic strategy, and legislative agendas.
At Jeremiah Program, we believe families are the best owners and narrators of their lives. That belief must move from organizational value to sector-wide practice.
Philanthropy Must Fund the Work That Lasts
Philanthropy has an important role to play, but it must resist the temptation to fund only what is immediately measurable.
Short-term program grants can support urgent needs. But lasting economic mobility requires investments in advocacy infrastructure, leadership development, coalition-building, narrative change, and policy work. Those efforts take time. They are harder to reduce to a tidy annual report, yet they are essential.
If philanthropy wants to support family wellbeing, it must fund long-term strategies. That includes unrestricted, multi-year support for organizations working with single mothers, resources for mothers’ leadership and civic engagement, and investments in multi-state coordination that can move policy at scale.
We cannot build durable mobility with temporary funding logic. And these investments uplift not just mothers but also their families and society. When single mothers have the resources to build economic security, the benefits help build healthier communities through a stronger workforce and greater economic growth.
We Need to Stop Romanticizing Resilience
Our systems still assume a narrow model of work and family life. Single mothers are living beyond that model. Policy must catch up.Single mothers are often praised for their strength, but praise is not policy. Admiration does not pay childcare invoices, does not stabilize rent, nor replace a lost SNAP benefit.
The public conversation needs to move beyond resilience and into shared responsibility. We should ask why single mothers are expected to be endlessly resourceful in systems that remain underbuilt for their success.
There is also a changing labor reality that policymakers and institutions have been slow to acknowledge. Many mothers are turning to entrepreneurship, freelance work, caregiving, digital labor, and supplemental income streams to keep their households afloat. These strategies can create flexibility and opportunity, but they can also leave families without predictable wages, employer-sponsored benefits, paid leave, or access to traditional safety nets.
Our systems still assume a narrow model of work and family life. Single mothers are already living beyond that model. Policy must catch up.
Economic mobility is family wellbeing infrastructure.
Economic Mobility Is a Public Commitment
The path forward is clear.
Policymakers should expand childcare access, strengthen CCAMPIS, protect SNAP and WIC, preserve healthcare continuity, and design benefits systems that reward rather than punish economic progress. Employers should recognize that caregiving is part of the workforce reality, not an exception. Nonprofits should integrate direct service with advocacy. Philanthropy should fund long-term systems change.
Most importantly, single mothers must be treated as essential architects of the solutions that affect their families.
Breaking cycles of poverty requires more than helping one child succeed or one mother overcome impossible odds. It requires building systems where opportunity is not fragile, support is not temporary, and mobility is not reserved for families who can afford the cost of reaching it.
Economic mobility is family wellbeing infrastructure. When we invest in single mothers, we invest in children, communities, and the future health of our economy. That is not charity. It is common sense and a strategic investment.
