Supporting the Economic Mobility Families Need to Thrive

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.

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.

Supporting Economic Mobility for 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.