Socio-economic status and the educational level of parents is more important than family structure for children’s .jpg)
welfare, a major new study [1] says.
The study, Family Relationships and Family Well-Being, written by Professor Tony Fahey of UCD, suggests that says the education level of the mother is particularly important in giving a child a good start in life.
The measures used by the study to estimate well-being include the child’s reading and mathematical ability, their social and emotional adjustment as well as their physical health, such as having a long-term illness like asthma.
The paper was published yesterday by Children’s Minister Frances Fitzgerald.
It is based on a sample of 8,568 nine-year-olds from the National Longitudinal Study.
Professor Fahey told The Irish Independent that the study showed that family structure was “not the over-riding influence on the well-being of a child”.
He said: “Our findings show only a slight, or, in many cases, a complete absence of differences in the indicators of child well-being between children of two-parent married families, co-habiting families, step-families, and one-parent families.
“The single most important mechanism that public policy can use to combat family problems is to tackle educational disadvantage.”
However, a range of studies from the US and UK show that family structure is a key component of child welfare, even when socio-economic status is taken into account.
A 2010 Pew Survey showed that “among children who start in the bottom third of the income distribution, only 26 percent with divorced parents move up to the middle or top third as adults, compared to 50 percent of children with continuously married parents.”
Findings from the UCD study also show:
· Eight out of 10 of nine-year-olds surveyed live with both their natural parents and 17.5pc are in lone parent families. Some 3pc are in step-families which, in nearly all cases, is when the mother has found a new partner.
· One in five of never-married lone parents live with at least one grandparent, a feature of their living arrangements that researchers found to be positive for their well-being, though not necessarily for the well-being of their children.
· Better educated parents were shown to be more likely to delay the start of child-bearing until their late 20s, while the least educated mothers were more inclined to have a first child before age 25. Among these “early start” mothers, the likelihood of being unmarried lone parents was high.
The study also revealed that married couples had three children on average, while unmarried lone parents have a 1.8 children.
Dr Fahey added: “With stability in couple relationships weakest among the least educated parents – and this weakness tending to reduce family size – many families of the least educated parents are now smaller than the overall average.”
He pointed out that “this is a significant reversal on the past historical situation in Ireland”.
Mothers with little or no secondary school education were five to six times more likely to smoke.
And they were more than three times more likely to show depressive symptoms than mothers with a postgraduate education.
Mothers who live with with their parents were half as likely as other mothers to suffer from depression or to smoke daily. One in five lone mothers live with their own parents.