Single Moms in France?

(asked by Anat from Israel)

I’m a single mom of 2 boys ( twins), 6+ years old. (I’m divorced but their father isn’t active in raising them)
I’ve worked in hi-tech for many years and recently was suggested to relocate from my work to Paris for 2 years. (I live in Israel)
Beside the amazing work opportunity for me and the great experience for the kids, I worry about being a single mom in a foreign, maybe even hustle environment.
My question is what do you know about the French people/government approach for single mom, liberal ? conservative ?

Thanks in advance
Anat

Hi Anat,

First of all, a little side note about being careful (you, me and everyone else) with “general political terms” when talking about different countries. What I mean here is that words like liberal and conservative have very different meanings from country to country (one can add socialist, republican, democrat, libertarian and many more to the list).

In France, the word conservative is very rarely used (in a French context that is) while the word liberal means only one thing and that is economically liberal, that is in favor of a society that is as capitalistic as possible with as little government involvement as possible, in other words conservative in an English-speaking context!

That being said, I’m not sure what your definitions of those words are, but I will assume that in the Israeli context, liberal means “normal sane people” and conservative means “religious nuts”.

In that case, rejoice, we have very few religious nuts in France. I definitely think that there are way too many, their number seems to be growing by the day, but it’s still way below what you can encounter in many countries, Israel included.

What I mean by that is that there’s little to no-stigma against single moms in France coming from the general population. I’m sure the few religious nuts from any religion that I just mentioned don’t like them very much, but those people are generally easy to avoid.

What about the government?

Well, despite the fact that our current government is not the most open-minded, the good news is that it has nothing against single moms and I’m pretty much sure that the C.A.F. (Caisse d’Allocations Familiales) has something for them. For those who don’t know, the CAF is a governmental organization whose jobs is to financially help families that need it, that includes families with several children (the main reason France is the rich country with one of the highest birth rates some people say) as well as single parents. Wikipedia tells me that single parents do get an allowance, according to their revenue.

I guess this answers your question.

If you have any follow-up one, hit the comments.