Are you an Australian single mum?
Single Mum Australia is the essential Australian parenting website for all single parent mums - including sole, separated, divorced, ex-defacto, single and pregnant, widowed, re-partnered and solo mums by choice.
The latest and most popular parenting news, family law, shared parenting and child custody laws, exclusive family lawyer articles, help links, single-mum-only forum with topics such as child support (including the child support agency, child support evasion and child support assessments), the Centrelink single mother pension (single parent payment) news, family law (including legal aid links and the latest family court information) and share accommodation, a family lawyers directory, media releases, surveys and studies, book reviews, and so much more. You can follow our online Facebook and Twitter networks too, to get the latest breaking single mum news alerts and single mum community forum posts delivered straight to your news feed.
We're everything a single mum needs - welcome to Single Mum Australia!
Single Mother Breaking News

17 May 2012
Single parent families: the pain our politicians don't feel
Sydney Morning Herald
Joe Hockey looked very uncomfortable when he was asked on Monday night why he believed children were best off with both a mother and a father
read the full article...

16 May 2012
One in three ‘can't afford decent meal'
Herald Sun
About half the people represented in the survey were struggling to support dependent children. "The great concern for me is the social exclusion that starts to take place," he said. "Children will come home with an invitation to a birthday party and (parents) will think,'Well, they're not going' because they don't want the children to be embarrassed because they don't have a present to take or nice clothes to wear."
read the full article...

15 May 2012
Great-grandmother 'would die' before sending kids to Italy
Brisbane Times
The grandmother of the four children at the centre of an international Family Court battle says her mother “would die” before she returned her great-grandchildren to their father by tonight's midnight deadline
read the full article...

14 May 2012
The dating game for single mums
Herald Sun
FORGET quandaries such as what to wear or who should pay for dinner. Getting back into the dating game is a much more complex affair for a single mum. What, when and how much to tell the kids are the big issues facing single mums looking for love. And the key, according to family relationships expert Sue Yorston, is taking it slowly
read the full article...

13 May 2012
Anaesthesia OK for infant brain development
Herald Sun
AUSTRALIAN and international researchers are hoping a new study will allay concerns that brief exposure to anaesthesia in infants negatively impacts on brain development.
read the full article...

13 May 2012
Grateful for the little things
Canberra Times
Downer single mum of four Siobhan Cosgrave half-jokes that her ''me time'' is when she gets to shut the door as she's going to the toilet.
read the full article...

12 May 2012
Preparing kids for the teen years
Herald Sun
LAYING solid foundations before children reach puberty pays dividends for the future. Teenagers get a lot of bad press. Parents of younger kids are always warned, "Just you wait until they reach their teens." So for all those mums and dads with kids on the precipice of adolescence, is there anything you can do to make the transition easier?
read the full article...

12 May 2012
Family Court ruling forces Sunshine Coast family apart
Courier-Mail
A SUNSHINE Coast family is being ripped apart by a Family Court ruling that is forcing four young girls on to a flight to Italy to live with a father they describe as a physically abusive workaholic
read the full article...

12 May 2012
Labor in revolt over welfare cuts
The Australian
LABOR MPs have warned the government is embarking on a harsh and unfair form of welfare reform by stripping single mothers of financial benefits and failing to provide enough help for them to get into work after they are forced on to the dole in January
read the full article and discuss in the Forum here...

11 May 2012
Parents to go 'from welfare to poverty'
The Australian
ALMOST half of those on the single parent's pension are already in paid work, contradicting the Gillard government's claim that they must be pushed on to the dole in January next year to get them into employment.
read the full article and discuss in the Forum here...
Most Recent Australian Single Parent Statistics...
Of 592,000 Australian single parent families (with children under 15 years)
87%
(515,040) were headed by mothers (*2006)
|
Percentage of Australian families with children aged under 15 headed by a single mother (*2008)
17.7%*
The Northern Territory has the highest rate of single parent families in the country (*2008)
|
Of the overall number of Divorces in Australia in 2009
49.1%
(49,448) divorces that involved children under the age of 18yrs
*Source: Australian Bureau of Statistics, December 2010
|
What does it mean to be a single mum?Of course, the
kids
are the most important thing in a single mum's life. Kids are the focus and always have been. But along with the children, there are other matters that can confuse a single mum's life. Centrelink
plays a big part of a single mother's life, mainly because this is where a large percentage of single mums get their finances from. Centrelink are the source from where the single mother pension
, or as it is otherwise known, the single parent payment comes from. The single mother pension is a subsistence amount, but just the same, it is money to live on, and so it is important, no matter if it is called single parent payment, single mother pension or whatever Centrelink welfare classes it at the time
Often, single mums come out of a divorce
or defacto relationship only to find that their troubles have just begun, and find that their first step leads them towards Family Law - it's time to engage a lawyer.There are more than just Centrelink finance problems to worry about, as mentioned before, but also child custody
issues. Child custody is something that hits right at the heart of single mums
. If a single mother's ex husband or ex partner has been a domestic violence perpetrator, the mum may be greatly worried about child custody. They worry that their kids won't be safe with their spouse, who has already proven to be abusive because they caused domestic violence
, which resulted in a divorce or separation.
Even so, Family Court
will often still order a form of child custody named Shared Parenting
. Shared Parenting is a form of child custody division of time or parental responsibility between the parents. Mother's often look for a good divorce lawyer to try to avoid share parenting with an abusive ex-spouse after divorce, however in many cases Shared Parenting is still the outcome after the divorce, no matter how good the divorce lawyers have been. They will often settle for visitation at a contact centre or access centre where fathers or mothers are supervised during child custody access.
Please remember the bigger font words,because we will use it often in our website.