Abstract
This study uses large-scale cross-national data from 24 countries to describe the living conditions of children residing with a single mother as compared with children who live with two original parents. Three central areas are studied: children’s social support, health, and material resources. The data are derived from the international WHO study Health Behaviour in School-aged Children (HBSC) of 2001/02. The survey includes nationally representative samples of school pupils of 11, 13, and 15 years of age in countries in Europe and North America and in Israel. After relevant selections, total n = 95,335. The general finding is that children in single-mother households have lower social support from parents, poorer health, and smaller material resources than children living with two original parents. The general tendency is rather similar across a large number of countries although more differences are found in some countries and fewer in others. There is no clear pattern regarding how the association with family type varies between countries, for example, according to the share of single-mother households, by welfare state regime, or in relation to single parents’ employment rates.
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Notes
Although separation and divorce constitute one main reason behind single motherhood, there are also other factors, which differ cross-nationally: the shares of single mothers who never married or cohabited, who separated or divorced, and who are widowed in fact vary considerably between countries (see Chapple 2009, Table 4).
In the present paper, only single-mother households vs. two original-parent households are focussed upon. Even though reconstituted families are an increasingly common phenomenon, living with both original parents or with a single parent are the two most common family types for children in all countries studied (yet with large cross-country variation in absolute percentages) (Pedersen et al. 2004, Figure 2.7). Children who live with single fathers are excluded as they constitute a very small group for which it would not be possible to obtain robust results with the data used here.
It is however not evident that children living with a single mother should automatically be categorised according to the mother’s social class, as they may be in contact also with the non-residential father, and perhaps even live with him for part of the time. Obviously the range of “father contact” may be wide both within and between countries.
More recent studies that compare the size of single and co-habiting/married mothers’ networks are scarce. It is however not evident that there is (still) a difference between the two groups of mothers. Drawing on the divorce literature (keeping in mind though that divorce is only one of several reasons behind single motherhood), Raeymackers et al. (2008) point out that studies of the effects of partnership dissolution on the individuals’ social networks show mixed evidence: while earlier research reported a decline in the individuals’ social networks after a divorce (see Milardo 1987 for a review), more recent studies show that divorced mothers do not always experience a decline in their social networks (see e.g. Kalmijn and Broese van Groenou 2005).
Empirical support of Coleman’s argument is mixed. Studies on longitudinal data have found a weak positive association between social closure and increases in mathematics achievements in Catholic schools, while for public schools the association was negative (Morgan and Sørensen 1999) or non-existing (Morgan and Todd 2009).
It should also be noted that total fertility rates vary widely between the included countries (ranging from 1.3 in Germany, Hungary and Italy to about 2 in the US, Ireland, France, Norway, Sweden and the UK; see Vos 2009, Table 1). The social selection into motherhood varies between countries and this may have different effects on the propensity to become a single mother. In most countries, women with a high education have higher levels of childlessness and lower levels of fertility compared with women with a low education. However, the strength of this association varies cross-nationally (Shkolnikov et al. 2007; Sobotka 2008). In Sweden, for instance, the average fertility rates are relatively even across educational groups, whereas in the US there is a more pronounced difference between low and highly educated women (Shkolnikov et al. 2007, Table 6).
For details on the number of respondents in each country, by gender and by age group, see Roberts et al. 2004, Table 2.
In the analyses, the cluster command was used for school class, with some exceptions: the analyses of Belgium, Estonia, and Greece were clustered by school, because information on school class was not available for all cases. In the analyses of Germany, the cluster command was not used since in a large number of cases, information on both school class and on school was missing.
Even though a number of previous studies have used multilevel analysis on the HBSC data, this was not done in the present paper as the objective is exploratory and descriptive, and as there was no a priori hypothesis about the variation between countries. Grouping countries into welfare state typologies, classified according to various criteria, is also common in cross-national research. Yet, this is not necessarily ideal for every purpose. For instance, there may be empirical exceptions to the expected pattern as well as within-regime type variation (see e.g. Uunk 2004). Lumping countries together according to a given typology may hide similarities and differences between countries. Given the exploratory and descriptive objective of this paper, it seems appropriate to start by analysing countries separately, and, as a second step, look for country clusters or patterns in the obtained findings. More importantly, social policy and macroeconomic conditions are not the only possible factors which affect the living conditions of children in single-mother households. Thus, it is not evident that welfare regime types are an ideal way of categorising the countries in this study. Furthermore, the n in each country is large enough to analyse separately.
In the LIS data, children in single-mother households are defined as children who are formally registered to live with their mother (but not their father). Yet, at least in some countries, joint living arrangments have become increasingly common. The LIS data do not permit a selection of the single mothers with joint living arrangements and therefore include children who may in fact divide their time between parents in their definition of “children in single-mother households”. In the HBSC data, only children who “really” live in single-mother households (i.e. who stay all or most of the time with their mother) are selected. Thus, the definitions of “single-mother household” are not identical in the two data sources.
The reason for this is that in some countries, such as Italy and Austria, a substantial share of single mothers are in fact single due to widowhood (Chapple 2009, Table 4). When excluding children whose father is deceased (but also, due to the wording of the response option, those who are not in contact with their father), the variable becomes more comparable across countries. Consequently, the number of cases is somewhat smaller in the analyses of this item: n = 90,808.
As noted in the Variables section, respondents who replied “Don’t have or see this person” about the father were excluded from this analysis. Also analyses where these cases were included and coded as not having social support from the father were conducted. With this alternative variable, family type differences were very clear for all countries and larger than those presented in Fig. 3 (p < 0.001 for all countries).
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Acknowledgements
I would like to thank the HBSC Research Network for the opportunity to use the data. Financial support from the Swedish Council for Working Life and Social Research (FAS grant 2004–1975) is gratefully acknowledged. Previous versions of the paper have been presented at the Workshop on Family Structure, Economic Resources, and Children’s Living Conditions in Stockholm, Sweden, June 2007; at the ESF-LiU Conference on The Transfer of Resources across Generations in Vadstena, Sweden, June 2008; at the 13th Annual Aage Sørensen Memorial Conference for Graduate Students in Sociology in Stockholm, Sweden, April 2009; and at the Seventh Meeting of the European Network for the Sociological and Demographic Study of Divorce, Antwerp, Belgium, June 2009. I am grateful to Tommy Ferrarini, Frank F. Furstenberg, Jr., Michael Gähler, Anne H. Gauthier, Jennifer Holland, Jan O. Jonsson, Viveca Östberg, Elizabeth Thomson and two anonymous referees for valuable comments.
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Låftman, S.B. Family Structure and Children’s Living Conditions. A Comparative Study of 24 Countries. Child Ind Res 3, 127–147 (2010). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12187-009-9059-1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s12187-009-9059-1