Diverging destinies across the life course? Socio-economic inequalities in family change in European children’s lives
Author: Mikolai, J.
This paper takes an innovative child-centred life course approach to studying family change in European children’s lives. Using Kaplan-Meier survival estimates on combined data from the Harmonized Histories and Round II of the Generations and Gender Surveys, I study children’s propensity to experience a first and second parental separation and repartnering by parental education and across birth cohorts in 20 European countries.
The key findings are:
- European children experience a fair amount of family change: 5-10% are born outside of a co-residential relationship, and 10-20% experience a first parental separation of whom 40-50% experience repartnering. Among those whose parents separated, 10-20% experience a second separation and 50-60% of these children experience a second repartnering.
- Children of low educated parents are more likely to be born outside of a co-residential relationship than those of highly educated parents and this educational gap has increased across birth cohorts in almost all countries.
- Children of low educated parents are more likely to experience parental separation (among those born in a union) than those of highly educated parents and this educational gap has increased across birth cohorts in many countries.
- Children of highly educated parents are less likely to experience a new parental relationship formation compared to those of lower educated parents, and the educational gap has increased across cohorts in many countries.
- Educational differences in children’s family experiences are the strongest at the beginning of children’s lives and the patterns are less clear for later transitions.
The full text of the working paper can be found here.
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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.
