j.1728-4457.2012.00533.x

PoPulation and develoPment Review 38 ( 4 ) : 7 0 7 – 7 2 7 (d ecembeR 2 0 1 2 ) 707

Data anD PersPectives

the Family context of cohabitation and single Motherhood in Latin america

Albert esteve

JoAn GArcíA-román

ron lesthAeGhe

we trace the shifts in household formation patterns of young women in 13 latin american countries since the late 1960s, using data from censuses con-ducted between 1970 and 2007. not only has there been a major increase in cohabitation as a form of union formation (e.g., esteve, lesthaeghe, and lopez-Gay 2012), there has also been a rise in the proportions of young single moth-ers (e.g., castro-martin and Puga 2008; castro-martin, martin-Garcia, cortina and Pardo 2011). the question has also been raised (esteve, lesthaeghe, and lopez-Gay 2012, p. 76) to what extent these features are occurring in a context of neolocal residence and nuclear families, which would be consistent with the notion of a second demographic transition (lesthaeghe 2010), or continue to be located in three-generation families or other forms of extended households. depending on these outcomes, the meaning of cohabitation and the degree of precariousness of single motherhood could be quite different.

our data are census samples contained in the international integrated Public use microdata Series (iPumS) that were collected and harmonized at the university of minnesota Population center (2009, 2011; Ruggles et al. 2009). Specifically, we use the iPumS “Family interrelationship variables” (Sobek and Kennedy 2009) to construct a new typology for classifying in-dividuals in various household living arrangements. this classification was inspired by the original european liPRo typology developed by evert van imhoff to project (-PRo) individual living (li-) arrangements (van imhoff and Keilman 1991; van imhoff 1995). the liPRo typology has been used for multistate projections of household positions of individuals in belgium,

708 c o h a b i tat i o n a n d S i n g l e M o t h e r h o o d i n l at i n a M e r i c a

the netherlands, and the united Kingdom (van imhoff 1995; Surkyn 1999; department for communities and local Government 2009), as well as more extensively for studying trends in national or regional subpopulations by so-cioeconomic and immigrant status (deboosere 1992; deboosere et al. 1997, 2009). the original european version has only a limited number of categories, for two reasons. First, few extended and composite households are found in western and northern europe; second, a manageable projection tool requires a more modest typology. because neither of these conditions applies to the current analysis of latin american data, the adapted version used here is entirely new and considerably less constrained.

in contrast to a classic typology of households or kinship groups, liPRo has individuals rather than households as units of analysis. it is well suited for following individuals through various stages of the life course. in this article, we focus on the shifting situation of young women over time by recording their positions in various living arrangements as measured in successive censuses. this is not a complete cohort analysis or a panel study that follows the same generation over an extended period of time. Rather, by focusing on women aged 25–29 years at several census dates, we obtain a clear picture of the household situation of up to four successive generations as they pass through this crucial phase of their lives. although the liPRo-type data con-structed here lend themselves to a variety of topics (e.g., related to teenagers, home leaving, developments at older ages, etc.), we limit ourselves to a se-lected few. Since these additional topics can be addressed by others, we have made the liPRo master sheets available online.1 the website also contains the syntax used to move from the iPumS codes to the liPRo typology. all tables presented here are derived from the liPRo master sheets.

we proceed as follows. First we explain the construction of the newly extended liPRo typology and provide an illustration for one of the 13 latin american countries in our dataset. this is followed by an overview of the basic trends in three educational groups in 11 countries. we then address specific topics such as the incidence of living with parents or in extended and composite families, and explore the living arrangements of single mothers. Finally, we argue that the data also help to explain both the resilience of the latin american family in the face of the economic crises of the 1980s and early 1990s (Fussell and Palloni 2004), and the more distinct pattern of latin american cohabitation when compared to the european pattern (cf. esteve, lesthaeghe, and lopez-Gay 2012, p. 76).

