The changing family in international perspective; families are becoming smaller and less traditional as fertility rates fall and more persons live alone; Scandinavian countries are the pacesetters in developing nontraditional forms of family living, but the United States has the highest incidence of divorce and of single-parent households - The American Family During the 20th Century

Monthly Labor Review, March, 1990 by Constance Sorrentino

Single-parent families increase

Intercountry comparisons of single-parent families are restricted by variations in definitions. The main issues relate to the upper age limit for children and the presence or absence of cohabiting parents. (See appendix.) For the comparison presented in table 8, the Bureau of Labor Statistics has obtained data for recent years using the under-18 age limit for children--the U.S. definition--allowing for more valid international comparisons of lone-parent households.

All countries shown in table 8, except Japan, have experienced significant increases in single-parent households as a proportion of all family households with children. Allowing for definitional differences, it is clear that the United States has the highest proportion of single-parent households. (See chart 1.) In 1988, more than 1 in 5 U.S. households with dependent children were single-parent households, up from fewer than 1 in 10 in 1960. Only Denmark approaches the U.S. level in the 1980's, and the Danish data are overstated because they count single-parent families instead of households; that is, they include single parents who are part of a larger household, while the U.S. figures exclude such parents. (In 1987, one-parent family groups in the United States represented 27 percent of all families with children; this figure is more comparable to the Danish proportion of 20 percent.) In France, the Netherlands, and the United Kingdom, the incidence of lone parenthood was in the range of 10 percent to 15 percent of all households with children. Using the under-18 age limit, Sweden's proportion of lone-parent families in 1985 was closer to the U.S. proportion in 1980, but well below the U.S. figure in 1988. Of the countries covered in table 8, Japan had by far the lowest incidence of single parenthood: 5 percent to 6 percent of all households with children in the period since 1960. This is to be expected, given the low rates of divorce and births out of wedlock in Japan.

The paths to single parenthood are numerous: Marriage and childbirth with subsequent widowhood; separation or divorce; and childbirth without marriage or consensual union. Combinations of events may lead to an exit from or reentry into single-parent status--for example, divorce and subsequent remarriage. The growth in the number of single-parent families has some common demographic elements in all the countries studied.

In Europe and North America, there is a growing proportion of those entering single parenthood through marital dissolution (separation and divorce) and childbirth outside marriage, and a diminishing share arising through the premature death of a spouse. Prior to the last three decades, single-parent families were usually formed as the result of the death of one of the parents.

A recent study indicates that, with the exception of the United States, the growth of divorced and separated mothers was responsible for the vast majority of the net increase in one-parent families since 1970.(13) In the United States, family dissolution also accounted for the majority of the net increase, but the growing number of never-married mothers contributed about 40 percent of the increase as well. Even in Japan, divorce or separation has become the predominant route to single parenthood.