Most mornings in my house begin the same way: getting two kids dressed and fed, trying to find shoes that have gone awol overnight, packing bags, brushing hair, checking calendars, responding to work emails, mentally calculating the day ahead and racing the clock before school and childcare drop-off.
Then the second shift of running a business, leading a team, making decisions, solving problems and attempting to hold together a professional life begins, that, from the outside, probably looks quite successful.
And in many ways, it is.
I’m grateful for the career I’ve built and meaningful work I get to do. I’m grateful that my co-founder and I have been able to bootstrap successfully and grow our profits. I know many Australians are doing it far tougher than I am.
But it is a story about a growing disconnect in Australia between what our systems assume family life looks like and the reality many women are actually living.
Because despite earning what would traditionally be considered a “good income”, there are still many weeks where the financial pressure of raising two children alone feels relentless.
Life after separation is complicated, and many families are simply doing the best they can within their own financial realities. Some parents are able to co-parent effectively and share an equal load. That’s not been my experience.
Outside of this, I’ve also become increasingly aware of is how little our tax and social support systems account for the reality of running an entire household on one income because there’s this strange assumption in Australia that once you cross a certain income threshold, you’ve somehow “made it” financially, and support is no longer necessary.
But income alone doesn’t tell the whole story. Because one income supporting three people functions very differently to two incomes supporting the same family.
In my case, I’m covering childcare for my three-year-old daughter, housing costs, groceries, school and activity costs, bills, insurance, medical appointments and the endless invisible expenses that come with raising children.
And like most single/solo mums, I’m not just carrying the financial load. I’m carrying the logistical and emotional load too.
When a child is sick, there’s no backup parent in the house to tap in while I keep working. When childcare closes, I absorb the impact. When school holidays roll around, I’m the one trying to figure out how to keep a business running while making sure my children are cared for, in a regional town where services are often limited.
There is no second adult to share the mental load of daily family life and no second income to absorb rising costs.
Yet from a policy perspective, much of this complexity disappears.
Australia taxes individuals, not households. There are strong reasons for that, particularly when it comes to encouraging women’s workforce participation and financial independence. But there’s also a blind spot in the conversation.
Because a dual-income household earning a combined income similar to mine may have two tax-free thresholds, shared housing costs, split childcare pickups, shared domestic labour and more overall flexibility to manage work and family life.
Meanwhile, a single parent can earn above the threshold for meaningful support while still carrying every cost and responsibility alone. It creates what I suspect many professional single mums quietly experience as a feeling of existing in a policy grey zone.
You’re doing “too well” to qualify for help. But you’re also carrying a level of financial and logistical pressure that isn’t fully acknowledged anywhere either.
According to the Australian Bureau of Statistics, there are more than one million one-parent families in Australia, with women leading the vast majority of them. Most single mothers are employed. Many are balancing careers, leadership roles and businesses alongside caregiving responsibilities.
At the same time, childcare costs remain extraordinarily high and difficult to access, particularly for families with younger children, while housing and living costs continue to surge across the country.
And unlike many two-parent households, single parents don’t have the flexibility of alternating who takes time off work, who handles pickup, who stays home with a sick child or who absorbs the domestic overflow that inevitably comes with raising children. Everything lands with one person.
Terese Edwards the CEO of Single Mother Families Australia says “Australia still treats many single mothers as if earning above income support thresholds means they are financially secure. In reality, many are balancing rising costs on one income without the buffer of a second adult. The system creates highly effective marginal tax rates where earning more can quickly reduce support, leaving many working harder without getting ahead. One misstep, such as a mother requiring surgery or a child needing additional care, can quickly expose how financially fragile many single-mother households really are.”
She implores the government to “seriously consider a care tax offset that recognises the paid and unpaid work single parents do every day.”
To be clear, this is not an argument that single mums like me, who are distinctly more privileged than many, deserve unwarranted handouts. Nor is it about diminishing the pressures faced by other families during a cost-of-living crisis. But it is about asking the question of whether our systems have kept pace with modern family structures.
While we rightly encourage women to remain in the workforce, build businesses and pursue leadership roles after becoming mums, we still haven’t fully grappled with what happens when one woman is trying to sustain an entire household alone.
What most single mums I know want is for the conversation around family finances in Australia to become more honest and more nuanced, because financial pressure doesn’t always look the way people expect it to.
Sometimes it looks like a woman answering emails late at night after bedtime because she lost half the workday to a sick child, or quietly calculating whether another extracurricular activity is manageable this term.
For me, it looks like earning a decent salary on paper while feeling like there is absolutely no margin for error underneath it. I suspect many single mums are experiencing that same reality.