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Going it alone and adrift: the socioeconomic profile and parental involvement of single-father and single-mother families in post-industrial Taiwan

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Abstract

In spite of the rising prevalence of marital dissolution in Asia over the past decades, little is known about single-parent families in Asia. The present study aims to contribute to the literature by investigating the changing socioeconomic characteristics and parental involvement (measured by parent–child activities and parental awareness of children) of single-father and single-mother families in Taiwan around the millennium. Using a nationally representative sample of 641 single fathers and 730 single mothers from the Taiwan Social Trend Survey collected in 1998, 2002 and 2006, this study found that the apparent socioeconomic advantage of single-father families over single-mother families has weakened. Parent–child activities and parental awareness are lower for single fathers than for single mothers and married fathers. The association between higher parental education and more parent–child activities and parental awareness is more pronounced among single fathers than among single mothers. The presence of co-residential grandparents is associated with lower parent–child activities with pre-teen children among single mothers. The results warrant greater attention to the wellbeing and development of adults and children from low SES single-father families in post-industrial Taiwan.

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Notes

  1. The percentages are calculated by dividing the number of single-parent families with children under 18 by the total number of households with children under 18.

  2. The percentage comes from the report of the 2010 Single Parent Family Survey, with the same definition (SPFS) of single-parent families used in Hsueh (1996, 2002).

  3. This survey was terminated after 2006 and so no further data are available to examine parental involvement in single-parent families in more recent years.

  4. Unmarried single parents were not included in the analytical sample (n = 14 for unmarried fathers and n = 43 for unmarried mothers in total for all 3 years) because the sample sizes were too small for “unmarried single father/mother” to be separate categories. Extramarital births in Taiwan only account for about 3–4 % of all births since 1998, and the exclusion of unmarried single parents barely changes the results in this study.

  5. Even though child outcomes such as psychological wellbeing or academic attainment are also important variables to be examined, they are not included in the TSTS data. The outcome variables we investigate here are all the available key indicators for single-parent families included in the TSTS.

  6. For families with children age 0–5, parents were asked to report their main concerns regarding child care issues for their pre-school children. Since the present paper focuses on parental involvement with children, parents’ concerns about raising children is beyond the scope of this study.

  7. While children’s age is also an important control variable, the TSTS data only provide whether a respondent has a child in the age groups of 0–5, 6–11, or 12–17. No specific age of a given child was collected in the data.

  8. Junior college and college and above are grouped as one category to facilitate analyses across three survey years. Response categories in 1998 include both “junior college” and “college and above”, but these two categories were collapsed into one category in the 2002 and 2006 surveys.

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Acknowledgments

This research was supported by a research grant from the National Science Council of Taiwan under Grant #102-2410-H-001-073-MY2. The authors thank the reviewers and the editor for helpful comments on earlier versions of this paper.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Institute of Sociology, Academia Sinica, 128, Sec. 2, Academia Road, Taipei, 11529, Taiwan

    Yen-hsin Alice Cheng

  2. Department of Sociology, The State University of New York at Albany, Albany, NY, USA

    Fen-chieh Felice Wu

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  1. Yen-hsin Alice Cheng
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  2. Fen-chieh Felice Wu
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Correspondence to Yen-hsin Alice Cheng.

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Cheng, Yh.A., Wu, Fc.F. Going it alone and adrift: the socioeconomic profile and parental involvement of single-father and single-mother families in post-industrial Taiwan. J Pop Research 33, 147–172 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12546-016-9158-z

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