The construction of a Latin American LIPRO typology

the basis for the latin american liPRo typology is the iPumS standardiza-tion of the family relationship codes and the construction of position pointer

a l b e r t e S t e v e / J o a n g a r c í a -r o M á n / r o n l e S t h a e g h e 709

variables for all individuals in a household (Sobek and Kennedy 2009). latin american censuses commonly follow the classic procedure of identifying a head of a household (self-reference or the economically most important person) and of relating each household member to the head via a kinship or relationship code (e.g., spouse, child, grandchild, sibling, son/daughter-in-law, unrelated person, etc.). more often than not, latin american censuses also have a separate category for cohabiting partners within the marital status variable, so that cohabiting couples can be separated from married ones. other classic variables that are needed are household size, sex of members, ages, and number of children (either ever-born or resident). on the basis of this information, Sobek and Kennedy constructed the following pointer variables for each member:

1) Spouse’s location: points to the person-number of the spouse.2) Father’s location: points to the person-number of the father3) mother’s location: points to the person-number of the mother.if these are not present, codes equal to zero are assigned.2 the example

given in table 1 illustrates the procedure.the primary interest of a liPRo classification is not the exact kinship

relationship, but rather the allocation to individuals of a type of household position. as such, the notion of a head of a household is no longer used. the head person in table 1 becomes simply a married man aged 73 in a composite household. the household is composite because there is a servant (non-kin) present, namely person number 7. without the servant, the married man of 73 would be living in an extended household.3 Person number 4 in the household is the cohabiting partner of the son of the elderly man and the mother of his grandchild. and person number 6 is the widowed brother of the elderly man in position number 1.

the rules used in setting up our new latin american liPRo typology are as follows. we start with the “spouse’s location” distinction of having a spouse/partner versus not having one, and continue in the former case with the distinction between this person being a partner in a consensual union

taBLe 1 example of census household data and of three additional iPUMs pointers

Person- children Marital spouse’s Father’s Mother’s number relationship age sex ever born status location location location

1 Head 73 m na married 2 0 02 Spouse 62 F 6 married 1 0 03 child 38 m na cohab. 4 1 24 other 30 F 1 cohab. 3 0 05 Grandchild 6 F 0 Single 0 3 46 Sibling 69 m na widowed 0 0 07 Servant 16 F 0 Single 0 0 0

SouRce: adapted from Sobek and Kennedy (2009, table 2).


and being a married spouse (iPumS-variable conSenS). this yields the major three-way classification of persons who are not in a union, persons in a cohabiting union, and persons in a marital union. From there, further and analogous distinctions are made within each of these three categories. First, the presence of a child is flagged (iPumS-variable ncHild), which leads to the distinction between parents and non-parents. Second, we indicate wheth-er the child’s parent(s) are present (”father’s location” or “mother’s location”), so that we can identify persons who are still living with parents. third, the presence of relatives other than parents is indicated, which means living in an extended household. the presence of another non-relative changes the label into a composite household. Hence, composite households can include extended ones. Finally, persons who were classified by the original census as living in group quarters are placed in a separate category, which may contain not only persons in collective households such as convents or army barracks, but also persons in multi-family compounds.

because there are cases with missing information, we have tried to clas-sify persons as far as possible with the information at hand. Hence the residual class of persons with incomplete information is also split into subclasses re-vealing as much of this partial information as possible. when this category becomes too large and exceeds several percentage points, we refrain from making inferences about trends since shifts in unclassified categories can be responsible for much of the presumed trend. also for this reason we had to drop the data for the 1970s censuses in brazil and mexico.

the full latin american liPRo typology, available online, contains a total of 36 categories, and excel spreadsheets also provide the totals for the four main classes: not in a union, cohabiting, married, and others.4

Data

we use iPumS data for 13 latin american countries for varying census dates. we analyze four census rounds for argentina, chile, colombia, ecuador, Panama, and venezuela; three censuses for brazil, costa Rica, and Puerto Rico; two censuses for mexico and Peru; and only one recent census for bo-livia and cuba. we have grouped the exact census date by round, that is, the 1970s, 1980s, 1990s, and 2000s. the exact census dates and information on the de jure or de facto nature of the census are given in table 2.

the excel master sheets are interactive and contain the results for four age groups of women, starting with 15–19 and ending with 30–34. this per-mits us to study the most important phases of household formation. in addi-tion, the data also distinguish four educational categories: less than primary, full primary, completed secondary, and completed tertiary/university. because the sheets are interactive, the user can condense and regroup any categories according to individual preference.


we now illustrate the use of the latin american extended liPRo ty-pology a) by analyzing the size of the shift away from marriage into longer periods living outside a union and within unmarried cohabitation; b) by mea-suring the prevalence of living in extended or composite households; and c) by focusing on single mothers and their domestic living arrangements.

