Why It Matters Simgle Parent Households
Summary
We have captured the number of residents in your postcode who are single parents with dependent children as well as their employment status.
Interpretation
| Dataset | Explanation |
|---|---|
| Postcode Adult Population | This tells you the total number of adults aged 16 and over living in your postcode. |
| Percentage of residents that are Single Parents | This tells you the percentage of all the households in your neighbourhood that can be classified as being led by single parents with dependent children. |
| Percentage of residents that are Single Parents in Employment | This tells you the percentage of all the households in your neighbourhood that can be classified as being led by single parents with dependent children who are in Employment. |
| Percentage of residents that are Single Parents not in Employment | This tells you the percentage of all the households in your neighbourhood that can be classified as being led by single parents with dependent children who are not in Employment. |
| Z-score Single Parents | This tells you how many standard deviations above or below the mean your postcode is regarding the percentage of households in your neighbourhood that can be classified as being led by single parents with dependent children. |
| Z-score Single Parents in Employment | This tells you how many standard deviations above or below the mean your postcode is regarding the percentage of households in your neighbourhood that can be classified as being led by single parents with dependent children who are in employment. |
| Z-score Single Parents not in Employment | This tells you how many standard deviations above or below the mean your postcode is regarding the percentage of households in your neighbourhood that can be classified as being led by single parents with dependent children who are not in employment. |
Why the metric matters from a commercial inhabitant’s perspective
Commercial inhabitants will benefit from knowing the proportion of this demographic that they have in their area. Retailers, for example, will find that this will dictate the needs of their local customer base. For example, the affordability of nurseries and other parent-baby services are more likely to be an issue in areas with a high proportion of lone parents.
There is also a correlation between a high proportion of this demographic and lower disposable income so high-end goods and services may be less in demand in such areas.
Why the metric matters from a residential inhabitant’s perspective
Whether or not a neighbourhood has a high proportion of this demographic or not will have an impact on the feel of your locale. In households where we have lone parents with dependent children, managerial responsibilities for children cannot be shared, so consequently, in some cases, not all aspects of child management can be present. Therefore, some negative manifestations of this can be present such as higher rates of crime, higher truancy rates and in some cases lower educational attainment. Dependent children of lone parents are quite likely to show mature tendencies earlier, due to having to take on more responsibility at an earlier age, such as transporting oneself to school, so they may be more independent earlier compared to peers from couple parent families.
These tendencies may result in more territorial behaviour. Such children are not mature enough to engage in wider network communities, so they may redirect that territoriality toward the local community. This sense of maturity and territoriality may also make such communities more resistant to change. One will also notice an altered social order, where young children who are highly independent are instructing young children. A likely practical effect of living in an area with a high proportion of households with lone parents and dependent children is greater pressure on public transport.
(Photograph: Wikimedia Commons)
General commentary
There are 1.7 million lone parents with dependent children in the UK, caring for 3 million children. Approximately a quarter of all households with children are headed by a single parent. The median age for a lone parent is 38 and only 1.4 percent of lone parents are teenagers.
In London, there are approximately 343, 800 lone parents with dependent children. We care about this statistic because children in single parent families are twice as likely to live in relative poverty as those in families headed by a couple, 47 percent versus 24 percent. Relative poverty means they cannot afford “an ordinary living pattern” so are excluded from the activities and opportunities that the average person enjoys. A household is in relative poverty if its income is below 60 percent of the median household income.
This is despite 67.1 percent of single parents being employed. In fact, in London, between 2007 and 2015, single parent employment grew much faster than anywhere else in the UK, from 48 to 63 percent. Rates of employment for lone parents with dependent children increase with the age of the child and remain poor for single parents to children of pre-school age - almost one in two are do not work, with the most common reason cited being access to affordable and decent childcare.
This is not helped by the fact that less than one in ten has shared care arrangements to assist with looking after their children. Single parents are also overwhelmingly women - nine in ten to be precise. The one in ten single parents who are men are more than twice as likely to be widowed than single mothers.
