The traditional family model does not guarantee Britons a route out of poverty.

The ‘traditional’ (read: patriarchal) family model of the breadwinning father and stay-at-home mother is leaving children in poverty, according to new research by the Joseph Rowntree Foundation (JRF).

Traditional two-parent families, where one parent – usually the father – ‘goes out to work’ while the other stays at home to care for the children, are the UK’s largest group of households with children living in poverty.

The research shows that almost a third of the 1.3 million families with children living in poverty are conventional families with a single breadwinner; 400,000 compared to 210,000 dual-income families and 105,000 lone working parents.

According to the report, the number of single breadwinner couple families has been falling in recent decades, largely due to social change and the fact that more women want to work, but in some cases it says, women have been forced to work in order to make ends meet for their family.

The organisation, which aims to identify and address the root causes of poverty in the UK, said the traditional family model does not offer a guaranteed route out of poverty in Britain today.

It calls for a mix of measures to support parents who to want share work and childcare, rather than pursue the traditional single breadwinner model.

Katie Schmuecker, Policy and Research Manager at JRF, said: “Our low pay jobs market means many families that are reliant on a single breadwinner find it hard to make ends meet.

“Measures like the Living Wage, supporting people to progress into better jobs and ensuring it always pays to work more will all help increase household incomes.

“So too will helping more families to become dual earning households,” she continued.

“This means we have to tackle the barriers that prevent people that want to work from doing so – such as unaffordable childcare, and the lack of financial incentive to work.

“Otherwise many parents and their children may find themselves trapped in poverty with little prospect of bettering their situation.”

Recommendations include expanding the provision of affordable childcare and making it easier for fathers to share caring responsibilities.

Kayte Lawton, Senior Research Fellow at the Institute for Public Policy Research (IPPR), said: “Many fathers work long hours, making it harder for them get involved in family life and more difficult for more mothers in poorer families to work.

“Childcare enables parents with young children to work, particularly mothers, but remains expensive for many poor families and needs to be made more affordable.

“Despite some improvements in the jobs market, many mothers can only access poorly paid, part-time jobs because of their childcare responsibilities.

“Addressing the cost of childcare would enable more mothers to work, boosting household incomes and helping tackle in-work poverty.”

However, the campaign group Mothers at Home Matter rallied the support of the Daily Mail (don’t read the comments) to condemn the recommendations as punishing for traditional families.

“It is outrageous that the Joseph Rowntree Foundation is implying that the right of families to care for their children at home is not one which low-income families should have, and should be a preserve only of the wealthy,” said Laura Perrins, of Mothers At Home Matter.

She has a point, but in reality many women in low-income families don’t have the luxury of that choice for very different reasons; they are literally the ones left holding the baby because that is simply the way things have always been.

If you are unskilled or never stand a chance of earning the same kind of salary as your husband, if you can’t afford nursery fees and your employer is inflexible, it will always you, the woman, who has to take on the responsibility of childcare.

Middle-class mums with a university degree and a well-paid husband can choose not to work, to stay at home and look after the children.

We need to make it possible and viable for women in lower-paid jobs to choose to work, to improve their prospects and those of their children.

Moving towards a model where parents share both earning and childcare responsibilities would surely be better for men, women and their children.