The shift away from marriage: Remaining single longer or more cohabitation?

the rise of cohabitation and the concomitant shift away from marriage in latin america have been widely documented (e.g., Quilodran 1999; cas-tro-martin 2002; Garcia and Rojas 2002; Rodriguez-vignoli 2005; castro-martin and Puga 2008; covre-Sussai and matthijs 2010; diaz 2011; esteve, lesthaeghe, and lopez-Gay 2012). the liPRo typology applied here sheds further light on these changes as they have unfolded since the 1960s.

in this section we restrict the analysis to the three main categories—not in a union, cohabiting, and married—and examine over time whether the decline in percentages married among young women is the result of their remaining single for a longer time or whether this decline is compensated for by rising proportions cohabiting. From the excel master table, we extracted shorter tables listing the three main categories (totaling 100 percent) for each country and census, and respectively for women aged 20–24 and 25–29. From these data we calculated the reduction of the percentages married in

taBLe 2 available census dates for 13 Latin american countries, 1970s–2000s

1970s 1980s 1990s 2000s

argentina 1970 (F) 1980 (F) 1991 (F) 2001 (F)bolivia — — — 2001 (F)brazil — 1980 (J) 1991 (J) 2000 (J)chile 1970 (F) 1982 (F) 1992 (F) 2002 (F)colombia 1973 (F) 1985 (F) 1993 (F) 2005 (F)costa Rica 1973 (J) 1984 (J) — 2000 (J)cuba — — — 2002 (J)ecuador 1974 (F) 1982 (F) 1990 (F) 2001 (F)mexico — — 1990 (J) 2000 (J)Panama 1970 (F) 1980 (F) 1990 (F) 2000 (F)Peru — — 1993 (F) 2007 (F)Puerto Rico 1970 (J) 1980 (J) 1990 (J) —venezuela 1971 (J) 1981 (J) 1990 (J) 2001 (J)

note: the distinction between married and cohabiting is missing for bolivia 1976 and 1992, and for Puerto Rico 2000. in brazil 1970 and mexico 1970, the proportions in the unclassifiable category were too large. For the remaining missing dates there was either no census round or no data were available in the iPumS data set. F = de facto, J = de Jure.


each country and the respective shares of this overall decline attributable to remaining single (more accurately, not in union) and to cohabitation. the results are reported in table 3.

the results show that the sizes of the marriage decline are fairly similar in both age groups, but vary much more between countries. the smallest reduc-tions in percentages currently married for the 20 years of observation are found in ecuador, where the initial proportions married in the 1980s were fairly high (30.5 and 47.8 percent in the two age groups), and in Panama where these initial percentages were already very low (18.0 and 26.7 percent). by contrast, reductions ranging between 15 and 25 percentage points in proportions cur-rently married are observed in argentina, brazil, chile, and colombia. costa

taBLe 3 Declines in percentages currently married and shares thereof attributable to being single or to cohabitation, observed over a 20-year period from 1980s to 2000s census rounds, women aged 20–24 and 25–29: Latin american countries

Percentage Percentage share of decline point decline in attributable to

currently married, Being country age group 1980s–2000s single cohabitation

argentina 20–24 –22.2 44.2 55.8 25–29 –24.6 40.0 60.0

brazil 20–24 –20.2 26.1 73.8 25–29 –23.0 29.1 70.9

chile 20–24 –16.7 48.7 51.2 25–29 –16.9 46.0 54.0

colombia 20–24 –15.7 9.2 90.8 25–29 –21.5 21.9 78.1

costa Rica 20–24 –11.2 26.4 73.6 25–29 –9.6 12.8 87.2

ecuador 20–24 –8.1 36.5 63.5 25–29 –9.6 60.5 39.5

mexicoa 20–24 –5.7 21.0 78.9 25–29 –7.4 40.9 59.1

Panama 20–24 –7.5 3.1 96.8 25–29 –6.7 25.5 74.5

Perua 20–24 –8.4 0.0b 100.0b 25–29 –16.0 18.3 81.6

venezuela 20–24 –13.3 31.3 68.8 25–29 –14.2 32.0 68.0

aShorter observation periods: mexico 1990 to 2000; Peru 1993 to 2007. bno increase in proportions not in a union, but a decline of 0.2 percentage points instead. this means that co-habitation rose by 8.4 + 0.2 = 8.6 percentage points. SouRce: iPumS data (see endnote 1).


