Fertility, Health and Lone Parenting

European Contexts

Fabienne Portier-Le Cocq

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9780367877514
• eBook ISBN: 9781351803243
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Ciencias sociales
• Subtopic: Sociología

In Europe, the percentage of lone-parent families has risen from 14% to 19% between 1996 and 2012. Only in Greece and Finland did the rates fall, while in Denmark and the Republic of Ireland the rise has reached or exceeded 10 percent. As of 2017, there are 2.9 million lone parents with dependent children in the UK, and nine out of ten lone parents are women. Sadly, lone parents are known to experience considerable social, financial, and health problems.

Fertility, Health and Lone Parenting examines the way in which lone parents live their lives, and how it impacts their health and well-being. Topics explored in these interdisciplinary contributions include lifestyle, nutrition, and the mental health of both parents and children. Unique empirical case studies within a European context help to expand the reader's understanding, whilst also drawing comparisons between the impacts of lone parenting on young mothers, fathers and their children.

A timely volume, this book will appeal to undergraduate and postgraduate students interested in subjects such as Sociology of the Family, Social Policy, Social Work, Gender Studies and Family Policy.

1
Lone parents in the UK

Ann Berrington

Introduction

Just under one-quarter of dependent children in the UK live in a lone-parent family (Office for National Statistics, 2016a). Following the rapid rise in lone-parenthood during the 1970s and 1980s, the overall prevalence of lone-parent families in the UK has remained fairly constant since the mid-1990s. However, this stability masks considerable changes in the routes into lone-parenthood and the socioeconomic characteristics of lone-parent families. This chapter provides new insight by documenting the changing demographic drivers of lone-parenthood and by investigating whether inequalities in material well-being and health behaviour between lone and partnered mothers have changed over the past 40 years.

Moral and political context of the rise in lone-parenthood

Interest in lone-parent families in the UK grew during the late 1980s partly as a result of their increased visibility, but also because of their association with non-traditional family behaviours – increased divorce and increased childbearing outside of marriage (Burghes & Brown, 1995; Lewis, 1997). The rise of the single-parent family was interpreted by some as a symptom of the decline in traditional family values. During the early 1990s, lone-parenthood was increasingly constructed as a social problem. Popular discourse within parts of the media and the ruling Conservative Party promoted images of ‘irresponsible lone-mothers’ and ‘feckless, absent fathers’ (Lewis, 1997; McIntosh, 1996). Of key concern was the amount of public money required to support lone-parents and the fate of children being brought up within such families (Lewis, 1997). However, by the end of the 1990s, under the New Labour administration, the focus had shifted towards supporting families (including lone-parent families) and eradicating child poverty (Home Office, 1998). Emphasis was placed on ensuring that children were raised in households where adults were working (Gray, 2001).

In recent years, emphasis upon the importance of marriage in children’s lives has resurfaced in policy-making. Family breakdown has been highlighted as a key pathway to poverty (Centre for Social Justice, 2006, 2013), and within the Coalition Government’s Social Justice Framework one of the key indicators of ‘progress’ was the proportion of children living with two natural parents (Department for Work and Pensions, 2013). The privileging of families where children live with two natural parents appears to make the assumption of a causal link between growing up in a single-parent family and poor outcomes for children. However, the relationship between family structure and child outcomes may reflect selection processes as opposed to causality (Amato & James, 2010; Thomson & McLanahan, 2012). That is to say, women from poorer socio-economic backgrounds are on average more likely to form lone-parent families, especially young single lone-mother families (Ermisch, 1991; Rowlingson & McKay, 2005). Moreover, UK children living in lone-parent families are at a significantly higher risk of poverty, with 46% of children in lone-parent families being in relative poverty (Harkness & Skipp, 2013). Thus, the poorer outcomes for children living in single-parent families result in part from their poorer socio-economic circumstances. This said, lone-parents are not a homogeneous group, and their experiences vary by gender, age, ethnicity, marital status and educational level of the parent (Phoenix, 1996). For example, lone-parents from middle-class backgrounds tend to have more resources to call on than do other lone-mothers (Rowlingson & McKay, 2005). Furthermore, the experience of lone-parents will differ according to whether they are living in a single-family household or in a shared household (Burghes & Brown, 1995).

One of the areas where UK lone-mothers stand apart from their European counterparts is their lower average employment rates (Chzhen & Bradshaw, 2012; Haux, 2012). As a result, many children are living in workless households, which can lead to poverty and social exclusion (Bradshaw & Millar, 1991; Main & Bradshaw, 2014). Over the past three decades, successive Governments have emphasised to varying degrees the role of female lone-parents as mothers or workers (Haux, 2012; Lewis, 1997). In comparison with other European countries, the UK welfare state has provided a greater level of support for non-working lone-parents. Social transfers resulting from policy initiatives, such as the New Deal for Lone-Parents (introduced in 1998) and the replacement of Family Credit with Working Families Tax Credit (in 1989) (Gregg & Harkness, 2003), acted to successfully reduce child poverty rates among UK lone-parents, at least up until 2009 (Chzhen & Bradshaw, 2012). Since 2008, we have seen increased conditionality of welfare support for lone-parents. Non-working lone-parents with older children have increasingly been classified as ‘unemployed’ rather than ‘caregivers’ (Haux, 2012). These policy changes, combined with economic recession, have resulted in high rates of unemployment among lone-parents (Whitworth, 2013).

