A hallmark of British families is their greater fragility and complexity when compared with families in many other western European countries. Relatively more children are being born into lone-mother families and Britain also has high and increasing rates of parental separation. These patterns have serious implications for inequality. These are the conclusions of Kathleen Kiernan and her colleagues (2024) in their extensive recent review of trends in families and inequality for Oxford Open Economics.
As every good sociologist knows, families are central to the nurturing and raising of children, yet not every family is able to provide the same level of resources, support and opportunities for them. In 1971 in England and Wales, just 8% of births were recorded outside of marriage. By 1991, this figure had more than tripled to 30%, and it stood at 48% in 2019, the latest year for which there are available data. Figure 1 shows increasing numbers of children being born outside of marriage.
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