The traditional family model is disintegrating in England and Wales, with research suggesting almost half of children now grow up outside traditional two-parent homes.
Dame Rachel de Souza, England’s Children’s Commissioner, has published preliminary findings from her Family Review that “44 per cent of children born at the start of the century, were not in a nuclear family for their full childhood, compared to 21 per cent of children born in 1970.”
The review’s estimates suggest that the breakdown of the nuclear family is more pronounced in some demographics than others, with Black Caribbean families being most likely to be single-parent arrangements by some distance, at 57 per cent. For Black African families the figure is 44 per cent, and for ‘Other’ black families the figure is 47 per cent.
Families categorised as ‘Asian’ appear to have the lowest rate of single parenthood, with Bangladeshis at 10 per cent, Indians at 11 per cent, Chinese at 18 per cent, Pakistanis at 19 per cent, and ‘Other’ Asian families at 17 per cent. Rates of co-habiting, as opposed to marriage or civil partnership, are also very low among the Asian groups, at no higher than three per cent.
White families seem to fall somewhere in between the extremes, with single parenthood highest in the White British category at 22 per cent, slightly lower in the White Irish category at 20 per cent, and lowest among ‘Other’ whites at 17 per cent.
There is much more variance among mixed families, with a single parenthood high among mixed White and Black Caribbean being joint second-highest with ‘Other’ black families at 47 per cent and relatively high among mixed White and Black African families at 32 per cent.
The rate is much lower for mixed White and Asian families, at 18 per cent, and ‘Other Mixed’ families, at 25 per cent.
All told, England and Wales have among the highest rates of single parenthood in Europe, behind only Denmark and the Baltic States of Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania.
Dame Rachel’s statement on the findings also speaks to families’ drastic shrinkage in the modern era, with 42 per cent having just one child, 42 per cent two children, and just 15 per cent having three or more children.
As with single parenthood, however, the figures are not even across different demographics, with the “share of families with three or more children [varying] from 14 per cent in White British families to 41 per cent in Pakistani families and 38 per cent in Bangladeshi families.”
Fully 80,000 children are estimated to be in state care, with “many more in less formal arrangements, including kinship care.”
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