The Transition Process into Single Motherhood: The Impact on Health and Wellbeing
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| License | CC Attribution 3.0 Unported: You are free to use, adapt and copy, distribute and transmit the work or content in adapted or unchanged form for any legal purpose as long as the work is attributed to the author in the manner specified by the author or licensor. | |
| Identifiers | 10.21036/LTPUB10810 (DOI) | |
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Transcript: English(auto-generated)
00:04
I'm interested in the dynamics of the single mother episode and the changes of health and well-being over their lifespan. We see a drop in marriages and an increase in divorce and cohabitation. Changes in patterns of marriage, divorce and cohabitation have contributed to a considerable proportion of single parent families.
00:24
In Germany, for example, there is an increase from 1.28 million single parents in 1996 to 1.6 million in 2015. Previous literature has shown that single mothers suffer disproportionately higher rates of physical and mental illness compared to partnered mothers.
00:44
However, this literature only focuses on the comparison of single mothers to partnered mothers. And only little is known about what happens already before the single mother becomes a single mother and over the whole single mother episode. My research question is, which determinants affect women's health within the
01:03
transition into single motherhood and over the whole single mother episode? It is particularly important to understand whether health and well-being worsen with the transition into single motherhood. For example, because of the conflicts in the family due to the separation, which might then have negative effects on health.
01:23
Or are single mothers a negatively selected group? That would be the case when we see first the poor health conditions, for example depression, which might then cause the separation and becoming a single mother. To wrap up, I have two main research questions. First, does the health and well-being worsen with the transition into single motherhood?
01:42
And second, when we look over the single mother episode, what are the determinants that improve or worsen single mother's health and well-being? The key challenge in analyzing single mother's health and well-being in a longitudinal perspective is to find the right data.
02:02
We need data that provides all information necessary to identify single mothers. We need the information who moves in, who moves out of the household. We need the information about the age of the youngest child. It is also important to have several measurements of the socio-economic circumstances. We need to see for several times the income and the employment status and of course also the health and well-being.
02:26
We consider individual characteristics in the longitudinal perspective using the socio-economic panel. The sub is the representative data for the whole German population. Our approach is the identification of intra-personal variation.
02:40
Therefore, we make use of the fixed effects regression, the within estimator for time-varying factors. We are not interested in a comparison of groups, for example, low-educated versus high-educated women or non-employed versus full-time employed. We are interested what happens to health and well-being when a woman changes the status.
03:02
What happens when the woman changes from non-employed to full-time employment? This approach, in combination with using the German panel data, allows us to find the mechanisms behind the potential health disadvantage of single mothers. Our key results are that we find different patterns for health and well-being.
03:23
While health captures the health satisfaction of the respondents, well-being captures the life satisfaction of the respondents. We see for both outcomes that there is a drop already before the woman becomes a single mother. We call this the anticipation effect. We see that separation has a much stronger effect on well-being than on health.
03:44
But we see that health still declines over the whole single-parent episode while well-being adjusts over a certain time of period and even reaches the same level we observed before the mother separated. When we look at the determinants on health and well-being, we see that
04:02
for the transition, the loss in wealth affects the health and well-being negatively. And when we have a look on the determinants over the life course, we see that the expansion in employment, for example, from non-employed to full-time employment, affects consistently the health and well-being in a positive way.
04:23
Another interesting finding is that when the mother repartners but the partner doesn't live in the household, it has a positive effect on health and well-being. As our results show that the employment has a positive impact on health and
04:42
well-being, it is important to give the single mothers also the opportunity to work. If there is no grandma living close by or no institutional childcare, single mothers simply can't go working. We know that institutional childcare is important to child development and parental employment regardless of being a single parent or a partner parent.
05:05
But for single parents, institutional childcare is even more important. Therefore, the access to universal childcare should be the top priority for family policies. The implementation of reliable and extended childcare with covering off-peak times might bring an
05:20
improvement in single mothers' health and well-being and ensure a balance of work and family. What we have done is focusing on single mothers, but what about single fathers? Considerably little is known about single fathers because of the lack of representative data, as the vast majority of single parents are heated by women.
05:45
However, the number of single fathers has been increased in the last decades. And in some countries, single fathers are even the fastest-growing family type. We have the chance now to work with high-quality Danish registered data covering the total Danish population.
06:03
That means that we have all single fathers in Denmark covered in our data set and we are having a reasonable sample size, analyzing their health and mortality.
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