The purpose of this thesis was to conduct a literature review in order to assemble challenges which single parents face when trying to combine work and family life. The purpose was also to raise those solutions made to manage everyday life. The goal was that the collected information could easily be accessed by those professionals who play a part in solving this conflict between work and family and who work with single parents and their families.

The thesis was implemented as a narrative literature review and the data collection was performed systematically. The aim was that the data would be similar to the research problem. The final data included 11 research articles in which one was in Finnish and the rest in English.

Based on to the literature review, the biggest challenges which single parent families face were related to arranging child care. Especially evening and nightshifts, weekend work and early mornings were the hardest working times for single parents. For single parents who worked at nonstandard times formal child care was not sufficient to cover their child care needs. They also used informal childcare, which was mainly offered by grandparents, specially grandmothers, friends and relatives. The research articles raised especially flexible working times, the possibility of part-time work, support from the employer and a family-friendly culture in the working place as factors that would decrease work and family life conflict.