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Greater health risks among single parents and their children

March 17, 2003

Single parenthood entails greater risks for serious ill health (requiring hospital care) and early mortality, among mothers, fathers, and children. This is shown in a dissertation by Gunilla Ringb'�ck Weitoft, to be publicly defended at Ume'å University in Sweden on March 21.

The dissertation's register-based studies trace illness and mortality among about 700,000 mothers and fathers and nearly a million children during the 1990s. The results indicate that single parenthood entails greater risks of serious ill health (requiring hospital care) and early mortality among mothers, fathers, and children. Single mothers showed greater risks when compared with cohabitating mothers. Single fathers, with custody of their children, also evinced heightened mortality risks, but it was above all single fathers who did not live with their children and single men without children who showed the highest mortality risks. The greatest rise in risk among both men and women was found in cases of mental illness, suicide, and substance abuse. Growing up in a single-parent household seems to mean more than twice the risk of mental illness, suicide/attempted suicide, and substance abuse, and it was also associated with a lower level of education as an adult.

A considerable share of these hyper-risks seem to be due to the fact that single parents have poorer economic and social conditions on average and that a greater share of people with weak health are included in the group. In other words, it may be poor health that leads to singleness rather than the other way around. When the analysis took into consideration socioeconomic factors and previous hospital care, the hyper-risks declined in all groups. Receiving welfare benefits and form of dwelling (renting rather than owning) appeared to be of great importance in this association.

The interpretation of the results must take into consideration the fact that mortality and serious illness (requiring hospital care) are unusual phenomena and that most people are not affected by them. Smaller studies, based on samples of the population, have shown that more common outcomes, such as mental illness, occur more often among children and parents in single-parent household. Such data at the population level would more likely be able to answer the more general question of whether single parenthood in itself entails greater vulnerability that generally leads to ill health among children and parents or whether this group contains an aggregation of severely vulnerable individuals who account for the entire overrepresentation of poor health.

VetenskapsrÃ�det (The Swedish Research Council)

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