Trivia
Less than two per cent of single parents in the UK are teenagers. The average age of a single parent is around 38 years; single mothers tend to be younger than single fathers on average (38 years compared with 45 years old, respectively).
History
As lone parent families with dependent children may arise through either a marriage or cohabitation which has ended or, less commonly today, through the death of a partner or spouse, to look at the history of single parents in London we must consider the history of divorce and children outside of marriage.
The latter was stigmatised in British society until startlingly recently. As late as the 1950s women who fell pregnant outside of marriage may have been sent to residential homes to have their babies and then generally have them adopted to avoid a perceived stigma at the time in the majority of social circles.
Records from as far back as Jacobean London, paint an even sadder picture as even though rates of illegitimacy were low, where it did occur, the rate of infanticide of illegitimate children was high compared with today’s very low rates. By the 1730s onward, attitudes had slightly evolved, as demonstrated by declining prosecutions in London for infanticide and the establishment of ‘foundling’ hospitals for abandoned babies. Policy at the time was geared more towards helping single mothers than stigmatising them at last. The nineteenth century in London, by contrast, was one characterised by lower marriage age and higher rates of fertility in and out of marriage and thus higher rates of illegitimacy.
When the earliest form of social insurance finally came into effect in 1925, it was granted to widowed mothers but not divorced or unmarried ones – the state clearly still did not want to provide a safety net to lone parents.
This changed with the introduction of the 1948 National Assistance Act which gave unmarried mothers the same small government aid as widowed mothers. However, until the 1977 Housing Act, it remained almost impossible for lone mothers to get a council flat since, as single people, they had fewer ‘points’ than couples.
The fastest growing type of family with dependent children since 1996 is cohabiting couples which increased from 7 percent in 1996 to 15 per cent by 2017. Dependent children living in a married couple family (including both opposite- and same-sex couples) fell by 9 percentage points to 64 percent in the same period. The percentage of dependent children living in lone parent families has remained very stable in this same period; 21 percent in 2017 compared with 20 percent in 1996.
The story of employment for lone parents with dependent children has been a more positive one in recent decades. Twenty years ago, the majority of single parents were not in work whilst today, nearly seven in ten are now in work. Part of this increase reflects policy decisions that finally recognised the need to support single parents to work. The introduction of tax credits in the late 1990s for families on a low income allowed single parents to top up their income even when working part-time. The expansion of childcare provision and introduction of targeted support for up to 70 (and subsequently 80) percent of childcare costs through working tax credits meant a marked increase in support for childcare. At the same time, Job centre made amendments to their policies to cater to single parents; specialist lone parent advisers were introduced, and voluntary employment support programmes (e.g. the New Deal for Lone Parents – launched nationally in 1998, before being replaced briefly by the Flexible New Deal in 2009 and the Work Programme by 2011) found some success.
In terms of the history of divorce in the UK, before 1858, divorce was rare and required an act of Parliament. It was only in 1858 that divorce could be carried out via legal process. Even then divorce was too expensive for most people, and there was the added challenge for wives of proving “aggravated” adultery - that their husbands had been guilty of cruelty, desertion, bigamy, incest, sodomy or bestiality.
The percentage of opposite-sex couples marrying through religious ceremonies has decreased steadily over time. In 1900, religious ceremonies accounted for 85 percent of all marriages, by 1980 this had fallen to 50 percent. Since 1992, civil marriages have increasingly outnumbered religious marriages every year.
In the late nineteenth century, the introduction of the first more widespread contraceptives meant that marriage and procreation did not have to go hand in hand at least within the Anglican and Church of England religions. In the 1960s divorce suddenly became more common after the Divorce Reform Act of 1969, because couples could cite marital breakdown as the reason for the split rather than having to go to lengths to gain evidence of one of the previous grounds.