Family Complexity and Young Children’s Health Outcomes in the UK: A Longitudinal Study

Michaela Kyclova , University of St Andrews
Nissa Finney, University of St Andrews
Katherine Keenan , University of St Andrews

This paper investigates the association between family complexity and children’s health outcomes. Families have become more complex due to a rise in divorce, cohabitation, non-marital childbearing and multi-partner fertility. Thus, children are increasingly likely to grow up in a non-traditional family structure. Evidence suggests that children from two-parent married families fare better in terms of health, behavioural, developmental and educational outcomes compared to children from complex families (e.g., single parent families, post-divorce families, or stepfamilies). However, existing studies on family complexity and its consequences for children’s outcomes only very rarely include detailed longitudinal measures of both parental relationship trajectories and children’s outcomes. Using data from the UK Household Longitudinal Study, we employ longitudinal measures of both parental relationship trajectories and children’s physical and mental health outcomes. Using sequence analysis to holistically capture partnership trajectories and panel regression to assess their association with child health, preliminary results indicate that mental health is worse for children who do not live with a stably married mother during their first five years. Compared to those living with stably married mothers, children of separated mothers or those experiencing separation in the child's first three years are at lowest odds of good health. Currently, the states used in sequence analysis only include maternal partnership status – however, these will be extended to include fathers’ relatedness to the child, sibling composition and presence of extended kin in the household to capture the complexity of the family environment context children grow up in.

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 Presented in Session 68. Divorce and children