No abstract

This paper studies postseparation fertility behavior. The aim is to investigate whether, and if so how, separation affects second birth spacing in Western European countries.\ud This analysis makes use of rich survey data from Belgium, France, Germany, Italy, Spain, and the United Kingdom, as well as from Finnish register data. We thus cover the behavior of a large proportion of the population of Western Europe. We also use descriptive measures, such as Kaplan‒Meier survival functions and cumulative incidence curves. In the multivariate analysis, we employ event history modeling to show how education relates to postseparation fertility behavior. There are large differences in postseparation fertility behavior across European countries. For Spain and Italy, we find that only a negligibly small proportion of the population have a second child after separating from the other parent of the firstborn child. The countries with the highest proportion of second children with a new partner are the United Kingdom, Germany, and Finland. In all countries, separation after first birth leads to a sharp increase in the birth interval between first and second births. \ud Our study is a contribution to the demographic literature that aims at understanding birth spacing patterns in Western Europe. Furthermore, we draw attention to the role of postseparation policies in explaining country differences in fertility behavior in contemporary societies

This article analyses childbearing in stepfamilies in Canada, using the 2001 General Social Survey on family. It estimates the probability that stepfamily couples will give birth to a child according to the composition of the stepfamily, and then moves on to explore the factors that are associated with such an event. Particular attention is given to the type of union, parental status, and number of children of both partners. Contrary to past studies, this research is based not only on women’s retrospective conjugal and parental histories but also on those reported by male respondents, and it controls for women’s work status.

Identifying conditions under which parents thrive is a key concern of family research. Prior research often focused on mothers’ well-being in single life domains, yet it is more likely to be shaped by stressors that stem directly from the parenting role and related stressors emerging from spillover processes into other domains. We therefore examine how stressors concerning mothers’ subjective, relational, and financial well-being accumulate and combine within subgroups of mothers and whether the likelihood to belong to these multidimensional subgroups varies by family structure. Using representative German data ( N = 11,242), latent class analysis revealed four distinct subgroups of maternal well-being with varying exposure to financial, psychological, and relational stressors. Regression models showed that particularly single mothers were at risk to belong to the most vulnerable group with exposure to multiple stressors. Findings are discussed in light of persisting disparities among post-separation families despite demographic trends toward growing family diversity.

The amount of household debt tripled globally over the last decades and a sizable share of individuals and families are overindebted due to mortgages, credit cards, or consumer debt. Yet research on the distribution of debt across families, and potential ripple effects of the psychological burden related to debt on well-being and family relations, remains sparse. Our study aims to fill these gaps by examining the socio-demographic profiles of families that have accumulated household debt and the unique role that the psychological burden related to debt plays on associations between mothers’ well-being, parental dynamics, and child adjustment based on the Family Stress Model (FSM). We used representative survey data collected in 2019 from Germany (N = 3271), which is one of the richest economies worldwide, yet about 10% of adults reported to be overindebted. Logistic regression results showed that single mothers were less likely to have debt compared to mothers in two-parent families. However, both single mothers and mothers in stepfamilies with high levels of perceived economic strain were particularly likely to report having debt. Structural equation modeling yielded that the links between the psychological burden of debt, maternal well-being, parental dynamics, and child adjustment were largely in line with the FSM, except for single mothers. We conclude that persisting financial disparities by family structure may be partially fostered by unique characteristics of the German welfare state, such as promoting more a traditional two-parent norm, and discuss our findings in light of practical implications.