Suchergebnisse

This study uses the Luxembourg Income Study (LIS) data from 2013 to study (1) the contribution of child maintenance to the income packages of lone mothers, (2) the proportion of lone mothers receiving child maintenance and the level of child maintenance for those receiving it and (3) the extent to which child maintenance is helping families who may need it the most (those at the low end of the income distribution), compared with families with moderate or higher incomes. Our analysis covers data from five countries: Finland, Germany, Spain, United Kingdom and the United States. Our results show that in all countries except the United Kingdom, labour income is an important source of income for lone mothers and less than 40 percent of income comes from social transfers. Child maintenance contributes significantly to the income of lone mothers, particularly in Spain, followed by the United States and Germany. We find the highest coverage of child maintenance receipt in Finland. In the other countries, only one-third of lone mother households receive child maintenance. The median amounts of maintenance are the lowest in the United Kingdom and Finland, but there is great variation in the level of child maintenance within countries. The comparison of the quintile groups reveals that in the United States, the lone mothers in lowest income quintile do not seem to benefit as much from child maintenance compared with the highest income quintiles, whereas in Finland, Germany and Spain, more lone mothers in the low-income quintiles receive maintenance. However, amounts are quite equal across income quintiles.

Child maintenance schemes differ substantially from each other in terms of underlying philosophy, structure, rules and organisation, and in particular, in their very different outcomes. In Finland the principle is that every child has the right to be adequately provided for and that child maintenance is the right of the child. The main policy focus is on shared parenting and the emphasis in the scheme on contact between the child and the non-resident parent emerged in the 1980s. Furthermore, supporting children is seen as a collective responsibility, and this means that at least part of the maintenance is normally guaranteed by the state if the non-resident parent does not pay maintenance. Guaranteed maintenance also covers children without non-resident parents. Calculations show that the maintenance determination guidelines operate on the basis of equality, as both parents are held to be responsible for the child's maintenance in accordance with their abilities, regardless of custody and residence arrangements. Still, the records on overdue maintenance payments and maintenance debts indicate that non-compliance remains a problem in Finland.

Increasing diversity in patterns of responsibility for the raising of children in families has presented serious challenges for welfare states. More complex family ties raise questions about the types of responsibility and obligation that should follow from different forms of private relationship, and the role the welfare state should play in governing family life. In this article, we compare how family policies in Finland, Norway and Sweden define parental responsibilities for supporting a child when its parents do not live together. We are particularly interested in whether the principle of Nordic family policy, shared parenting, operates when parents do not live together but raise their child together. Do parents have an opportunity, for example, to share family policy benefits, and if they have, what are the conditions under which this can be realised? Comparative examination shows variation between the logistics of Nordic family policies. Norwegian and Swedish family policy systems are flexible, and family policy there enables parents to share benefits in a way that supports shared residential arrangements. In Finland, however, the situation of parents living apart but sharing the daily care of their child has been given insufficient attention and family policy has still not been developed.

Drawing from the 2012 International Social Survey Programme's data for 22 countries, this article analyses the variation in attitudes toward single parents and the determinants of those attitudes from a cross-national perspective. Findings indicated that the most positive attitudes toward single parents were in Nordic countries, except Finland. The attitudes were the most negative in Eastern European countries. At the individual level, women, younger people, people voting on the political left, Protestants, and people with low religiosity evidenced more approval than their counterparts. At the country level, attitudes were more positive toward single parents in countries where the proportion of single parents were high or where egalitarianism (regarding gender roles) was more evident.

Sharing responsibilities for paid work and unpaid care between men and women is recognised as one of the challenges that Western countries face in the 21st century. This article examines attitudes towards sharing paid work and unpaid care responsibilities in 22 Western countries by addressing the following questions. (1) How do attitudes towards different earner-carer models vary across countries? (2) Which socio-demographic and country-level factors explain differences in attitudes to an equal division of paid work and unpaid care responsibilities? International Social Survey Programme (ISSP) data 2012 is used as the data source and research methods include logistic multi-level regression analysis. Results reveal that cross-national variations in attitudes are significant: Most traditional attitudes are found in many Eastern European countries, whereas Nordic countries are the least traditional. At the individual level, those who are highly educated, in paid work, single, childless, and religiously non-active support the equal division of paid work and unpaid care responsibilities more often than other respondents. At the country level, longer father-specific parental leave, a stronger tradition of women's paid work, and less traditional gender roles are related to stronger support for an equal division of paid work and unpaid care.

