From Longman Dictionary of Contemporary Englishlone mother/father/parent etclone mother/father/parent etcBritish EnglishONLY someone who looks after their children on their own SYN single a lone-parent family → lone
Examples from the Corpus
lone mother/father/parent etc• One Parent Benefit is paid to 75% of lone parents.• We can treat lone parents as poor people, needing means-tested social assistance of some sort - as we do now.• Two thirds of lone parent families depend mainly on social security benefits, compared with one in eight two parent families.• Sheila is a lone parent with two children, aged 13 and 15.• More than half of lone parents with two or more children had incomes below their absolute poverty level at £227 a week. 