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The neighbourhoods and social networks we examined in the previous chapter have been described as ‘mesosystems’–it is these that link individual agency with social structures and institutions (see Cochran et al. 1990 for the relationship between the three levels). The relationship between structure and agency also features in debates about lone motherhood. The essential question here is the extent to which lone mothers create and make sense of their own lives within constraints that they have little or no power to alter. Scott Lash, for example, has questioned the thesis advanced within the ‘lifestyle’discourse (see Chapter 2), that individuals are increasingly and purposively exercising agency and breaking free from tradition and structure, by reference to a particular group of lone mothers: