Complex families in the United Kingdom: mapping children’s diverse family pathways and their correlates from birth to age ten

The rise in divorce, cohabitation, non-marital childbearing and multi-partner fertility means that today’s children are more likely to experience less common or less stable family settings compared to previous generations. This may lead to increasing inequalities across the life course. Unlike most existing studies on family change, we investigate family trajectories in the United Kingdom from children’s perspective. We map the family trajectories characterising children’s first ten years of life using multi-channel sequence analysis on data from the UK Household Longitudinal Study, jointly capturing the dynamics of maternal partnership histories and paternal co-residence patterns from the children’s perspective. Multinomial logistic regression is applied to understand the characteristics associated with experiencing different childhood family trajectories. Children experience six typical family trajectories: continuously married; early separation; continuously cohabiting; later separation; early solo motherhood; and a new father. From birth to age ten, over a quarter of children do not continuously live with their two biological parents. Children with lower-educated mothers, mothers in the youngest or oldest groups, who live in urban areas, and belong to certain ethnic groups (White British, Mixed, Caribbean, Black African) tend to experience less common or less stable trajectories. Our elucidation of factors associated with more/less stable childhood family pathways can inform policy decision-making around support for families to mitigate growing short- and long-term inequalities giving rise to children’s diverging destinies.