Complex families in the United Kingdom: mapping children’s diverse family pathways and their correlates from birth to age ten
Authors: Šťastná, M., Mikolai, J., Finney, N., & Keenan, K.
This paper investigates children’s family trajectories in the UK during their first ten years of life. We use multi-channel sequence analysis on data from the UK Household Longitudinal Study to jointly capture the dynamics of maternal partnership histories and paternal co-residence patterns. We then study the characteristics associated with experiencing different childhood family trajectories.
The key findings are:
- Children experience six typical family trajectories: Continuously married, Early separation, Continuously cohabiting, Later separation, Early solo motherhood, and A new father.
- Over a quarter of children in the United Kingdom do not grow up with their biological married or cohabiting parents in their first 10 years.
- A life course approach highlights how children’s family pathways can be varyingly complex and stable.
- Children of higher-educated, Asian and first-generation migrant mothers often grow up within parental marriage.
- Early separation might be more socially stratified than later parental separation for children in the United Kingdom.
The full text of the paper can be found here.
