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This study investigates housing conditions of single mothers in the context of housing policies. We study single mothers' probability to experience housing deprivation, overcrowded housing, overburdening costs of housing, and neighbourhood problems across European countries. We consider the structural consequences of home ownership rates, and policies related to regulation of rental markets, housing benefits and housing prices. We apply a multi-level framework to EU-SILC data on 21,937 single mothers, from 195 country-years and covering 21 European countries from 2008 to 2017. First, we find a trade-off in the provision of free housing or housing at reduced rents, that helps to reduce housing cost overburden for single mothers, but is also associated with higher rates of housing deprivation, overcrowding and neighbourhood problems. Next, in contexts with stricter rental market regulation, single mothers' housing deprivation is lower. Higher housing benefits reduce the risk of housing deprivation as well as overcrowding, but in contexts where home ownership is common, single mothers tend to experience more overcrowding. Single mothers are more likely to report neighbourhood problems in societies where housing prices are high. Our findings suggest that factors within the control of policy makers can be beneficial to the housing conditions of single mothers.

This study evaluates the strengths and weaknesses of defamilization as a concept for analysing state-market-family relationships in comparative perspective. A paradox has emerged around defamilization in the last decade; its use in empirical large-N research has grown markedly despite mounting criticism in theoretical discussions. Applying criteria of conceptual goodness, we find that the popularity of the concept is based on its high degree of parsimony, theoretical utility and field utility, but that there are problems with the resonance, coherence and differentiation of the concept. We argue that defamilization is most coherent and has greatest utility if the concept’s roots in welfare state theory are fully acknowledged. In our view, this means that defamilization is best understood a) alongside the separate concept of familization, b) as a multidimensional concept in terms of economic and social dependencies in family relationships, and c) as a means of addressing both gender and intergenerational dependencies. Although suitable for operationalization in empirical research, the concept hence imposes high demands regarding the required data and possible analyses.

This paper investigates links between social inequality and reproductive behavior. It complements the extensive research on the stratification of young adults' life chances in education and the labor market by considering changes over time in the stratification of contraceptive use at first intercourse by parental background. We seek to understand detraditionalization trends in young people’s sexually intimate behavior by investigating whether these trends were driven by particular social groups and how they were supported by policy initiatives. We study Italy from 1950 to 2006, which shows strong regional and socioeconomic disparities, and comparatively slow changes in religiosity and gender norms. Data from the “Survey on Italians’ Sexual Behavior” (2006) and macro indicators on family planning centers are used. The findings show a steep increase in contraceptive use at first sexual intercourse over time, stratified by parental background, but only for condom use. We did not find that family planning centers intervened in these relationships.

This study investigates whether generous family policies at the transition to parenthood reduce single and partnered mothers’ economic disadvantages later in the life course. Previous research usually focused on the immediate effects of family policies and disregards potential longer-term effects. In this study, we suggest taking a life-course perspective to study the relationships between family policy and mothers’ poverty risks. We empirically investigate how investment in child benefits, childcare services and parental leave measures at the transition to parenthood are associated with poverty outcomes at later life stages and whether these associations hold over time. We draw on pooled EU-SILC data, and an original policy dataset based on OECD expenditure data for child benefits, childcare and parental leave from 1994 to 2015. We find that mothers’ observed increase in poverty over time is slower in countries with high levels of spending for childcare at the transition to parenthood than in lower spending countries. The gap between partnered and single mothers was also diminishing in contexts of high childcare expenditure. For the other two policies, we did not find these links. These results do lend support to the claim that childcare is a prime example of a social investment policy with returns later in the life course and represents a life-course policy that seems to be able to disrupt economic path dependencies. The results for the other two policies suggest, however, a limited potential of family policy spending at transition to parenthood to reduce the poverty gap between partnered and single mothers over the course of life.

This article examines longitudinal patterns of work–family reconciliation across Europe and whether the influence of defamilizing policies on those patterns is contingent on the normative context. Data from the Survey of Health, Ageing and Retirement and sequence analysis are used to reconstruct and analyze women’s family and employment life courses from age fifteen to fifty years, born in the period between 1924 and 1966 from fourteen countries. Historic family policy data and gender attitudes collected in the International Social Survey Programme are included in multinomial regressions. Results suggest that defamilization and gender egalitarianism increase the labor market attachment of women with traditional family life courses independently.

This chapter provides a systematic overview of some of the most widely used concepts in comparative family policy research. We situate the conceptual approaches in their respective research tradition, define the concepts’ main characteristics, and highlight differences and similarities between concepts. All approaches we discuss are rooted in feminist and mainstream comparative welfare state research that considers nation-states as the main unit of analysis. To foreclose some of our conclusions, similarities between the concepts seem often stronger than the differences. However, we show that there are important nuances, which can be critical in drawing comparative conclusions about family policy and its expected outcomes. We argue that some of the conceptual nuances have been blurred over time and this takes its toll on the conceptual rigor in the research field. The chapter provides the basis for informed choices on using one rather than another concept in empirical comparative family policy research.

