Messages of support

“We welcome the Gingerbread Let’s Lose the Labels campaign and all the work they’re doing to support lone parent families. The campaign is a really positive and important step towards ending the labelling of lone parents which impacts both parents and children.
Ensuring that support is there, if lone parents want it, is extremely important and Gingerbread does a fantastic job on this. We’ve been working with them for five years now as part of Barclaycard's Horizons programme and I understand how damaging labels can be to lone parents' confidence and self esteem.
Horizons is working to help lone parents and their children escape financial hardship and take steps towards a brighter future. I'm delighted to say it's making a really big difference - over 250,000 lone parents and their children have benefited already from advice on money matters, support with the costs associated with education and, with Gingerbread's help, support with getting back to work. I applaud Gingerbread's campaign and know that within my own business, Horizons is working hard to dispel the misleading labels which are so often applied to lone parents.”

Valerie Soranno Keating, Chief Executive, Barclaycard

"One of the hardest things about being on your own with childen is the lack of back-up and emotional support. I found myself constantly questioning my parenting abilities and getting down about the single-parent prejudice in the media. Gingerbread reminds us we aren't alone and we are proper families too!"

Catherine Johnson

"Lone parents do one of the most difficult jobs there is. They do it with diligence and dignity, they do it in challenging personal circumstances, and they do it despite the prejudice of strangers. If we must give them a label, how about 'heroes'?"

Neil Pearson

“I have been a one parent family twice now, and it has been a rewarding and difficult journey each time. I was an eighteen-year-old punk rocker the first time, and a best-selling author the second. What amazed me about the experiences was that, despite being twenty years apart, society still had the same old prejudices.”

Martina Cole

"The problems single parents face are often unseen or neglected. We are lucky to have a charity like Gingerbread through which we all can lend our support to one of the most misunderstood causes around."

Peter Capaldi

"The single parents I know are single parents for a wide variety of reasons. Their personal circumstances and family backgrounds are very different. But they all have one thing in common; they're doing their best to bring up their children in a loving, supportive home. We should be supporting single parents in their efforts to do this, not stigmatising them."

Kerry McCarthy, MP

"As a man who carries many labels - not least of which being massive (6’9”), black, gay, a single parent, an ex-athlete, and now a psychologist - I have felt the burden of society’s labels my whole life. The damage that crude stereotyping does to all people is tragic and in the case of Britain’s single parents an unnecessary added load. The vital role played by single parents such as my own Mother, deserves a crescendo of applause and universal admiration for the work they do in a role that is overwhelmingly thrust upon them, not chosen.”

John Amaechi


Formed from the merger of the National Council for One Parent Families and Gingerbread.	Search:
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