Elderly women living alone in Spain: the importance of having children

Abstract

Our goal in this paper is to analyse the extent to which completed fertility, and in particular childlessness, is a valid predictor of living alone at advanced ages, an increasingly important residential option in advanced societies with crucial implications for social policy design and the organization of welfare services. Based on micro-data from the 2011 Spanish population census, logistic regression techniques are used to assess the impact of fertility on living alone among elderly women net the effect of age, marital status, educational attainment, and other standard population controls. Our results show a clear relationship between completed fertility and living alone. Childlessness is strongly associated with living alone, while having offspring acts as a powerful buffer against living alone, particularly in larger families. A relevant conclusion of this study is that a growing deficit of family resources available for the elderly women will take place in those societies where low fertility and high rates of childlessness have prevailed in recent decades, leading to substantial growth in the number of childless elderly women and in the incidence of living alone during later life.

Living Alone in Later Life: A Global Perspective

“…In families prone to higher mortality or in those with very low fertility, the options to reside with kin will be more limited than in large families with many children (Kobrin ; Pampel ; Wister and Burch ; Wolf ; Iacovou ; Gaymu et al. ; Koropeckyj‐Cox and Call ; Reher and Requena ). The supply of available kin, important as it is, may have little to do with the willingness of the family group to assume this role or with people's expectations.…”

“…This cap on living alone appears to be related to increasingly active public interventions for the elderly (institutions) and the enhanced joint survival of spouses (Keilman and Christiansen ). In other developed countries, often in areas characterized by strong family systems, increases in living alone have been less pronounced than in preceding decades (Reher and Requena ; Zueras and Miret ). In other parts of the world, a different pattern holds, with often substantial increases in many rapidly developing societies (for example, South Korea, Iran, Argentina, China, Costa Rica, Brazil, Ecuador, South Africa, Indonesia, Vietnam).…”

Living Alone over the Life Course: Cross‐National Variations on an Emerging Issue

“…; Requena et al. ; Reher and Requena , ; United Nations ). We lack large comparative studies that compare levels of living alone across societies, age groups, and sex.…”

“…Spousal or partner mortality often leads to solo living. People's fertility histories may have also implications for co‐residence in later life, especially today when levels of childlessness are very high in parts of the world (Dommaraju ; Hayford ; Reher and Requena , ). Never‐married, divorced, widowed, and childless people earmarked for living alone in later life are a potential burden both for their families and for health and care systems.…”

Women living alone in later life: A multicountry comparative analysis

“…This paper is the last of a series of recent studies in this line of research where living alone during later life is analysed from different perspectives with multivariable statistical techniques based on microcensus and administrative data (Padyab, Reher, Requena, & Sandström, ; Reher & Requena, ; Reher & Requena, ). Its goal is to explore these issues further by comparing the determinants of living alone among women in six countries belonging to different family systems from both the developed and the developing world including Tanzania, Kyrgyzstan, Indonesia, Brazil, Spain, and Sweden circa 2011.…”