Rica and venezuela occupy intermediate positions. much of the decline in proportions married is accounted for by rising proportions cohabiting. in all countries the share of rising cohabitation is higher than that of remaining single longer. this is strikingly so in colombia and Panama, where the reduction in marriage among women aged 20–24 is more than 90 percent compensated for by cohabitation. these two countries are closely followed by brazil, costa Rica, and venezuela, where the share of rising cohabitation is still 2 to 3 times larger than the share remaining single. by contrast, a more even distribution is observed in argentina, chile, and ecuador, with a smaller preponderance of cohabitation over being single. in these latter three countries ages at entry into a union (of whatever type) must have increased, whereas in all the others shown in table 3 (excluding mexico and Peru), ages of entry into a union must have remained fairly stable over the 20-year observation period (cf. lopez, Spijker, and esteve 2011) owing to the large compensation by rising cohabitation.

we have only shorter periods of reliable observation for mexico (1990 to 2000) and Peru (1993 to 2007). the shift away from marriage in mexico occurred later than in most other latin american countries, but the share of cohabitation is again larger than the share remaining single. However, recent information from the mexican census of 2010 indicates that the country has been catching up at an accelerated pace (Perez-amador and esteve 2012).5 more specifically, cohabitation increased dramatically in all educational groups and in all regions of the country. Peru, on the other hand, has had more substantial declines in percentages currently married, and a large share of this decline over almost a decade and a half goes to cohabitation, as was the case in colombia and Panama.

we next compare these shifts from marriage to remaining single and to cohabitation by educational category. this analysis is particularly relevant in latin america given the strong contrasts between social classes. the results are given in table 4. to simplify the presentation, we have grouped women with incomplete and complete primary education into a single category. another reason for doing this is the fact that later cohorts of young women have increasingly completed primary education, but mainly belong to the same social class as their less-educated predecessors who are about 20 years older. the other two education categories refer to completed levels. Persons with incomplete levels are coded according their highest level completed. the analysis here is also restricted to women aged 25–29.

the results in table 4 illustrate that the declining proportions married among women with less than complete secondary education are very largely compensated for by entry into cohabitation. in addition, in a number of coun-tries (colombia, costa Rica, Panama, and Peru) there were also small declines among women not (yet) in a union, and these percentages are compensated for by shifts into cohabitation.

the educational gradient in the shift is also quite clear: the more highly educated women are, the larger the shift of declining percentages married


toward remaining outside a union and the smaller the shift toward cohabita-tion. on the whole, women with completed secondary education still have shifts toward cohabitation that are larger than shifts to remaining single, but

taBLe 4 Declines in percentages of women aged 25–29 currently married, by education, and shares thereof attributable to being single or to cohabitation, observed over a 20-year period from 1980s to 2000s census rounds: Latin american countries

Percentage Percent share attributable to

point decline in not being country education currently married in union cohabitation

argentina Primary –23.8 1.5 98.5 Secondary –20.7 35.6 64.4 tertiary –25.1 68.8 31.2

brazil Primary –24.6 12.5 87.5 Secondary –14.5 22.5 77.5 tertiary –17.0 70.8 29.2

chile Primary –14.8 15.8 84.2 Secondary –14.8 41.4 58.6 tertiary –20.5 69.1 30.9

colombia Primary –23.6 0.0 100.0b Secondary –22.0 0.0 100.0b tertiary –15.7 40.8 59.2

costa Rica Primary –9.6 0.0 100.0b Secondary –9.7 20.9 79.1 tertiary –1.0 70.3 29.7

ecuador Primary –10.5 36.2 63.9 Secondary –8.5 6.0 94.0 tertiary –7.9 54.4 45.6

mexicoa Primary –7.7 22.1 77.9 Secondary –1.5 0.0 100.0b tertiary –7.3 81.4 18.4

Panama Primary –6.4 0.0 100.0b Secondary –16.1 0.1 99.9 tertiary –12.7 55.5 44.5

Perua Primary –14.5 0.0 100.0b Secondary –2.0 0.0 100.0b tertiary –11.4 0.2 99.8

venezuela Primary –15.4 4.9 95.1 Secondary –13.3 52.6 47.4 tertiary –19.3 85.9 14.1

aShorter observation periods: mexico 1990 to 2000; Peru 1993 to 2007. b100 percent means that the declining percentage of married women is fully compensated for by a rise in cohabita-tion, and that there was also a further increment in cohabitation due to declining proportions not in a union. SouRce: iPumS data (see endnote 1).


the reverse holds for women with completed tertiary and university educa-tion. but there are a few exceptions: in both colombia and Peru the shift to cohabitation for women with the highest education is still larger.

we have seen that the dominant trend for women with less than com-plete secondary education is to substitute cohabitation for marriage. For them the proportions single have not risen, and in several countries the propor-tions not in a union have even declined slightly. this means that ages at entry into a union for these women have remained essentially stable during the last quarter of the twentieth century. For women with complete secondary education the picture is more mixed, with some countries experiencing more appreciable rises in proportions single. concomitantly there are varying de-grees of partial substitution of marriage by cohabitation. until the twenty-first century these trends were slowest in chile and mexico and most pronounced in colombia and Peru. Results from the 2010 census round will reveal to what extent the slower-moving countries have caught up with the others.

