Family Change and Social Inequality

About the seminar

Recent decades have seen rapid changes in family forms across OECD countries. In the UK far fewer couples are choosing to marry before having children, rates of divorce and separation have risen rapidly and more women are choosing to have children alone. In this one day seminar we explore inequalities in family forms, and the implications of increasing family diversity for children’s life chances.

This event is supported by the ESRC Centre for Population Change at the University of Southampton.

Speakers:

• Juho Härkönen (Stockholm) “Diverging destinies in international perspective: Education, family structure, and child poverty”

• Mike Brewer (Centre for Micro-Social Change, Essex) “Family instability throughout childhood: new estimates from the British Household Panel Survey and Understanding Society"

• Brienna Perelli Harris (Southampton) “Partnership Dynamics and Inequality”

• Wendy Sigle (LSE) “Mind the “gap”: Marriage, maternal nativity, and child obesity in the UK”

• Tina Haux (Kent) “ Parenting and contact across separation”

• Susan Harkness (Bath) "Lone Parenthood and Children’s Cognitive Outcomes in the UK, Evidence from the 1958, 1970 and 2000 birth cohorts"

• Ann Berrington (Southampton) "Inequalities in transitions to adulthood"

• Roundtable table discussion: "Future Directions and Policy Implications". Led by Dalia Ben Galim, Head of Policy and Research, Gingerbread

For further information, and to download a programme, visit the University of Bath event pages.

About the series:

This series of conference and academic seminars funded by the ESRC, entitled, 'Child Poverty and Social Mobility: Lessons for Research and Policy', co-ordinated by the Centre for the Analysis of Social Policy, University of Bath and the Social Mobility and Child Poverty Commission. The events are also supported by the Institute for Policy Research at the University of Bath.

The conferences bring together academics and policy makers to help improve our understanding of both the causes and consequences of declining social mobility and child poverty in Britain; to assess the influence that policy has had on these trends; and to consider how best policy makers might now respond to declining mobility.