Weaponizing Family Values: Online Discourses of Tradition and the Stigmatization of Single Mothers

Family patterns have diversified considerably in the last sixty years going beyond the married nuclear family and single-parent families are now a widely recognised family assemblage (UN 2022; Balirano, Mackenzie, Zottola, 2024). Yet, according to some narratives, the ‘traditional’, nuclear family remains a source of morality for nations, a beacon for social order and identity (Sullins, 2021). This study specifically investigates how single-mother families are discursively construed in social media discourse, focusing on the online interactions that could be retrieved from the platform Reddit. A corpus of threads featuring the keywords ‘single mom(s)/mum(s)/mother(s)’ was collected, including all the replies and comments to the initial messages, as posted over the last 3 years on the platform. Through a critical approach to discourse analysis, the emerging construal of single-mother families will be examined, concentrating on hateful narratives that exacerbate emotional and social tensions, portraying single mothers as unworthy exceptions to the ‘natural’ and ‘traditional’ family.