Lone Mother Families in Hong Kong: Perceptions of Risks and Their Coping Strategies

From a taboo to a new family norm, the lone mother issue has become a reality in Hong Kong since the latter part of the last century. Lone mothers, especially the divorced ones, have been placed in disadvantaged positions by traditional views reinforced by past discourses. Functional, pathological and victimized perspectives prescribe women’s roles in the family to uphold social stability, blame the women for choosing to divorce, and portray the women as victims to elicit sympathy for charity. The surge of lone mother families coincided with rapid social changes resulting from political and economic changes. With hindsight, we see the drawback of the past discourses lacking a gender perspective, and reference to the changing social and economic environment, thus deeming the lone mother issue as an individualized one. In other words, the lone mothers were left to fend for themselves and their children with only individual resources to tackle a collective social problem. To address this imbalance, this research pioneered new perspectives from the risk society theory and post-structuralist feminism to examine the lone mothers’ risks, their perceptions and coping strategies. The application of the concepts of detraditionalization and individualization reveals that the lone mothers in Hong Kong were in a transitional process at the gate of emancipation due to the traditional patriarchal belief in gender roles in motherhood and the ethics of work and care. Another force at work here is the ideology of capitalism which emphasized individual responsibility. Despite a common belief in conservatism, the women showed various degrees of detraditionalization and individualization, roughly pointing to two groups, familial and individualized, with overlaps and fluidity between them. The research found that in the perception of risks and their coping strategies, class still matters. In addition, the lone mothers’ social location, including their access to knowledge, resources and network support also plays an important part in determining their disadvantaged position. Subsequently, the lone mothers’ responses to risks are heuristic amidst the constraint of a socially constructed status. In conclusion, it is necessary to study the lone mother issue with updated perspectives, and dispel the notion of rational choice so that society as a whole will bear the collective responsibility.