Monoparentalidad

Mother’s educational level and single motherhood: Comparing Spain and Italy

“…As mentioned, previous studies (Flaquer, Almeda, and Navarro 2006;Garriga 2010) show a positive relationship between educational level and single motherhood in both countries, using data from the 1990s or early 2000s. However, using more recent data (EU-SILC 2005, 2011), Table 2 shows that in Spain, the proportion of single mothers is higher among those with tertiary education than among those with lower secondary education or less, while the opposite is true in Italy.…”

“…Previous research performed using data from the 1990s or early 2000s showed that single mothers had higher educational levels than mothers in two-parent families in both Spain and Italy (Flaquer, Almeda, and Navarro 2006;Garriga 2010;McLanahan 2004). The most recent literature on divorce in Southern Europe has found no clear negative gradient of educational level (Bernardi and Martínez-Pastor 2011;Gabrielli and Vignoli 2013).…”

“…However, this ceases to be such a paradox when we take into consideration the composition effect of single parenthood in Southern Europe. Previous studies with data from the 1990s or early 2000s showed a positive relationship between single motherhood and educational level in Southern Europe (Flaquer, Almeda, and Navarro 2006;Garriga 2010;McLanahan 2004), while this relationship was negative in Northern Europe (McLanahan 2004;Kennedy and Thomson 2010). Furthermore, a high percentage of single mothers in Southern Europe live with their parents in order to balance work and family life or escape from poverty (Treviño 2006;Flaquer and Garriga 2009).…”

The change in single mothers’ educational gradient over time in Spain

“…There is some evidence that the transformation of the social composition of family structures has not occurred at the same pace across all Western societies (Härkönen 2014). Data from the 1990s and early 2000s showed that highly educated women in Spain were more likely to live in single-parent families (Treviño 2006;Flaquer, Almeda, and Navarro 2006;Garriga 2010), while the opposite was true in Northern Europe (Kennedy and Thomson 2010;Turunen 2011). However, Garriga, Sarasa, and Berta (2015), using EU-SILC data from waves 2005 and 2011, find that the relationship between mother's educational level and being a single mother is negative in Spain, while it is not significant in Italy.…”

Single-parenthood by choice: Children’s socialization processes into a non-conventional family model

“…Cada una de las vías de acceso a la maternidad/paternidad que hemos examinado en esta investigación impone imperativos (Eckert, 1994) o tareas del desarrollo (Havighurst, 1956) 43,5% en 2001, son los que tienen una mayor presencia en el conjunto, tienden a disminuir ligeramente, constituyendo el único tipo de hogar que tiene un crecimiento negativo a lo largo de los noventa -en torno a un -2%- (Flaquer, Almeda y Navarro-Varas, 2006). Por primera vez en el Censo de 2001 se hace referencia a las familias reconstituidas, formadas por una pareja en la que hay algún hijo no común, fruto de una relación anterior, y representan el 3,6% de las parejas casadas con hijos y el 33,8% de las parejas de hecho no formadas por dos solteros.…”