Lone parents in the UK

Abstract

This chapter has two key aims; firstly to chart the increase in lone parent families in the UK over the past forty years, and secondly to investigate whether inequalities between lone and partnered mothers in material wellbeing and health behaviour have widened over this period. The chapter starts by reviewing the moral and political context within which lone parenthood has been discussed in the UK. It then summarises the explanations which have been put forward for the association between lone parenthood and poor health. Section two examines demographic trends in the rise of lone parenthood, describing the relative roles of unpartnered childbearing and partnership dissolution in their formation. In section three differences between lone, cohabiting and married mothers in terms of their employment characteristics, housing tenure and smoking behaviour are examined for the period 1979-2012. The conclusion reflects on the implications of these findings for policy. Given the requirement for a long-term perspective this chapter utilizes data from repeated rounds of an annual UK Government survey – the General Household Survey1 (GHS) - from 1980 to 2009 which have been harmonized 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 trends2. 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 3 (ONS, 2014a). We thus use data from the 2012 survey to update the time series. Unfortunately the Opinion Survey does not ask respondents about their past co-residential partnerships and so we cannot update the GHS time series in terms of the partnership histories of lone mothers in Britain. Nevertheless, the strength of combining all of these survey data lies in their national representativeness and long 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).