Executive Summary

The family is the core institution for child-rearing worldwide, and decades of research have shown that strong families promote positive child outcomes. For this reason the World Family Map Project monitors family well-being and investigates how family characteristics affect children’s healthy development around the globe. Families do not operate in a vacuum: their ability to provide for their children and supervise their development depends not only on parenting behaviors and attitudes but also on the social, economic, and policy environments that surround them. Yet efforts to strengthen families are often considered off-limits or of low priority for policy and programmatic interventions, especially in times of financial strain. With the indicators and analyses presented here, this project points individuals, families, communities, NGOs, and governments to some key factors affecting child and family well-being that policies and programs can shape in order to foster strong families and positive outcomes for children.

The World Family Map Project monitors global changes in the areas of family structure, family socioeconomics, family processes, and family culture, focusing on 16 specific indicators selected by an expert group because of their known relationships to child outcomes in the research literature. Each annual report of the project provides the latest data on these indicators, as well as an original essay focusing on one aspect of the family and how it relates to child well-being in different parts of the world. In both the indicators and the essay, the highest quality data available are shared for countries that are representative of each region of the world. Scholars around the globe contribute to the project as advisors and analysts, stimulating a large community of researchers to improve data and research on families and children.

The inaugural edition of the World Family Map provided indicators of family well-being worldwide and an essay focusing on family living arrangements and education outcomes. This second annual edition of the World Family Map, sponsored by Child Trends and a range of educational and nongovernmental institutions from across the globe, provides updated indicators and a new essay focusing on union stability and early childhood health in developing countries, as well as a brief analysis of psychological distress among 9- to 16-year-olds in the European Union.

Family Structure

The number of parents and extended family members in a child’s household influence the human and financial resources available to the child. 

• In spite of marked family changes around the globe over the last half-century, children are still most likely to live in two-parent families in all countries except South Africa.
• One out of five children are living without either of their parents in South Africa and Uganda, and at least one out of eight children do so in other sub-Saharan African countries, including Ghana, Tanzania, Kenya, and the Democratic Republic of the Congo. About one out of 10 children live apart from both parents in several countries in Central/South America (Bolivia, Chile, Colombia, and Nicaragua), while less than one in approximately 20 do so in other regions of the world.
• Growing up with a single parent is especially common in sub-Saharan Africa, in Central and South America, and in several English-speaking Western countries; in the U.S., the U.K., New Zealand, and Canada, a fifth or more of children do so. Asia, the Middle East, and Eastern Europe have the world’s lowest rates of single parenthood.
• Extended families, which can compensate for the absence of one or both parents from the household, are most commonly found in sub-Saharan Africa, followed by Asia and Central/South America.
  Although marriage rates for adults aged 18-49 are declining worldwide, they remain high in Asia and the Middle East (between 47 percent in Singapore and 80 percent in Egypt), and are particularly low in Central/South America. The rate of cohabitation for adults aged 18-49 tops 30 percent in some Central/South American countries and 20 percent in some European nations.
• While fertility rates are also declining worldwide, nonmarital childbearing is increasing in many regions, with the highest rates found in Central/South America and Western Europe.

Family Socioeconomics

Indicators such as poverty, undernourishment, parental education, employment, and public family benefits measure the material, human, and government resources available to families raising children.

• Undernourishment, or consuming fewer calories than needed for a healthy life, has become significantly less widespread in the past two decades: the percentage of the world’s population that is undernourished decreased from 23 percent in 1990-92 to less than 15 percent in 2010-12. Nevertheless, it remains an indicator of material deprivation and disproportionately affects families with children. Despite global progress in fighting hunger, in some nations in sub-Saharan Africa and Central/South America, more than 20 or even 30 percent of residents are undernourished.
• Parental education, which positively affects parenting behaviors and child outcomes, is on the rise in many countries. Brazil exemplifies this trend, where the percentage of children living with a parent or household head with a secondary education increased from 17 to 29 percent between 2000 and 2010. 

