Evolving families and child wellbeing

Research in the U.S. has shown that children growing up in two-parent households do better that those in single-parent households on a number of outcomes, educational in particular. Cross-national studies of educational achievement have found that this finding applies to other Western nations. However, cross-national studies aimed at measuring educational outcomes in a comparative manner in a large number of countries have serious limitations with respect to the measurement of parental background. In particular, non-resident parents are ignored, and even key characteristics of the home environment, such as household income, are not assessed. In this paper, we show that even a very crude imputation method for assigning values to two of the key missing variables modifies the results in a significant way. Specifically, after imputing values for household income and time spent with both parents, the achievement gap with children from two-parent households disappear for children from single-parent households, but not for those from step-parent households.

This paper employs Amartya Sen’s capability approach to examine the Ghanaian family formation trajectories from a qualitative point of view. The capability approach, developed in the 1970s and early 1980s, with widespread application in several domains of abstraction, is a broad normative framework for understanding human well-being and development. Based on in-depth field interviews, we explore the norms and preferences, the choices and decision-making processes, timing as well as constraints embedded in the family formation process. The analyses draw attention to the concepts of ‘ambivalence’ and ‘agency’ which are important in smoothening the difficulties actors encounter in pursuing personal family life

This paper examines living arrangements of children in Africa and assesses their implication on schooling. Children experience diverse living arrangements due to a great variety of reasons. AIDS-related adult mortality continues to have a significant influence on children’s living arrangements in Africa, leading to more fostering. However, regardless of parent’s survival status, child fostering remains a deep-rooted practice in Africa. Changing living arrangements of children raise concerns about the long-term investment in education. The reason is welfare and investment of children in education depends on the ability of the caretakers to provide for them. Five percent census data from Integrated Public Use Microdata Series (IPUMS) is used to establish trends and patterns of children’s living arrangements and identify factors that predict children‘s living arrangements; assess implications of living arrangements on children’s schooling; and identify factors that predict children’s schooling. Children living in households with mothers only are significantly higher than those with fathers only in the household. Survival statuses of parents, age of the child, and to a lesser extent, marital status, are predictors of living arrangements. Type of households, wealth index and age of the child are predictors of children schooling.

Most studies of children’s wellbeing have not dealt effectively with the complexity of multiple disadvantage. Traditional approaches have employed a limited set of predictors and when multiple risk factors have been used they have often been dealt with by treating them as confounders. This present project is, instead, concerned with the experience of multiple disadvantage. Using newly developed multidimensional measures of family adversity, which considers both material and psychosocial adversity, for the Longitudinal Study of Australian Children, we examine the persistence of multiple family adversity overtime and analyse its impact on children’s development outcomes. We focus on families that consistently experience multiple forms of adversity such as jobless families, sole-parent families, and families that live in disadvantaged neighbourhoods and examine their evolution longitudinally such as transitioning from sole-parent to two-parent families, from joblessness to being a ‘working family’, and from living in a disadvantaged neighbourhood to an advantaged neighbourhood. We first determine whether such transitions are accompanied by improvements across other measures of adversity or whether these families remain disadvantaged in other respects. We then examine what effects these transitions have on children’s wellbeing.

The objective of this paper was to study working children and child labor among children in Uganda. The most important question paused was if children in child labor were orphans or not. This paper was based on secondary data from the 2005/6 Uganda National household survey.
Overall, 36 percent of the children were involved in some kind of work whether for pay or on own. There are also children who worked for pay, worked for own account and worked for the household. The results further show that child labor accounted for almost one in five (19.2%). Despite Uganda being a signatory to the UN convection on the rights of children, one in three children is working and one in five is involved in child labor.
In urban areas, the proportion of children working for money is also an indication of child labor. Whereas the pretext is that child involved in child labor are mainly orphans, results showed that orphans were not more vulnerable to child labor than other children.