Union status and the incidence of residence in extended/composite households

more often than not, the shifts in young women’s living arrangements are considered without reference to the possible presence of other kin or other non-relatives. this is not a major drawback when studying european popula-tions or populations with european traditions, since the nuclear household is by far the dominant one. but matters change considerably when other populations are analyzed. in these cases the incidence of extended or com-posite households becomes of interest because such living arrangements can absorb or soften the effects of economic shocks or alleviate the consequences of other precarious situations. in the first instance marriage or cohabitation without leaving the parental household could have been a response to the period of economic instability and hyperinflation in the 1980s. in the second case single mothers could benefit both financially and in kind from the pres-ence of parents, other kin, or even non-relatives. in what follows we analyze our latin american version of the liPRo typology to identify the extent to which the shifts documented in the previous section occurred within the context of nuclear versus extended or composite households. table 5 shows the percentage of women in five types of union who live in extended or com-posite households. the complement of these percentages gives the incidence of living in nuclear households.

table 5 shows that considerable proportions of young women aged 25–29 still live in extended or composite families. this is particularly so for single mothers, with figures typically ranging between two thirds and four fifths. only in bolivia and Puerto Rico are these proportions below 60 percent. the extent to which exit from the parental household results in the formation of a partnership, either through marriage or cohabitation, can be assessed via


the figures for cohabiting couples and married couples: still a third to over one half of young childless women in a partnership are commonly found in extended or composite households. only in argentina and brazil do we find lower figures of the order of one quarter. also noteworthy is that the differ-ences between cohabiting and married women without children (the second and third columns) in the percentages living in extended households vary substantially between countries, although the percentages for the former are systematically higher than for the latter. this may indicate that further exit from the parental household occurs when a cohabiting union is converted into a married one. Regardless of the actual process, it appears that cohabiting partners are accepted as residents in extended households in much the same way as married spouses.

as we noted above, the incidence of co-residence varies substantially from country to country. the lowest levels of co-residence in an extended household are found in argentina and brazil. co-residence is equally rare for married couples in these two countries and in Puerto Rico. at the high end of the distribution for both cohabiting couples and married couples are bolivia, cuba, ecuador, Peru, and venezuela, with percentages in extended households typically exceeding 40 percent. as expected, co-residence with parents or other adults drops further for cohabiting and married women with children (final two columns). there is still a tendency for cohabiting mothers to be found more frequently in extended households than married moth-ers, but this tendency is not universal. more striking is the lasting difference

taBLe 5 Percentages of women aged 25–29 living in extended/composite households, by type of union: Latin american countries, latest available census

single cohabiting Married cohabiting Married mothers couples couples mothers mothers

argentina 2001 73.4 28.3 21.9 23.2 19.7bolivia 2001 56.8 59.9 56.9 28.9 29.1brazil 2000 69.4 26.0 18.1 17.9 14.3chile 2002 81.8 37.4 37.3 29.2 24.6colombia 2005 72.7 41.1 28.3 26.9 25.9costa Rica 2000 66.1 37.0 21.5 18.8 15.0cuba 2002 74.2 44.7 51.3 27.9 38.0 ecuador 2001 67.7 59.8 51.9 32.2 26.8mexico 2000 72.5 37.1 31.2 20.8 18.7Panama 2000 73.4 41.4 32.2 31.6 28.9Peru 2007 71.6 54.8 52.7 33.6 31.9Puerto Rico 1990 40.0 41.9 14.6 10.4 9.1venezuela 2001 79.4 50.1 42.6 29.4 30.4

SouRce: iPumS data (see endnote 1).


between countries. brazil, costa Rica, and Puerto Rico have fewer than 20 percent of young married mothers or cohabiting mothers living in extended households, whereas the figures for bolivia, cuba, Panama, Peru, and ven-ezuela are in range of 30 to 40 percent.