Explanations put forward for the poorer health of lone-mothers

UK lone-mothers have previously been found to suffer from poorer health as compared to partnered women, including higher rates of depression (e.g. Crosier et al., 2007; Targosz et al., 2003) and poorer self-rated health (e.g. Fritzell et al., 2012; Van de Velde et al., 2014). Low income has been found to be a key explanation as to why UK lone-parents are more at risk from depression and poor health (Bur-strom et al., 2010; Fritzell et al., 2012), with the lack of employment among lone-parents as a mediating explanation. Increased poverty rates and higher levels of unemployment among British lone-mothers has been found to explain a greater proportion of their poor health than is the case for lone-mothers in other countries (Lahelma et al., 2002).

Marmot’s (2010) review into social inequalities in health specifically mentions lone-parents as one of the groups vulnerable to low income and poor health.

Patterns of employment both reflect and reinforce the social gradient and there are serious inequalities of access to labour market opportunities. Rates of unemployment are highest among those with no or few qualifications and skills, people with disabilities and mental ill-health, those with caring responsibilities, lone-parents, those from some ethnic minority groups, older workers and, in particular, young people.

(Marmot, 2010, 26)

Getting lone-parents into (high-quality) work is seen by Marmot (2010) as the key policy intervention to improve the health of lone-parents.

The social determinants of health perspective (Townsend & Davidson, 1982; Whitehead, 2007) highlights the inter-relationships between material explanations and lifestyle explanations of health inequalities. Living and working conditions can restrict an individual’s ability to choose a healthy lifestyle. Smoking is one such lifestyle behaviour which drives health inequalities (Whitehead, 2007). Evidence from the 1980s showed that among mothers, rates of smoking are highest among white women in working-class and low-income households, many of whom were lone-parents (Graham, 1987). Increased rates of smoking among lone-mothers has been seen to be a response to caring responsibilities in the context of reduced socio-economic resources and social exclusion (Graham, 1987; Graham et al., 2006; Sperlich & Maina, 2014; Targosz et al., 2003). According to Graham (1987, 47), smoking provides disadvantaged lone-mothers “a way of coping alone with the demands of full-time caring and with the struggle of making ends meet”. Given the importance in the literature of employment differences, wider social inequalities and contrasts in smoking behaviour in explaining health inequalities between single and partnered mothers, this chapter focuses on these aspects and examines whether differences between single or partnered mothers have changed over the past decades.

Data sources

Given the requirement for a long-term perspective, this chapter utilises data from repeated rounds of an annual UK Government survey – the General Household Survey (GHS¹) – from 1980 to 2009, which have been harmonised by a team of researchers within the Economic and Social Research Council Centre for Population Change (Berrington et al., 2011; Beaujouan et al., 2014). In addition to collecting information on social conditions and cigarette smoking, the GHS collected retrospective partnership and childbearing histories, providing a unique source of information on family formation trends.² The GHS was discontinued in 2011, but data on socio-economic conditions and smoking have been collected by the Office for National Statistics in its Opinion Survey (Office for National Statistics, 2012). We thus use data from the 2012 survey to update the time-series.³ The Opinion Survey does not ask respondents about their past co-residential partnerships, and so in order to estimate the proportion of recent birth cohorts who have entered lone-parenthood as a result of having a birth prior to any co-residential partnership, we use data from waves 1 to 6 of the Understanding Society Survey – a nationally representative panel survey of over 30,000 households (Knies, 2016). The strength of combining all of these survey data lies in their national representativeness and length of time-series of consistent information, which permits us to explore the changing associations between socio-economic factors and health risk factors and health (Minton et al., 2012; Popham et al., 2012).

Trends in lone-parenthood

The prevalence of lone-parent families

In 2016 there were nearly two million lone-parents with dependent children in the UK, which equates to just under one in four families with dependent children (Office for National Statistics, 2016a). This average hides considerable geographical variation, with higher rates for example in some urban localities within London, Liverpool, Glasgow and Belfast (EUROSTAT, 2015a). The UK, along with Denmark, Lithuania and Ireland, has one of the highest percentages of households that are lone-parent households in the EU (Chzhen & Bradshaw, 2012; EUROSTAT, 2015b). Women account for nine out of ten lone-parents (Office for National Statistics, 2016a). The proportion of families with dependent children which were lone-parent families doubled between 1971 and 1991 (8% to 19%). Early increases are associated with an increase in divorced lone-mothers, but between 1985 and 2001 there was a significant increase in the number of never-married lone-mothers. This was related to the increase in proportion of births that took place outside of marriage, which doubled between 1985 and 2001 from 19% to 40% (Office for National Statistics, 2013). Much of the increase in non-marital fertility was associated with an increasing trend to start childbearing within cohabitation, and increasing numbers of lone-parent families result from the dissolution of cohabiting couple families. The growth in the proportion of families headed by a lone-parent has been much slower in the 21st century, and may have stabilised in recent years. In fact, cohabiting couple families have been increasing the most, as shown in Figure 1.1 for the period 1996–2016.

The prevalence of lone-parent families at any point in time is the net result of a complex set of demographic and household transitions. Increases over time in the prevalence of lone-parent families can be the result of more individuals entering lone-parenthood o...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1 Lone parents in the UK
• 2 Lone parents, poverty and mental health: results from the Poverty and Social Exclusion Survey 2012
• 3 Mental ill-health among parents after divorce and separation: causes, consequences and compounding factors
• 4 Surviving, not thriving: eating and health in lone-parent families in the UK
• 5 Child health and lone motherhood: evidence from the UK Millennium Cohort Study
• 6 The disparities in health and quality of life in child protection: the case of the Loire-Atlantique department
• 7 Family context and adoption of risky lifestyles: a study of English adolescents
• 8 Public health, social anxieties: the example of the English lone teenage mother
• 9 The health of British young mothers and their children
• 10 Young fathers and their perspective of health and well-being: examples from the ESRC ‘Following Young Fathers Study’
• 11 Lone parents’ self-rated health in European comparative perspective: socio-economic factors, job quality and social protection
• Index