When Parents Separate: Further Findings from the National Longitudinal Survey of Children and Youth

2004-FCY-6E

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INTRODUCTION

This is the second of three reports examining the impact of parents' family transitions on children's family environment and economic well-being based on longitudinal data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Children and Youth (NLSCY), a panel survey conducted jointly by Human Resources and Development Canada (HRDC) and Statistics Canada.^[3] The first report focused particularly on how changes in the conjugal situation of parents affect the economic circumstances within which children are raised (Juby, Le Bourdais and Marcil-Gratton, 2003). The next two reports examine in greater depth how parents' conjugal behaviour shapes the family life course of their children. This report focuses specifically on aspects of the most common family transition for Canadian children, and the first for most of them—their parents' separation. The third report will explore what happens next as mothers and fathers go their separate ways.

Two themes, often absent from research on family change, are central to this report. Together they guide the analyses and provide a backdrop for social policy formulation:

• Children's family experience needs to be viewed as a "process" that evolves in response to decisions made by parents about their own conjugal and parental life.

  In other words, the concept of "family life course" should replace that of "family structure," on which most family research is based. This is due to two main reasons

  1. Structure implies solidity or permanence, and leads implicitly to the idea that children spend their lives in a given family type: intact, lone-parent or stepfamily. As a result, a large body of research has looked at the impact on children of "growing up" in a lone-parent or stepfamily, without taking into account that relatively few children do in fact spend their entire childhood in one of these family types.
  2. The family structure perspective groups all families of the same "type" into a single category, ignoring the events leading up to the formation of the family. This leads to an oversimplification of reality and to false stereotyping. Take "lone-mother families" as an example. Taking into account the event immediately preceding the transition to a lone-mother family reveals two very distinct lone-mother family types: one created when a single woman has a child outside a union, the other formed when a couple who have had children together decide to separate. These two types have very little in common with each other. In the first case, mothers tend to be young, single, and have only one young child; when they enter a new union, which most do, they generally marry their partner, who becomes the first and only father the children have ever lived with. In the second case, separated mothers tend to be older, and have more and older children; a new union starts more often with cohabitation than marriage, and the new partner arrives in the life of children who lived for an extended period with their biological father (Juby, Marcil-Gratton and Le Bourdais, 2001). Only by taking a "life-course" approach to children's family experience is it possible to provide a more complete picture of the relevant aspects of a child's family experience.

• More and earlier parental separation means that close and significant family members do not necessarily live in the same household; the analysis of children's family experience, therefore, has to extend beyond the residential group.

  Family structure almost always refers to the residential family unit. For intact families this definition is adequate, as the residential family includes a child's parents and siblings. For the growing number of children in other family types, however, limiting the study of the family to the residential group is problematic. Children may belong to more than one residential group, for instance. Even if they do not, close family members (most often the father) who continue to play an important role in their children's life may not reside in the same household. To study family life without including these individuals seriously constrains the understanding of a child's family experience. NLSCY data makes it possible to identify and include these "non-residential" family members in many of the analyses conducted here.

  In these reports, we attempt to provide a broader perspective on the changing family life experience of Canadian children. Instead of viewing parents as forming a unit, we look at them as two individuals whose conjugal and parental life courses meet for a period of time, during which a child is conceived. The child's family life course is then dependent on whether or not parents continue to follow the same path, or whether they decide to go their separate ways—an event that occurs for some children even before their birth. Subsequently, the child's family environment is subject to decisions made separately by each parent—decisions to form or dissolve new unions, to have additional children in these new unions etc. Appreciating this diversity is an essential step in designing programs and policies to help children and families adapt to family transitions in a healthy and positive way.

What is a family transition?

Family transitions are the building blocks of the family life course. In this study, a family transition is considered to occur when parents change their conjugal status (i.e. they create or dissolve a marriage or common-law union). In addition, certain "parental status" changes are also considered as transitions: when the mother or father becomes a "stepparent" at the formation of a new union with a partner who has children from an earlier union; or when they have a child with a new partner, providing their children with a half-sibling. Some of these changes have a direct impact on the child's residential family group, triggering a transition from one family type to another: from intact to lone-parent family when parents separate, for example. Others, such as the arrival of a new partner in the non-custodial parent's life will not prompt a transition, but will have an impact on the child's extended family environment.

In this report, we focus on the beginning of the life course, situating the child's birth within the family life course of the parents, and looking at the first and most common transition experienced by children: their parents' separation. The report is divided into four sections:

• Section I sets the scene, updating and expanding earlier analyses of how the context within which children born during the last two decades of the 20^th century has evolved (see Marcil-Gratton and Le Bourdais, 1999). Specifically, we examine the evolution of births within or outside of a union, within marital or common-law unions, and within a first or subsequent family unit, comparing different cohorts of children and different regions of Canada. This section also looks briefly at how these factors influence children's subsequent family life course transitions.
• Section II updates and expands information relating to parental separation, tracing the relationship between the context at birth and the likelihood that parents separate, and showing how this relationship varies through time and for different regions of Canada.
• Section III focuses on the way in which parents divide responsibilities for children when they separate, with a particular emphasis on shared custody. The different types of shared living arrangements and the evolution of these arrangements through time are considered.
• Section IV examines the new information collected for the first time at Cycle 3 concerning custody issues (e.g. whether children are consulted; whether parents keep to the visiting arrangements agreed upon) and child support arrangements (e.g. whether support agreements are adhered to; whether support agreements mean that support payments are expected) made for children when parents separate.

Family and Custody History Data

The retrospective "Family and Custody History" section of the National Longitudinal Survey of Children and Youth provides complete conjugal and parental histories of each child's biological parents up to the time of the first survey, in the winter of 1994-95, and is brought up to date at each subsequent survey. The family history data gathered in this survey provide a new insight into the extent to which decisions parents make with regard to their conjugal and parental life affect their children's family life course, by making it possible to reconstruct the complex family networks created by both biological parents after they separate.

However, the wealth of information about the conjugal and parental behaviour of both biological parents, on which the analyses in this section are based, brings its own problems. Linking such complex information from one cycle to another is a time-consuming process, made more so by problems of inconsistency between information reported or recorded at successive surveys. For example, several separated mothers, who were recorded in the Cycle 1 data file as not living with a new partner, reported at Cycle 2 that they were not only living with a new partner, but that this partner had also been present two years earlier (when Cycle 1 data was collected). Verifying other data revealed that, in most cases, the new partner had arrived in the household shortly before the Cycle 1 survey, and mothers probably failed to report a new relationship whose durability was still uncertain at that time. Before starting the research itself, therefore, the first step involved creating the child samples at Cycles 1 and 2, and validating the data to ensure consistency between the family information collected at the two cycles.

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