Changing Lone Parents, Changing Life Courses

Abstract

The socio-demographic profile of lone parents has changed in the last decades. Being mostly widowed men and women or young single mothers until the 1970s, lone parents are nowadays mostly divorced and separated parents, even though they are still by and large mothers rather than fathers. As a consequence, the experience of lone parenthood has also dramatically changed. Less objects of pity or stigmatized with shame, lone parents and their children are more than ever bound by legal arrangements to the other parent and are caught in more dynamic family trajectories.There are at least two remarkable changes that certainly need to be addressed by research on lone parenthood: its boundaries and its diversity. Both aspects are connected and have potential implications for lone parents and their children. First, the diversity and complexity of legal and residential arrangements of parents and children make it difficult to establish the borders between a full-time and a part-time one-parent household. When child custody or parental authority are shared, can we still talk about lone parents? Children circulate more and more between two or more parental households after separation, and more than one parent may be financially and legally responsible for them. One direct consequence of such changes in the

Lone Mothers’ Repartnering Trajectories and Health: Does the Welfare Context Matter?

“…Family life has changed rapidly with the diffusion of living arrangements alternative to the predominant nuclear family model, including diverse family forms such as lone parents and stepfamilies (Sobotka & Toulemon, 2008). The incidence of lone parenthood is rapidly rising in many Western countries, and lone parents are becoming increasingly heterogeneous with regard to their sociodemographic characteristics (Bernardi, Mortelmans, & Larenza, 2018), even though the large majority are women and health penalties for lone compared with partnered mothers remain high (e.g., Avison & Davies, 2005; Wickrama et al, 2006). Despite variation across institutional welfare contexts (Burstrom et al, 2010; Pollmann-Schult, 2018), health disparities for lone mothers persist and are partly attributed to lone mothers’ higher levels of psychosocial and financial stress because they tend to work in low-paying jobs and be left alone to care and provide for their children (Dziak, Janzen, & Muhajarine, 2010).…”

A háztartás és családszerkezeti változások hosszútávú trendjei Magyarországon európai kontextusban: Teóriák, tévképzetek, tények

“…Az egyszülős családok gyakoriságának európai trendjeiről szintén korlátozott ismeretekkel rendelkezünk, de azt több forrás is alátámasztja, hogy az egyszülős családok aránya Magyarországon európai viszonylatban hosszú idő óta nagyon magas. 1960-ban például alig volt olyan európai ország, ahol az egyszülős családok aránya nagyobb lett volna, mint nálunk (Bernardi-Mortelmans 2017). Időben még tovább visszamenve azt is megállapíthatjuk, hogy az egyszülős családok aránya már a 19. században is kiemelkedő volt.…”

The link between separation and political party preference: selectivity or causal influence?

“…However, there are also gender differences in the economic consequences of separation, with men generally suffering fewer negative economic consequences (Bröckel and Andreß 2015;Leopold 2018;Vaus et al 2017) and women facing more often challenges related to raising children as a lone parent (Bernardi & Mortelmans 2018). This may also explain some of the gender differences in the political alignment of voters after separation: as men do better economically following separation, they tend to vote more to the right, whereas women -who suffer negative economic consequences -tend to vote more to the left.…”