Income inequality has grown in many countries over the past decades. Single country studies have investigated how trends in family demography, such as rising female employment, assortative mating and single parenthood, have affected this development. But the combined effects have not been studied sufficiently, much less in a comparative perspective. We apply decomposition and counterfactual analyses to Luxembourg Income Study data from the 1990s and 2000s for West Germany and the USA. We counterfactually analyse how changes in the distribution of men’s and women’s education, employment and children across households between the 1990s and 2000s affected overall inequality (Theil index). We find that changes in family demography between the 1990s and the 2000s explain inequality growth in West Germany but not in the USA, where the effects of gendered changes in education and employment offset each other. In West Germany, changes in the distribution of household types, and particularly changes in men’s employment and education, contributed to increases in income inequality. The country differences in the relationship between changes in family demography and inequality growth reflect how the decline in men’s and the growth in women’s employment played out differently in the weakening male breadwinner context in West Germany and in the universal breadwinner context in the USA.

Der starke Fokus der Forschung und Politik auf das okonomische Wohlbefinden Alleinerziehender uberdeckt die moglichen Auswirkungen der Lebensform auf andere Lebensbereiche. Ein weit geringerer Teil der empirischen Forschung widmet sich bisher dem sozialen Wohlbefinden, wie der Einbindung in soziale Netzwerke. Auch als sozialpolitisches Ziel steht die soziale Einbindung Alleinerziehender hinter den Zielen ihrer Arbeitsmarktintegration und Einkommenssicherung zuruck. Dieses Kapitel widmet sich deshalb der Dimension des sozialen Wohlbefindens Alleinerziehender unter Berucksichtigung der Lebensverlaufsperspektive.

Der hauptsachliche Fokus von Forschung und Politik zum Thema Alleinerziehen ist die okonomische Situation von alleinerziehenden Muttern und ihren Kindern. Dies ist traditionell der Bereich, in dem der Wohlfahrtsstaat unterstutzend in das Familienleben eingreift. In Deutschland stehen Alleinerziehenden unterschiedliche familienpolitische Leistungen zur Verfugung, die direkt oder indirekt auf ihre okonomische Position wirken sollen. Auch im vorliegenden Kapitel wird der Fokus auf die okonomische Situation Alleinerziehender im Wohlfahrtsstaat eingenommen, um der viel diskutierten Thematik mit der Lebensverlaufdimension eine neue Perspektive hinzuzufugen.

With targeted childcare initiatives and welfare-to-work programmes policy-makers have sought to address employment activation of lone mothers and negative outcomes for children in lone parent households. The present study examines non-parental childcare use and maternal employment among children living in lone and co-parent family situations at ages three and four and emotional and behavioural difficulties at ages four and five. The results demonstrate that negative outcomes associated with lone motherhood are explained largely by mother's age, education, material circumstances and area deprivation; and that maternal employment does not relieve lone mothers’ disadvantages in a way that alleviates the risks of difficulties to their children. However, in any family constellation, mainly group-based formal pre-school childcare does have a positive impact on child difficulties compared to drawing on informal childcare arrangements as main provider. In addition, and specifically for the difficulties of children in lone mother family situations, any non-parental childcare – formal or informal − for at least twenty-five hours per week is beneficial. Study findings support policy agendas which tackle families’ material hardship beyond promoting mothers’ employment, and through investment in formal childcare provision, and also through arrangements allowing lone mothers to divide their weekly load of childcare with another main provider.

Family policy is not easily conceptualized or measured in comparative research. Previous approaches are highly diverse and have yielded mixed empirical results in terms of placing countries’ family policy profiles in the international landscape and mapping their trajectories. This article reviews the long-standing discussion of the familization and defamilization concepts popular in comparative research, derives a conceptual framework and provides an in-depth discussion of current empirical approaches. It tackles the lacking consensus on how familization and defamilization are measured, arguing that interventions in gender-specific and intergenerational dependencies are the key dimensions and that measurement at policy level is best suited to capture within- and cross-country variation in family policy. Using data on 21 European countries, the article proposes measures that acknowledge the different dimensions of familization and defamilization. The proposed indicators prove to be useful for mapping a range of European countries’ family policy constellations but are bound by data restrictions. Therefore, the article makes a strong claim for improving the availability of internationally comparable family policy data. Dieser Beitrag ist mit Zustimmung des Rechteinhabers aufgrund einer (DFG-geförderten) Allianz- bzw. Nationallizenz frei zugänglich / This publication is with permission of the rights owner freely accessible due to an Alliance licence and a national licence (funded by the DFG, German Research Foundation) respectively.