There are few areas, except perhaps for the irregular immigrants issue, which raise many people’s ire, prejudice and more as much as the single parents explosion, or single parents as our Minglish labels them. These women, when so labelled, are automatically assumed to be young girls, always living a life of pleasure and leisure.

I too once wrote a piece on our “pocket money culture”, where too many people (and not just single parents), find a way to get social security as their pocket money, and then supplement this with undeclared work or income from partners or others, while the really poor who just live off social security, and have the additional burdens of illness or disability, face lives of often extreme drudgery.

However, since these really genuinely poor can never afford to be out having fun or out at all, we never see them so they do not exist, much as caged irregular immigrants leave us feeling cold because we don’t see their faces every day.

Some parts of Malta however do have huge concentrations of these families, and I’m not going to name them, because labelling is always dangerous. But we do need to be a little cautious in our bias, particularly as the perception is that the State is favouring these women and giving them everything for free, including access to housing, which is not the case.

If you do just consider housing for a minute, and let me wear my other cap, an analysis of the Housing Authority’s output in the last five years shows most housing going to married or engaged couples, with less than one third going to families led by a lone parent, usually a woman. And this one third can be equally divided between those who never married and those who are now separated, the true single parent as we understand the term (young and unmarried) is only getting around one sixth of the output, and some would argue not enough, when most studies show these are among the poorest families in Malta (together with elderly women living alone)

Additionally, as most of the Housing Authority’s output is for subsidised sale, there are no, or practically no teenage mums, getting these subsidsed flats at all. So it is important that the public realises that the State, at least in this sense, is not encouraging this explosion in births to those who are not married.

Most people however are totally against single parents until they suddenly have one in the family, which is happening to more and more families. Most of our families now do have either an unmarried or a separated mum among them, but as is usual in Malta, anything within the family is excused, while single parents outside the immediate family are regarded as the great unwashed.

There are a number of practical reasons why attitudes need to change. First of all, we have a very seriously declining birth rate. Now, if close to a quarter to a third of new births are to unmarried women, can you imagine the problems if these births were not happening at all? Perhaps then we would become more welcoming of irregular immigrants as a way to resolve our labour shortages, as well as to contribute to pension funding and the like?

Another issue is that this staunchly anti-abortion Malta. Many unmarried mums abroad abort. In Malta we think they shouldn’t. So if they do go ahead and keep the child as our laws demand, we should perhaps be a little less hard on them.

And last, but most important of all, this is fundamentally sexist bias. Boys and girls, men and women make babies. Yet the one who has to bear the child, deliver the child and generally look after the child all his or her life is the one who bears the stigma called single parent. The girl or the woman, in other words. The dads, the willing partners in a sexual act out of marriage, in many cases, get away scot free .

So let’s stop being too simplistic and too sexist, while yes trying to educate our young people to first have safe sex (instead of the only abstain campaign which is not working and will not work,)and teach them that yes generally two is better than one so if you go into parenthood be a little sure of your man.. and of your girlfriend of course!