The Complexities of Navigating Social Supports: Impacts on Low-Income Lone Mothers

This study explores how low-income lone mothers in Ottawa, Ontario, navigate Canada’s complex, multi-sector networks of social supports in their work to meet their families’ needs. Drawing on reflective thematic analysis of in-depth interviews and text message-based data with 25 mothers, the study illuminates how systems organized to meet basic needs are often experienced as stressful and deflating, stigmatizing, and even risky. Mothers described the labour of accessing supports as extensive, with physical, bureaucratic, relational, and emotional dimensions, and as compounding feelings of shame, undermining trust in the state, and constraining their socio-economic mobility. The findings show how certain aspects of social service design and delivery fail to meet needs and can entrench poverty and erode social bonds. Participants also identified elements that can foster a sense of support and connection, such as services that are reliable, flexible, co-located, coordinated, and relational. These findings underscore the need to reimagine social support delivery to value provisioning labour, reduce systemic harms, and address the structural conditions that sustain poverty.