Family Processes

Family processes describe family members’ interactions with one another: how they communicate, when they spend time together, how frequently they experience conflict, and whether they are satisfied with family life. Such factors can be positive or negative influences on child outcomes.

• The percentage of adults expressing a high degree of satisfaction with family life, in countries where this measure is available, ranges widely from 31 percent in Russia to 74 percent in Chile.
• The frequency of parent-teen communication also varies across countries; however, the vast majority of 15-year-olds eat their main meal with their parents in the countries where data are available.
• In Central/South America and some of the European countries studied, 15-year-olds are more likely to discuss how well they are doing at school frequently with their parents than to talk about more general topics, while in Germany and the Asian countries studied, they more frequently discuss general topics.

Family Culture

National attitudes toward family norms can influence trends in family structure and functioning, and thus they are important to monitor.

• Acceptance of voluntary single motherhood varies tremendously by region. In general, between 40 and 70 percent of adults in the Americas, Europe, and Oceania approve of it, but just 2 to 29 percent of those in Asia, the Middle East, and sub-Saharan Africa do so. Attitudes here generally align with behavior (single motherhood is more widely accepted where it is more common), with the exception of sub-Saharan Africa, where attitudes toward single motherhood are more negative, even though single motherhood is comparatively common.

The World Family Map indicators show that there are distinct family patterns across regions, and yet there is variation across the countries within a region. For example, some countries have managed to reduce malnutrition, while others have increased parental education. In some regions, students are comfortable talking to their parents about school, while in other regions, those students appear to be in the minority. There are many other patterns to discover in the report. Each country and region has unique strengths to offer as an example for others to follow, and each also has areas of life where families are struggling.

Essay on Union Stability and Childhood Health 

The 2014 World Family Map essay suggests that the family contexts of caregiving deserve attention in ongoing efforts to improve children’s health around the world. The essay specifically explores the relationship between family instability—measured here by divorce or dissolution of a cohabiting relationship, widowhood, or repartnership, either through marriage or cohabitation—and children’s health. Three measures of child health are explored to cover different types of indicators of health: 1) diarrhea, an acute illness; 2) stunting, a longer-term measure of health resulting from chronic nutritional deprivation or repeated episodes of poor food intake, disease, or both; and 3) child mortality, the ultimate negative health outcome. Data from international Demographic and Health Surveys (DHS) are analyzed from 27 developing countries in Central/South America and the Caribbean, Africa, Asia and the Middle East. In Asia, Central/South America and the Caribbean, and sub-Saharan Africa, children raised by mothers who have experienced union instability are more likely to have health problems, especially diarrhea and to die, than children raised by a mother who has remained in her first union since before their birth. For instance, recent diarrhea was 16 percent more common in Africa and 35 percent more common in Asia among children of repartnered mothers than among children born to mothers continuously in their first union. Children of mothers who have divorced or dissolved a cohabiting partnership, been widowed, and repartnered in Africa, Asia, and Central/South America are 20 to 43 percent more likely to die than children in stable families. In the Middle East, however, family instability is not associated with negative child health outcomes. The essay also finds that in lower-income countries, single motherhood is more common among better-educated and wealthier mothers, a fact that stands in contrast to the typical pattern in higher-income countries. Note that adoptive and same-sex parents are not included in the study, so comparisons with them cannot be made.

The findings presented in the essay suggest that family instability compromises parents’ ability to provide the kind of consistent and attentive care that is most likely to foster good health in children. The mechanisms of family instability that may compromise children’s health might include increased levels of stress, less focus on the child, a reduction in social support, and a decrease in socioeconomic resources. Extended kin networks, communities, and private and public programs can do much to alleviate these stressors as families go through these transitions so as to improve health outcomes for children who experience such instability. 

Together, the indicators and the essay suggest many opportunities to improve family and thus child well-being globally. These opportunities include fostering union stability (assuming parents have low-conflict relationships), extended family support, improving nutrition and parental education, and encouraging parent-child communication, among others. Fortunately, there are multiple mechanisms by which families can support healthy child development. This report illustrates some important ones that may produce a large return on investment in the health and well-being of the world’s children.