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Does Parents’ Union Instability Disrupt Intergenerational Advantage? An Analysis of Sub-Saharan Africa

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Demography

Abstract

The long arm of childhood, with its wide-ranging influence on individuals’ life chances, highlights the importance of understanding the determinants of health in early life. Research has established that parents’ education is a major determinant of childhood health, but children across the globe increasingly experience their parents’ divorce and subsequent remarriage, raising questions of whether union instability alters these intergenerational processes. Does divorce and remarriage interfere with parents’ education benefiting their young children’s health? I explore this question in sub-Saharan Africa, a world region where parents’ education plays a major role in protecting children against severe health risks, and where young children commonly experience parental divorce and remarriage. Moreover, sub-Saharan Africa features distinct family lineage systems, affording an opportunity to explore this question in both majority matrilineal and patrilineal contexts. Analyses of Demographic and Health Survey data on 271,292 children in 30 sub-Saharan African countries offer no evidence that the high levels of union instability in the region will weaken the health benefits of parents’ education for future generations. Following divorce, children benefit from their biological parents’ education to the same degree as children with married parents—a finding that is consistent across lineage contexts. Moreover, stepfathers’ education corresponds with pronounced health benefits for their coresident stepchildren, particularly in patrilineal regions where these children benefit less dramatically from their mothers’ education. Together, the study results offer a renewed sense of the importance of parents’—including stepfathers’—education for early childhood health across diverse family structures.

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Notes

  1. Author’s calculation based on United Nations World Population Prospects database: https://esa.un.org/unpd/wpp/dataquery.

  2. I used this measure, rather than a measure of the highest year of school completed, given differences in educational systems across sub-Saharan African countries (and within countries at different points in time) that mean primary and secondary school constitute a variable number of years. Because of the study’s multicountry scope, this measure offers a better standard for differentiating parents by their educational credentials. Using a six-categorical variable as a continuous variable is appropriate when categorical thresholds are symmetrical (Rhemtulla et al. 2012), and the predicted probabilities confirm a linear association between each level of education and children’s odds of poor physical health.

  3. Seven percent of mothers of children coded as having a “stepfather” were cohabiting with their partner but were not married. Results were stable when these children were disaggregated, so I combine them into a single category and, for ease of discussion, reference these men as children’s “stepfathers.” Among children with married biological parents or remarried mothers, some of the fathers/stepfathers were temporarily staying elsewhere at the time of the survey. Paternal migration can benefit child health (DeRose et al. 2017; Townsend 2002; Yabiku et al. 2012) and could alter intergenerational processes. Thus, in supplementary analyses, I disaggregated children according to whether their biological fathers and stepfathers were staying elsewhere at the time of the survey. I found no evidence that doing so alters the findings. In additional analyses, I omitted these children, and the results were stable to their exclusion.

  4. Data are publicly available at http://intersci.ss.uci.edu/wiki/index.php/Ethnographic_Atlas#Electronic_versions_of_the_Atlas_and_SCCS. “Other” lineage includes duolateral, quasi-lineages, ambilineal, bilateral, and mixed.

  5. Regions coded as matrilineal include Sud-Ouest in Burkina Faso; Kinsaha, Bans-Congo, Bandundu, Nord-Kivu, Maniema, Sud-Kivu, Katanga, Kasa-Oriental, Kasa-Occident, Equateur, and Orientale in the Democratic Republic of the Congo; Kouilou, Niari, Bouenza, Pool, Sangha, Brazzaville, and Pointe-Noire in the Congo; Centre, Centre-Nord, Sud Sans Abidjan, and Ville d’Abidjan in Ivory Coast; Centre, Sud, and Yaoundo in Cameroon; Haut-Ogoou and Ogoou-Lolo in Gabon; Western, Central, Greater Accra, Eastern, Ashanti, and Brong-Ahfo in Ghana; Central and Southern in Malawi; Fatick in Senegal; Savanes in Togo; and Central, Cobberbelt, Eastern, Luapula, Lusaka, Northern, Northwestern, and Southern in Zambia. The majority ethnic groups that are matrilineal in these listed regions include the Akan, Akye Out Attie, Bas-Kasai and Kwilu-Kwngo, Bakongo, Baoule, Bemba, Beti/Bassa/Mbam, Basele-K, Luvale, Chewa, Kasawi, Katanga, Kongo, Lala, Lobi, Lunda, Mbede-Teke, Sangha, Serer, Teke, Tonga, Tanganika, and Yao.

  6. In supplementary analyses, I used data on mothers’ HIV status for the subsample of 100,454 children in 23 countries where such data were available (Burkina Faso, Burundi, Congo, Democratic Republic of the Congo, Cameroon, Ethiopia, Gabon, Ghana, The Gambia, Guinea, Ivory Coast, Kenya, Liberia, Lesotho, Niger, Namibia, Rwanda, Sierra Leone, Senegal, Togo, Tanzania, Zambia, and Zimbabwe). Supplemental models confirmed that after accounting for mothers’ HIV status, the coefficients and standard errors vary in minor ways. Yet the main findings, in terms of the direct impact of family composition and parental education, were consistent. Full results are available upon request.

  7. Some of the children in the sample are siblings; however, because the majority of children are the only focal child of their mothers included in the study (because the sample is restricted to living children under age 5), I did not include household as a level in the analysis. In supplementary models, I used the random sampling feature in Stata to select one child per mother to assess whether the findings were consistent (N = 196,078). Full results are available upon request.

  8. A child’s gender can consciously and subconsciously influence intergenerational processes (Raley and Bianchi 2006), including fathers’ and stepfathers’ investments (Anderson et al. 1999; Harris et al. 1998), which can manifest as distinctions in children’s nutritional standing (Wamani et al. 2007). In supplementary analyses, I explored whether these key findings vary for girls versus boys. To do so, I first analyzed three-way interactions by child gender. I then disaggregated children by their family composition and included two-way interactions between fathers’/stepfathers’ education and child gender as well as three-way interactions that added birth order. None of these models showed evidence that the findings differ significantly for girls versus boys, nor for children of higher or lower birth order. The same was true of models exploring the variable effect of mothers’ education on child health: considering child gender did not alter the nonsignificant variation in mothers’ education across distinct family compositions, nor did I find evidence that within specific family compositions, mothers’ education differentially benefitted girls versus boys, even when considering birth order. Evidence of important distinctions in child gender across matrilineal and patrilineal regions, however, merits further research on how gender alters parent-child relationships across distinct lineage contexts.

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Acknowledgments

I thank the three anonymous reviewers and the Editors of Demography, whose comments have greatly improved this manuscript. I also thank Vissého Adjiwanou, Kieron Barclay, Abdallah Chilungo, Sara Lowes, Synab Njerenga, and Abby Weitzman for helpful comments and suggestions on both technical and conceptual components of this research.

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Smith-Greenaway, E. Does Parents’ Union Instability Disrupt Intergenerational Advantage? An Analysis of Sub-Saharan Africa. Demography 57, 445–473 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s13524-019-00854-7

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