two additional conclusions can be drawn from these findings. First, the more precise explanation for the resilience of latin american families to the economic shocks of hyperinflation in the 1980s, as perceived by Fussell and Palloni (2004), lies in the fact that co-residence with parents or others remains the rule for single mothers and also remains common for both cohabiting and married couples without children. Second, we add a caveat with respect to latin america’s convergence to the pattern of the second demographic transi-tion (Sdt). the sheer size of the cohabitation boom and the de-stigmatization of unmarried unions clearly fit the Sdt prediction (esteve, lesthaeghe, and lopez-Gay 2012), but the convergence to a purely western pattern is only partial given that significant proportions of childless cohabiting couples and a still noticeable percentage of cohabiting parents are living not in nuclear households but in extended and/or composite households. For such couples it is harder to imagine that cohabitation is merely a “trial marriage” between two individuals. Hence a distinct latin american version of one of the key aspects of the Sdt is produced by the historical context of the continued salience of co-residence in extended households for a significant proportion of the population. For others, however, who comprise a majority in nine countries of the 13 considered here, cohabiting couples and mothers do live in a neolocal and nuclear household, and for them the convergence to the western Sdt pattern is much more likely.

Living arrangements of single mothers

Single mothers face conflicts between work and caring for children, suffer from a lack of social capital, and are almost universally at considerably higher risk of living in poverty (e.g., chant 1985, 2002; dominguez and watkins 2003; Gornick and Jäntti 2010). the problems facing single mothers have al-ways been acute in latin america and the caribbean, and the high incidence of single motherhood is considered one of the reasons why latin american income inequalities have remained so pronounced (Gindling and oviedo 2008). in addition, the rise in cohabitation over the past several decades has contributed to a growing pool of women with higher probabilities of becoming single mothers. in 1996 arias and Palloni concluded for several latin ameri-can countries, “our data reveal that there is an increased tendency for wid-ows and divorced women to head their own household. if this characteristic remained invariant in years to come we will see a large increase in the total proportion of female heads as the population ages and as marriage disruptions become more prevalent. the increase, however, will not come from the ranks


of younger women who are unmarried or in consensual unions, but from among those who are older and who have experienced some time within a marriage” (1996, p. 27). evidently, at the time of writing, these authors did not realize that the latin american “cohabitation boom” was in the making and that this new feature would alter the situation to a considerable extent.

traditionally the literature on single mothers focused almost entirely on the low-income and poorly educated strata of the population (see also lehmann 2000, p. 30). However, not only have educational levels increased considerably in most of latin america since the 1970s, but the prevalence of cohabitation has expanded among women with full secondary education and even full university training (see esteve, lesthaeghe, and lopez-Gay 2012). this implies that a very different pool of women now face higher probabilities of single motherhood.

combined use of iPumS data and the liPRo typology permits us to reconstruct the basic trends over time and according to educational category. the relative prevalence of single mothers in the age group 25–29 is given in table 6, both as a percentage of all women in that age group and as a per-centage of all women with children. the rise in percentages of single mothers varies substantially across countries. argentina, brazil, chile, and colombia had increases between the 1980 and 2000 censuses in excess of 3.5 percentage points relative to all women and in excess of 7.0 percentage points relative to all mothers. by contrast, costa Rica and Panama had no increase in single mothers as a percent of all women 25–29, and hardly any as a percent of all mothers in that age group. one of the major reasons for these disparities could of course be the differences in the growth of cohabitation over that pe-riod. this is partially borne out by the data: argentina, brazil, and colombia had increases in percentages cohabiting among all women 25–29 in a union larger than 25 percentage points, whereas the corresponding increments for costa Rica and Panama were only around 10 percentage points (see esteve, lesthaeghe, and lopez-Gay 2012, p. 61).

it is not surprising that the incidence of single motherhood also var-ies according to social class and education. the outcomes are presented in table 7 for the latest available census, again for all women 25–29 and for all mothers in that age group. with the exception of cuba, where educational differences in the incidence of single motherhood are minimal, the contrast between women 25–29 with complete tertiary education and those with at most complete primary education still follows the traditional gradient with respect to cohabitation (cf. esteve, lesthaeghe, and lopez-Gay 2012, figure 3, p. 67): the higher the education, the lower the proportions cohabiting and the lower the incidence of single motherhood. in table 7, the percent-ages of single mothers among all women aged 25–29 are typically lowest for the best educated. apart from cuba, the gap between women with the highest and lowest education varies from 5.5 percentage points in Peru to


