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Stepfamilies and lone parents: Changing family life in Britain

June 18, 2004

More and more men are raising other men's children, while, in many cases, their own children grow up elsewhere - no fewer than 17% of dads born in 1970 are stepfathers, nearly double the number among men born just 12 years earlier. And six out of 100 babies born in Britain at the turn of the millennium have no contact with their fathers.

These are some of the major new findings about changing family life, reported in ESRC's new publication Seven Ages of Man and Woman as part of Social Science week. The report reveals that:

"¢ 15% of the babies in the Millennium Cohort Study - which is tracking nearly 19,000 babies born in 2000/1 - live just with their mothers. Of these, nearly half see their father at least once a week though nearly four in ten have no contact with him at all.

"¢ Family life among 30-year olds is characterised by instability. Partnership breakdown continues to rise. People born in 1970 are twice as likely as those born 12 years before to have experienced at least one partnership breakdown by 30.

"¢ The number of lone mothers rose to nearly one in five among those born in 1970 compared with one in eight among mothers born in 1958.

"¢ The most rapidly growing family type is the stepfamily, created when a new partnership is formed by a mother and/or father who already have dependent children. Since most children remain with their mother following divorce or separation, most stepfamilies have a stepfather rather than a stepmother. 'Social' as opposed to 'biological' parenting is an important new phenomenon in family life.

"¢ Unmarried cohabiting parenthood is nationally pervasive and quite common. The average is 31% of all parents. The lowest areas record 12%. And in the very highest, around half of births to all couples are to unmarried parents.

"¢ The likelihood that a child will be living with both natural parents understandably declines as he/she gets older. But the probability of living with both natural parents has also fallen over time. Of people born in 1958, almost 90% were still living with both parents at age 16. That proportion dropped to around 82% for people born in 1970, and falls even more dramatically to 65% for children born in 1984-6.

"¢ The increase in the proportion of children not living with both natural parents is composed of increases in the numbers living with a lone mother since birth; those living with a lone parent following parental separation; and those living in stepfamilies.

"¢ The composition of children within a family has changed too. In 1965, the average 7-year old lived with 2.1 other children. Given that 1% of these children were living in stepfamilies, only a tiny minority of these other children would have been step-siblings. Nearly 40 years later, the average child aged between 6 and 8 lives with only 1.5 other siblings, of whom around 10% are step-siblings or half-siblings.

"¢ Sibling composition has an effect on educational attainment. Children in two-child families do better at school than only children, and they also do better than children from larger families - there is a steady decline in attainment with each additional sibling after the first.

"¢ For any given family size, eldest children do significantly better than their younger siblings, which may be attributable to having more undivided attention from their parents in the early years.

Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC)