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

Family patterns have diversified considerably in the last 60 years, going beyond the married nuclear family, and single-parent families are now a widely recognized family assemblage ( UN, 2022 ; Balirano et al., 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 of 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.