A forum on lone parents held last week was about as much about Maltese women in general, as it was about the often-misnamed single or lone parents.

Many of the lone parents I know and meet are in touch with their ex and the father of their children (who is sometimes not an ex at all, but you don’t need to be a rocket scientist to know you are better off today not marrying and getting your girlfriend to claim social security, particularly if you are a man on a lowish wage, or a lowish declared wage, than you are getting married).

The child in fact does have varying degrees of contact with the father even though the birth certificate says father unknown, and although this might not be the case for the majority or all so-called single parents, it is worth bearing in mind.

It is very difficult to have sensible, and properly targeted social policies in a country where statistics cannot, and do not, reveal the true picture as far as poverty, or the politically correct “social exclusion” is concerned.

The fact that a substantial number of single parents are single in name only, and are obviously not living only off their “relief” totally skews the picture for the percentage of single mothers who do live in abject poverty.

These mothers form a tiny percentage of the whole family population, but they definitely need more help. Many of them are very low skilled and are unlikely to get out of the poverty trap even if they work, something which I think we should be honest enough to admit more often. There are many paid jobs that keep you in poverty. Working can equal poverty too, and we should admit this more readily than we sometimes do. After all declared salaries in Malta are low compared to the cost of things. Even educated people struggle in certain jobs in this country (at least the ones who live off one declared income!).

What chance is there for an uneducated mother to get out of the poverty trap even if she does manage to work part-time, when salaries are so low?

The overriding fact is that Maltese mothers – let’s be more specific and not just say women but mothers – do not work, do not wish to work and can afford not to work. The country may have a problem with this (not least the fact that there soon won’t be enough people working to pay enough pensioners!), but single mothers are in this respect no different to other married mothers who choose not to work.

Of course there is a percentage of mothers who would work if there was free or very affordable childcare, but on the whole Maltese mothers choose not to work. This desire not to work has been borne out by recent studies which emphatically showed the majority of mothers not wanting to work outside the home.

So if married women and mothers, who usually have far more support, both financially and personally, choose not to work, we can hardly be surprised that lone parents choose not to work either, can we?

The choice not to work is therefore an emotional one, and not only a financial one. We are told that the only way out of poverty for the lone mother is to be in paid work. This may be relatively true if the mother is educated, but less so if she can only find manual work such as cleaning or any form of paid housework. In fact the system penalises you for earning, so there is really very little financial incentive for less educated women to work at all, unless they can do so in our enormously black economy.

It is also important to remember, especially those of us who are privileged to work in interesting, stimulating jobs, that most jobs are terrible dead end affairs where you also have to negotiate the pitfalls of factory or office politics.

Many of my women friends in London, who were also mums and did the whole full-time work and childcare thing initially then ended up finding ways not to work, or to go back to studying, or to work part-time, or to work from home, or to downsize in order to improve the quality of their lives which becomes increasingly important as you get older.

Now many of these were in highly paid jobs, yet many of these women simply got tired working and trying to balance the whole husband, home, kiddies and work thing, and stopped doing so, or certainly started to try and work much less once they had hit 35.

Working is not as glamorous as it is often made out to be. So many women work a little after school, or after university, but then actually make a positive choice to stay at home and bring up their family once kids come into the picture.

They find this infinitely more interesting than most of the dead end jobs on offer to them, and who can blame them?

Making work worthwhile for women who are also working bringing up their kids and looking after hubby and parents and home is a pretty daunting task.

Perhaps if more men were trying to do all these things our policies would be slightly more realistic, don’t you think?