Background: Childlessness has increased in many European countries. Partnerships and parenthood are obviously closely related, but there is relatively little knowledge on how childlessness is linked ...to contemporary union dynamics that involve high rates of separation and unmarried cohabitation. Objective: To situate (biological) childlessness in longitudinal dynamics of union formation and stability, we take a life-course approach to union trajectories that consist of states entered via the formation and dissolution of cohabitations and marriages. Concretely, we identify groups of similar union trajectories of individuals between the ages of 18 and 39 who are childless at age 42. Methods: We analyse register data on Finnish men and women born in 1969 and 1970 (childless N=3,241) with sequence, cluster, and multinomial logistic regression methods. Results: Four clusters of typical union trajectories were identified among the childless and assigned these labels: 1) Never Partnered (45%), characterized by never having entered a coresidential partnership, or just having entered a cohabitation near age 40; 2) Briefly Cohabited (25%), characterized by mostly living single after a brief cohabitation spell; 3) Cohabitors, Often Serial (19%), marked by typically discontinuous cohabitation; and 4) Married (11%). The Never-Partnered cluster is male-dominated. Men with a rural background and less-educated men and women are overrepresented among the Never-Partnered childless. Conclusions: For the great majority of the childless in our study cohorts, union trajectories are marked by either the (almost) complete absence of coresidential unions or fragmentary cohabitation histories. Contribution: The study contributes to the literature by showing that union histories, including never partnering as well as cohabitation instability, are key for understanding contemporary childlessness.
Purpose: The purpose of this study is to apply and evaluate the effectiveness of a child abuse prevention program based on the Nursing Model of Resilience and Coping Skills Training Model for ...unmarried mothers during pregnancy and puerperium.Methods: This study had a prospective single-case, AB design with four repeated self-questionnaire measures and three observational measures. Seven unmarried mothers were provided with 10 sessions child abuse prevention program through individual visits from 32 to 34 weeks of pregnancy to 6 weeks after childbirth. The questionnaire was composed related to resilience, maternal stress, maternal attitude, parent-child interaction, child abuse potential. The observation was measured by video recording (total 16 times) the interaction of parent-child during feeding and analyzing it by three experts. Data were analyzed by Wilcoxon signed-rank test and Friedman’s test.Results: Maternal attitude and parent-child interaction were statistically significantly improved after intervention compared to before intervention. However, maternal stress decreased after intervention compared to before intervention, but it was not statistically significant. Also, resilience and child abuse potential were not statistically significant. This program is partially effective in preventing child abuse by promoting parenting attitudes and parent-child interactions.Conclusion: This study focused on individual resilience and applied systematic intervention as coping skills training to prevent child abuse. This study is meaningful in that interventions were conducted through individual visits to unmarried mothers at high risk of child abuse, and the program was applied, including pregnancy and postpartum periods, to prevent child abuse early.
While there have been significant developments regarding mediation, parental responsibilities and the rights of unmarried fathers, fathers remain challenged in acquiring their parental rights through ...mediation in terms of Section 21 of the Children’s Act 38 of 2005. The aim of this qualitative study was to understand the experiences of parents and mediators regarding mediation since the inception of the Children’s Act in 2007. Semi-structured interviews were conducted with unmarried fathers, unmarried mothers and mediators. Data were analysed using within-case analysis. The findings highlighted the positive experiences of mediation, challenges in mediation and strategies to enhance the quality of mediation.
This article connects two current debates: the rise of single-person households or of 'solitaries', and the so-called 'loneliness epidemic'. It raises questions about how these are associated, via ...social-science literature on loneliness as a social, contextual and subjective experience, and findings in that literature about the relevance of lone-person households. The article is concerned to explore the history of living alone as a form of family structure, via analysis of European, North American and Japanese pre-industrial and industrial listings of inhabitants, and the post-1851 British censuses to 2011. It also does this cartographically via British mapping of lone-person households in 1851, 1881, 1911 and 2011. It documents dramatic rise across many countries in single-person households during the twentieth century, notably since the 1960s. Many pre-industrial settlements had no single-person households, and the average was around 5 percent of households. The current western proportions of such households (e.g. 31 percent in the UK) are wholly unprecedented historically, even reaching to 60 percent or more of households in some modern European and North American cities. The discussion examines this trend - which has very wide ramifications - and raises issues about its relevance for modern problems of loneliness as a social and welfare concern.
This paper presents a reflection on the possible forms of social, political, and religious constraints on single people (women and men who are unmarried and without children). Studying the cities of ...Athens, Sparta, and Gortyn, as well as the city of Magnesia Gortyn imagined by Plato, it analyses the modalities of regulation of the behaviours and the discourses regarding the agamoi. So it puts into perspective the idea of a real legal treatment of celibacy in archaic and classical Greek cities.
The term "unmarried" mothers is widely used in South Korea to indicate that carrying a baby without marriage is not culturally acceptable. A societal stigma, which single mothers experience, causes ...more abortion and doubles the burden of parenting alone. This study aimed to identify what type of information (onset/before pregnancy controllability, offset/after pregnancy ability and effort) contributes to reducing stigmatization toward unmarried mothers. The findings showed that offset effort information has a robust impact on participants' cognitive, affective, and behavioral responses toward mothers of newborns out of wedlock across the three studies (n = 275; n = 266; n = 227, respectively) with different targets (a minor and an adult of 25 years old) and different participants (college students and adults above 30 years old). This pro-effort bias increased behavioral intentions of helping single mothers through the moderators of onset controllability and offset ability and the mediators of cognitive and affective responses. In particular, Study 2 found individual differences, such as type of interpersonal attitude, gender-role attitude, and family communication style moderated the relationship of offset effort with behavioral intentions. Mothers who made an effort to build a better future were ascribed fewer negative stereotypes, evoked more positive emotions, and were considered to deserve more help and support from the public. The findings have implications for communication interventions to lower prejudice against unwed mothers in South Korea.
Public Significance Statement
This study confronts public perception where social stigma originates and aims to find ways to change negative perceptions and responses toward mothers of newborns without marriage. It suggests that offset effort information, that is, how hard unwed mothers work for raising their babies and building a better future, helps people decrease negative stereotypes, elicit more positive emotions and beliefs, and accept that unmarried mothers deserve more help and support at the individual level.
Introduction
Unmarried fathers in the U.S. face barriers to establishing a relationship with their newborn children that married fathers do not confront. Our study was implemented to determine how ...systems and services could be modified to better support the engagement of unmarried fathers.
Methods
We conducted interviews with 35 professionals who interact with primarily low-income unmarried mothers and fathers to elicit their perceptions of such barriers. We developed a social ecological model to inform the study design and used purposive sampling with chain referrals to ensure a wide breadth of perspectives. Themes and subthemes categorizing personal and environmental factors were placed within five nested categories corresponding to different levels of influence on unmarried fathers’ behaviors: public policy, community, institutions, interpersonal relationships, and intrapersonal characteristics, and their intersections.
Results
Participants challenged as inaccurate the stereotype of unmarried fathers as disengaged and uninterested in being involved with their children. Rather, they described the marginalization and devaluing of unmarried fathers by government policies and family service systems and programs and also the dearth of resources available to them. They called on decision makers to adjust policies and services to be more inclusive of unmarried fathers, to promote father engagement more actively, and to urge direct service providers to respond to fathers as valued individuals.
Discussion
Adapting to the common reality of nonmarital childbearing will entail a systematic shift in the integration of ways in which we value, understand, include, and serve fathers.
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