European Perspectives on non-marital childbearing

Citation: Kiernan, K. (1999) European Perspectives on non-marital childbearing.
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Tagged: uw-madison (RSS), wisconsin (RSS), sociology (RSS), demography (RSS), prelim (RSS), qual (RSS), WisconsinDemographyPrelimAugust2009 (RSS)

Summary

The author uses the European Fertility and Family Surveys (FFS) to analyze non-marital childbearing in Europe. Facts: - Non-marital childbearing levels: over 40% in Nordic countries and in the other extreme Italy and Greece less than 10%. - Cohabitation is strikingly most common in the Nordic countries and France, relatively rare in Southern European countries and Ireland, with the rest of West European countries falling between the two extremes. - Generally, countries with high levels of cohabitation have higher rates of non-marital childbearing and vice-versa. - In Spain and Italy is clearly apparent that first marriage is the pre-eminent context for first births. In fact, for almost all countries is normative to become a mother in one's first partnership; - Having a child prior to a partnership is a minor practice in many countries including countries with high levels of marital childbearing and countries with low levels. There has been a movement away from having a child within marriage to having a child within a cohabiting union but the proportions of women having a child outside a partnership per se has exhibited little change. - Education: there is no general pattern; - Religion: it is clearly apparent in all countries that those who became mothers within marriage were more religious than their counterparts who had their first child in other contexts; - Parental divorce: those who experienced parental divorce during childhood were more likely to have a child within a cohabiting union than those women without such an experience; - Partnership: in most countries the majority of women, more than 70%, who had a child on their own had subsequently cohabited or married. Sweden had the lowest proportions of never-married partnered mothers (12%) and France is an outlier where 45% of the solo mothers reported not having entered a union by the time they were interviewed for the survey. Amongst those who entered a union the majority practice was to cohabit rather than to marry directly. The exceptions to this were the two southern European countries of Spain and Italy where 2 out of 3 of the mothers who had a child on their own were married. - Conversion of cohabitation into marriages: France and Great Britain lowest proportions and Switzerland, Austria, Italy and Sweden highest proportions (70% or more). - Divorce: in all countries children born within marriage were less likely to see their parents separate than those born to a cohabiting union. Within the set of cohabiting unions those, which had not been converted into marriages, were the most fragile.