12.5 percentage points in argentina. much of the explanation lies in the fact that women with higher levels of education enter motherhood much later than women with less schooling. However, when we consider only women who are already mothers, these educational differences are systematically reversed. with the sole exception of argentina, single motherhood among all mothers 25–29 is more frequent among those with advanced education than among those who did not progress beyond primary school. in fact, in several instances this reversed profile is quite pronounced: in brazil and chile (a 5.1-percentage-point difference), costa Rica (6.8), colombia (8.8), and Peru (15.9). evidently, among the fewer women with higher education who

taBLe 6 Percent of single mothers aged 25–29 relative to all women 25–29 and to all mothers 25–29: Latin american countries 1970–2007

Percent of all women 25–29

country 1970–74 1980–85 1990–93 2000–2007

argentina 6.1 8.0 8.8 11.5bolivia — — — 19.2brazil — 5.0 9.3 11.2chile 10.9 13.2 14.5 16.8colombia 16.0 14.1 14.4 19.3costa Rica 13.0 14.0 — 13.3cuba — — — 19.6ecuador 15.3 14.5 13.5 15.2mexico — — 6.9 11.2Panama 17.8 19.1 19.0 17.6Peru — — 15.5 16.8Puerto Rico 10.1 12.7 15.0 —venezuela 12.7 16.0 16.5 16.2

Percent of all mothers 25–29

country 1970–74 1980–85 1990–93 2000–2007




progress to motherhood in the age group 25–29, proportionally more have already ended up in the position of a single parent. this not only illustrates the operation of a different selection mechanism, but again demonstrates that educational gradients are less stable in periods of rapid economic and/or cultural change (cf. esteve, lesthaeghe, and lopez-Gay 2012, pp. 68–75).

we mention a major caveat, however, when assigning the attributes of being in “a precarious situation” or “in poverty” to single mothers. this ca-veat pertains to the fact that co-residence of single mothers with others or in another household is far more common in latin america than in europe or the united States. this specific feature is illustrated in table 8, which reports

taBLe 7 Percent of single mothers aged 25–29, by education, relative to all women 25–29 and to all mothers 25–29: Latin american countries, latest census year


Primary complete complete tertiary/ country or less secondary university

argentina 2001 15.4 9.2 2.9bolivia 2001 21.1 17.5 10.0brazil 2000 12.6 9.2 4.7chile 2002 18.3 16.9 8.0colombia 2005 20.1 21.3 10.8costa Rica 2000 14.3 12.8 8.0cuba 2002 13.9 16.6 12.5ecuador 2001 16.0 15.0 9.1mexico 2000 12.4 10.1 5.5Panama 2000 19.4 18.4 9.1Peru 2007 17.3 17.8 11.8venezuela 2001 18.0 11.5 7.1

Percent of all mothers 25–29





the percentages of single mothers aged 25–29 living in extended or composite households. many of these households include one or both parents, so that we are often considering three-generation households.

the census results for several successive decades show both that 70 to 80 percent of single mothers co-reside in extended or composite households and that these percentages have been stable over time. the only exceptions are costa Rica and Puerto Rico, where such co-residence is less frequent and where percentages are declining. the overall high percentage of co-residence in the majority of countries considered here illustrates the “robustness” of family relations to which Fussell and Palloni (2004) referred when comment-ing on the persistent latin american marriage regime in times of economic upheaval. while this robustness apparently remains, the marriage regime has been significantly altered by the rises in cohabitation and concomitantly in single parenthood. moreover, with such high percentages of co-residence, the contention by Gindling and oviedo (2008) that latin america’s marked income inequality can, to a significant degree, be ascribed to the high preva-lence of single motherhood seems exaggerated. Finally, it has become clear that the term “lone mother” as used in the latin american context is appli-cable to only a minority of unpartnered mothers. the majority of them are simply not “lone” or alone in a nuclear household.

the percentage of single mothers aged 25–29 living in extended or composite households in each of the education categories is given in table 9. these profiles may seem counter-intuitive at first sight, but are quite un-derstandable when considered more closely. the better-educated women (full secondary or higher) systematically have the largest proportions of

taBLe 8 Percent of single mothers aged 25–29 living in extended/composite households: Latin american countries, various census rounds 1970–2007

country 1970–74 1980–85 1990–93 2000–2007




single mothers living with their parents or other relatives. this illustrates once more that they benefit from greater social capital than less-educated women. if women with higher education become single mothers, they can rely more on parents and siblings who also have more substantial resources than the relatives of women at the lower end of the economic and educational spectrum. Further, single mothers with completed secondary education are likely to be students, in which case continued co-residence with parents is desirable as women finish higher education. the overall outcome, however, is that less-educated single mothers not only have much lower incomes, but also come from families that are not wealthy enough to continue to support them via co-residence. in other words, less-educated single mothers face a double burden since proportionally more of them also do not have the safety net of the three-generation or otherwise extended family. the relative share of single mothers with completed primary education or less who live in a more precarious nuclear household situation ranges from around 20 percent in chile to 50 percent in bolivia.

