A child born to a single mother in one European country can expect a very different family trajectory than a child born in another—and this project will map exactly how those differences play out over a lifetime. Most research on family change—divorce, repartnering, stepfamilies—focuses on adults. This project shifts the lens to children, asking how their experiences of family complexity vary by socioeconomic background and across European countries. It fills a gap: we know surprisingly little about whether a child in Sweden, for example, faces the same family transitions as a child in Poland, or how those differences affect their education, health, and wellbeing. The researchers will combine longitudinal surveys, machine learning, and simulation to track children as they age, using data from multiple European countries. If successful, the work could reshape how policymakers design support systems—from child benefits to school counselling—by revealing which family structures and transitions are most consequential for children’s outcomes, and where inequalities are most entrenched. This is fundamental social science. It does not promise an immediate tool or policy. But by building a child-centred, cross-national picture of family complexity, it could eventually help governments target resources more effectively and reduce childhood inequalities that persist across generations.
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This project aims to provide a comprehensive understanding of the trends, inequalities, and consequences of family complexity (e.g., divorce, repartnering, stepfamilies) across children's lives in Europe. Family change not only impacts adults, but it also has major implications for the lives of children who live in these families. Surprisingly, relatively little research has investigated children's experiences of family change across Europe. We know little about children's experiences of family complexity across their lives, whether their experiences differ by socio-economic background and across countries, the reasons behind cross-national differences, the consequences of increasing family complexity for children's lives across Europe, and the potential consequences of family change for children of the future. This project fills these gaps by taking a novel, child-centred approach and following the lives of European children as they get older using a combination of advanced longitudinal methods, machine learning, and simulation on a large number of European datasets. The objectives are: 1. To understand trends in family complexity across the life courses of children in Europe 2. To identify inequalities in the trends in family complexity across children's life courses in Europe 3. To understand the consequences of family complexity for multiple domains of children's lives 4. To explore whether and how multiple domains of children's lives are interrelated 5. To develop an approach to predict family complexity in the life courses of the children of the future Through its innovative approach, this project will fundamentally advance our understanding of family complexity and its consequences for the lives of European children. It has the potential to open up new horizons for the demographic study of inequalities across individuals' lives and for studying childhood inequalities more specifically.
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