We investigate how partnered individuals spend their time, comparing the allocations spent alone, as a couple or together with children as a family, focusing on family life cycle, work status and education as primary determinants of time use. The analyses use data from the Swedish Time Use Surveys (1990/1991, 2000/2001, and 2010/2011) covering over 5,500 partnered individuals aged 20-55. Multivariate techniques are used to address: how the family life cycle affects who individuals spend their time with; the impact of education on the time couples spend together; whether these relationships have changed in recent decades. Results suggest that parents spend less time together as a couple than non-parents, but when we factor in family time, one-child parents spend similar quantities of time together as non-parents. Having two children impacts partner time negatively, but there seems little difference between having 2 or 3+ children concerning time with one’s partner or as a family, indicating returns to scale or some kind of specialization among parents with more than two children. Education is not a strong determinant of how much time couples spend together, but educational gradients exist in activities performed. Over time, we uncover a shift towards more family togetherness at the expense of time alone with one’s partner.

This study approaches the evolution of the number of births outside of marriage in Brazil over the course of the last decade and the legal debate resulting from such a disassociation between reproduction and marriage from the perspective of children’s rights. According to data from the Live Birth Information System (SINASC), births from consensual unions and single mothers together increased from 56.16% in 2000 to 65.78% in 2009. Some estimates suggest that between a quarter and a fifth of children born outside marriage end up not being legally recognized by their biological fathers, and are solely registered by their mothers. In 2010 the National Justice Council launched the Pai Presente [“Present Fathers”] project to reduce the number of people with undetermined paternity in Brazil. Our goal is to discuss this reality in light of perceptions on family, children’s rights and the gender relations at the heart of “Present Fathers”.

Taiwan, with a traditional belief in family stability and togetherness, has experienced noteworthy demographic changes that may pose important concerns for the life of children such as increased proportion of children born out-of-wedlock and living with divorced or separated parents. This study aims to examine the relationship and potential pathways between family structure transition and children’s cognitive and socio-emotional development at age 3. Our analysis was based on 19,499 children who completed 6-month, 18-month and 3-year surveys of the Taiwan Birth Cohort Study. Using hierarchical multiple regressions with family selection factors controlled, we found that children living persistently in single-parent families or having ever experienced parent’s divorce/separation did poorer in both developmental outcomes. Living with cohabiting biological parents since birth, however, was found beneficial for socio-emotional development. The disparities in development could be tremendously explained by poverty status, level of family support and quality of the home environment.

Despite much debate about what kind of physical custody arrangements is in the “best interest of children”, there are still rather few studies examining the dynamics of these arrangements in the years following parental separation. Researchers who do work on the issue of post-separation parenting arrangements' duration usually use divorce court-order samples that are not representative of the general population of separating couples. Moreover, their conclusions often contradict one another; some find that dual residence arrangements are very unstable while some actually find much stability. We argue that these divergences are partly the result of an improper account of the effect of time on living arrangements' stability. We use population-based longitudinal survey data representative of the cohort of children born in the Canadian province of Quebec in 1997-1998. We use continuous-time event-history analysis to identify patterns in the timing of transition from one type of parenting arrangement to another. Cox regression models allow us to measure the association of various characteristics of parents and children with this transition process.

The relationship between family structure and child well-being has been little studied in lower income settings. In Botswana new household types have emerged with increases in female headship, non-marital childbearing and parental cooperation with other household members. This study examines the association between household structure and child health in Botswana, measured by physical health. The study pays more attention to the heterogeneity of the household membership. This involves a larger kin network beyond biological parents. Second, the study explores if contextual factors are associated with child health. Three measures of child health assessed are stunting, diarrhoea and acute respiratory infection. Data used are from the 2000 Multiple Indicator Survey (MICS), and the 2007 Botswana Family Health Surveys (BFHS). Simple and logistic multilevel models are used to control for confounding variables associated with child health. The study demonstrates the importance of shared household resources, processes, and family functioning that goes beyond biological parent families on child health outcomes.