Kate Bell is Director of Policy, Advice and Communications at the single parent charity Gingerbread.

Gingerbread is the national organisation supporting single parents in England and Wales. It is 92 years this month since we were formed as the National Council for the Unmarried Mother and her Child – but some of the problems we’re facing today would have looked pretty familiar to our founders.

In 1918 we were campaigning against the Bastardy acts which stigmatised the children of unmarried parents. Today, we’re launching our ‘lose the labels’ campaign, as single parents have told us they’re still being stereotyped and stigmatised.

Single parents head one in four families today, and bring up over three million children. Their average age is thirty six, most work, and most were in a stable relationship when they had their child. But our members tell us they’re still portrayed as scroungers and bad parents – 83 per cent said that the media portrays them in a negative light.

Gingerbread’s campaign aims to tackle the stereotypes. We’ve got Gordon Brown, David Cameron and Nick Clegg to sign up to a pledge to tackle prejudice against single parents; you can ask your MP to sign up too here. We’ve also produced a film to try and challenge the stigma.

We hope that we’re starting a debate about how single parents are portrayed, and we hope its one that will lead to fairer treatment. We want single parents to be seen as individuals, not as a short-hand for social problems. Ninety two years on, its time to lose the labels.

Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett’s book ‘The Spirit Level’ set out comprehensively to demonstrate that more equal societies are better for everyone. In their update, which they wrote about in this Saturday’s Guardian, they also knock on the head some all too prevalent myths linking single parenthood with social breakdown.

They state that ‘national standards of child well being seem unaffected by high rates of single parenthood.’ Or put another way, a country with higher rates of children brought up by married parents, won’t necessarily be one with happier children.

This finding shouldn’t come as a bombshell. Last week the Children’s Society published a study of child wellbeing in the UK, showing that levels of family conflict were much more important than family structure in explaining how happy children told researchers they were with their lives – differences in family type explained only two per cent of how happy a child felt with their life.

The OECD, had already come to the same conclusions when they looked at international evidence on the impact of growing up with a single parent on how children get on. The research does show that children in single parent families have worse chances across a range of areas. But its not the fact of growing up with one parent rather than two that explains these – it’s the poverty and family conflict that all too often accompanies single parenthood. And as the OECD put it, “If there is a causal effect on child well-being of being brought up in a single parent family, it is likely to be small.”

Single parents are still an easy target when seeking culprits for social problems. But the research shows that policies targeting single parenthood alone won’t make life better for children. It’s much harder to try and tackle poverty, to provide good quality employment for families, and to ensure that when parents do separate, children don’t get caught in the middle. Gingerbread set out some ideas of how to start in December. We hope that the debate in the run up to the election can focus on the hard questions – and not on the easy stereotypes.

But in our new report single parents tell us that successive welfare reforms have left them feeling disempowered – by the welfare system itself, and by the continued obstacles placed in their way when they try to move into work.

The Government is planning to implement policies whereby single parents will see their benefits cut for failing to comply with a Jobcentre Plus decision about the steps they must take to prepare for paid work. The new Secretary of State for Work and Pensions, Yvette Cooper, announced some welcome changes to the Bill last week, including more protection for parents who have experienced domestic violence and a pilot of additional support for those in short hours jobs. But single parents still say there’s a big difference between the Government’s rhetoric and their own lives.

We asked our single parent members and website visitors to tell us what they thought about benefits, working life and the proposals set out in the Welfare Reform Bill. They told us that an increasingly stretched benefits system has a long way to go before it can claim to offer the “personalised service” promised. What’s more, they show that giving Jobcentre Plus advisers the power to cut single parents’ benefits is neither fair nor realistic. Their stories reveal that paid work does not always make financial sense and though most single parents aspire to find work, many who are working part-time are still poor.

Most of all we see that single parents are struggling with the difficulty of balancing caring responsibilities with working life. And that even with an increase in childcare over the past ten years, they talk about the problems they are having in finding affordable and appropriate childcare places for their children – especially during the school summer holidays, and when they are trying to fit childcare in with shift-work, temp work and anti-social hours.

Single parents want their families to be better off when they return to employment. Over twenty percent of children with a single parent working full-time remain poor. Single parents want to know that childcare is out there when they need it but over two thirds of Family Information Services say that parents report a lack of available childcare in their area. And, most importantly, they want to be allowed to make the choice about when and how to work, so they can juggle working life with the responsibility of caring for their children by themselves.

In short, this is a group that is as keen as any politician to see changes that will make work workable for them. But their needs and responsibilities as parents must be understood as part of the drive for them to find work.

As the Welfare Reform Bill moves through parliament in its current state, it fails to take into account the “real world” hurdles faced by too many single parents. There’s still time for politicians to take their concerns into account – we hope they’ll be listening.

The views expressed in this blog are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of Oxfam GB.