Combining Lone Motherhood and Paid Work: The Rationality Mistake and Norwegian Social Policy

How lone mothers combine being mothers with employment has become a central policy issue in many western countries. But policy making is dominated by the operational assumption that lone mothers are ‘rational actors’ who make individual utility calculations about the costs and benefits of taking up paid work. This is what we have called the ‘rationality mistake’, for evidence shows that decisions are still made rationally, but with a different sort of rationality. In this article we use a case-study from Norway to explore this issue further. Norway is unusual in having a ‘designer benefit’ – the transitional allowance – exclusively for lone mothers. Before 1998, the transitional allowance positioned lone mothers as mothers at home, whereas after 1998 policy places lone mothers – after the first three years of motherhood – as workers in employment. The policy lever of benefit change was supposed to change how lone mothers – as rational economic actors – behave. Using an intensive research design, we find that lone mothers employ a moral and relational rationality which usually means that both the pre and post-1998 policy would act more as a constraint than an enabler on their behaviour.