[Child of a single mother]

There were 658,000 one-parent families in France in 1968; there were 1,600,000 in 1994, disunity today being a component factor much more frequent than widowhood. The guarding parent is the mother in 87% of cases, and in 95% of cases for 0 to 4-year-old children. This mother is generally frustrated in her desire to rebuild the family. These families have suffered a rapid and important economic degradation in the past few years, the French one-parent families being victim of the evolution of social allowances which are more unfavourable for them than for other families. For many years, pediatric, pedopsychiatric and social disturbances observed in the children of these families have been ascribed to one-parent familyhood, the social environmental pressure having heavily influenced the results of the studies performed in this field. Recent studies do not permit implication of the one-parent familyhood as a specific factor and suggest this as a major role for the poverty of these families.