AbstractIn this article we examine the role of child support in the economic well‐being of children in single‐parent families in Latin America. We use the Luxembourg Income Study wave IX and the 2012 Colombian Quality of Life Survey to answer three questions: (1) Are children in single‐parent families more likely to be poor than children in two‐parent families? (2) What is the relative importance of different income sources in the income packages of these families? and (3) Are child support transfers improving the economic well‐being of children in single‐parent families? Our results show that children in single‐parent families are disproportionally poor relative to two‐parent families in Brazil, Colombia, Panama, Paraguay, and Uruguay. For other countries, poverty rates are similar (Guatemala and Peru), or higher in two‐parent families than single‐parent families (Mexico). Labor income is the most important income source for both types of families in all of these countries. However, child support represents between 20% and 39% of total income among families receiving this transfer. The largest antipoverty effectiveness of child support is also observed among these families. Child support brings between 30% and 55% of children receiving this transfer out of poverty.

The aims of this special issue were twofold: to provide international research evidence of child maintenance schemes in five countries and to produce a comparative analysis of that research, to show how child maintenance outcomes differ across countries. The research data were collected using a vignette technique. This set up two fictional families, specifying sets of characteristics in order to explore how child maintenance schemes deal with key factors. Decision processes and payment outcomes are explored for applicants who are, for example, lone parent families on low incomes, divorcing families on middle incomes or reconstituted cohabiting families where a new child is born to the non-resident parent; the effects of changes in employment status and shared care arrangements are also considered. This final paper provides a comparative analysis of the vignettes to show how child maintenance outcomes differ across countries, and summarises the key themes that emerge from the individual country papers. Ultimately, the comparative analysis demonstrates that we have only scratched the surface in understanding similarities and differences internationally across child maintenance schemes. This is partly because of the complex interaction between child maintenance schemes and social security systems, which is not always transparent.

AbstractIncreasingly, children live in both parents' homes equally after parental separation, but little is known about whether social security policy supports these shared‐residence families. We propose that a determination of support for shared residence in various policies can be based on two criteria: whether both parents can receive benefits and whether the total amount received is greater than what would have been received if children lived with only one parent. We categorise support for shared residence in child benefits, housing assistance, social assistance, and guaranteed child support in 13 countries (Australia, Belgium, Denmark, Estonia, Finland, France, Iceland, New Zealand, Norway, Poland, Sweden, the United Kingdom, and the United States), using a 2017 questionnaire, policy documents, and previous research. Norway is the only country supporting shared residence in all four policy domains; three countries do not support shared residence in any. Policies on shared residence across domains are inconsistent. This research highlights the need to clarify policy for these families and to consider whether parents who manage shared parental responsibilities post‐separation should be assisted in new ways.

Increasingly, parents in separated families equally share care of their children post-separation. In this article we extend a well-known family policy model to generate hypotheses about the level of child support to be paid by separated parents when children live primarily with their mother ('sole custody') in contrast to when children spend equal time with both parents ('shared care'). We test these hypotheses with data collected from thirteen countries. In sole custody cases, countries with an earner-carer policy model do have lower child support expectations than countries with a traditional family policy model or a market-oriented model, as predicted. Countries with a traditional family policy model do have the highest orders in the shared case, as predicted. However, there is as much variation within models as there is between, suggesting new analytic frameworks for considering child support in family policy need to be developed.

PurposeThis article analyzes the challenges Finnish single mothers experienced in their everyday lives during the COVID-19 pandemic. In studies on challenges to family life during COVID-19 lockdowns, single-parent families remain a largely understudied group.Design/methodology/approachThe authors apply triple bind theory and ask how did Finnish single mothers manage the interplay between inadequate resources, inadequate employment, and inadequate policies during lockdown in spring 2020? These data come from an online survey including both qualitative and quantitative questions which was conducted between April and May 2020 to gather Finnish families' experiences during lockdown. This analysis is based on the qualitative part of the survey.FindingsThis study's results show that lockdown created new inadequacies while also enhancing some old inadequacies in the lives of Finnish single mothers. During lockdown, single mothers faced policy- and resource-disappearances; accordingly, they lost their ability to do paid work normally. Furthermore, these disappearances endangered the well-being of some single mothers and their families.Originality/valueThis article contributes to the wider understanding of everyday lives of single mothers and the challenges COVID-19 pandemic created. Moreover, this study provides knowledge on the applicability of the triple bind theory when studying the everyday lives of single mothers.

We provide an overview of child support policy in high-income countries, highlighting differences in institutional arrangements, the amount of child support due, and the amount of child support received. We show that the United States expects high levels of child support from nonresident parents when compared to other countries, that noncompliance is a problem across countries, and that most European countries deal with nonpayment of child support by providing guarantees of public support for children and resident parents. The guarantee schemes vary in terms of eligibility and generosity. Throughout, we find that child support policy approaches differ across countries. A key policy implication from this review is that the United States may be expecting too much child support from nonresident parents and that it could consider guaranteeing a modest amount of public support to single-parent households.