Findings and conclusions

this study sheds new light on the rapidly changing picture of union and household formation in latin america. we focused on women aged 25–29 since many of the crucial transitions have either already occurred before that age or are happening in that age bracket. For 13 countries in the region we used the iPumS samples of census rounds and reconfigured the household

taBLe 9 Percent of single mothers aged 25–29, by education, living in extended/composite households: Latin american countries, latest available census






positions of individuals by constructing an extended version of the liPRo typology. these adaptations allow for the possibility of continued co-residence in the parental household or in other forms of family extensions. we can summarize our findings as follows:

1) the considerable drop in proportions married before age 30 is mainly due to the substitution of marriage by cohabitation. this is also the main reason why ages at first union have remained stable in most countries of the region. However, there is an educational differential in this respect, with better-educated women also prolonging the period of not entering a union in addition to their substitution of cohabitation in place of marriage.

2) the study of household formation in latin america cannot ignore the possibility of remaining in the parental household and/or of co-residence with other relatives or non-relatives. the transition to a neolocal nuclear household is not necessarily synchronous with entering a partnership or reaching parenthood. this feature sets most of latin america apart from european-origin populations, including the united States, canada, australia, and new Zealand.

3) the majority of cohabiting women without children continue to live in extended households (most often three-generation ones) in bolivia ecuador, Peru, and venezuela. For them, cohabitation presumably does not represent the second demographic transition connotation of being a neolo-cal and nuclear “trial marriage.” Rather, cohabitation could be viewed as the continuation of an older historical pattern. However, the same cannot be con-cluded for the complement of this percentage, that is, the share of cohabiting women without children who live in a neolocal and nuclear household. this share exceeds 50 percent in colombia, cuba, Panama, and Puerto Rico; 60 percent in chile, costa Rica, and mexico; and 70 percent in argentina and brazil. in these instances, the convergence of cohabitation to the european Sdt pattern is evidently more pronounced.

4) in the absence of children, co-residence of cohabiting women in extended families is more common than for their married counterparts. this means that the cohabiting partners are regularly accepted by co-residing rela-tives, and presumably also that a subsequent marriage marks the departure of the new couple from a parental household. in some latin american countries, however, substantial proportions of married women without children still co-reside with parents or other adults. co-residence with others drops further for couples, cohabiting or married, with children.

5) Single mothers have by far the highest incidence of living in an ex-tended or composite household. among such women aged 25–29, commonly two thirds to three quarters co-reside with other adults, and in such instances three-generation households are a dominant feature. the major exceptions are bolivia and especially Puerto Rico, where significantly fewer single moth-ers live in extended families. in contrast to the expectations of arias and Pal-


loni (1996), the cohabitation boom appears to be the main source of the rise in single motherhood.

6) when considering all women aged 25–29, the incidence of single motherhood is clearly highest for women with the least education. only in cuba is there no such a gradient. Part of the explanation of course is that there are simply fewer mothers in that age group among the better educated. However, if only mothers in the age group 25–29 are considered, then co-residence with others is lowest for the least-educated women. as a result, less-educated single mothers generally have less earning power and lack the safety net provided by co-residence with kin or other adults.

we conclude with a few observations on the uniqueness of the latin american family context and the implications for the spread of the second demographic transition in the region. the remarkable robustness of latin american women’s ages at first union to the economic shocks of the 1980s and early 1990s is essentially due to the systematic shift from marriage to cohabitation, and furthermore to the continued intergenerational support provided by the extended family system. it would be a mistake, however, to consider this as an overall indication of continued “traditionalism.” in fact, despite the relatively high percentages of cohabitants residing for some time in extended households, the majority of them are found in a neolocal and nuclear setting. despite considerable national and regional variation in this respect, the trends clearly point toward the predictions of the second demographic transition: greater tolerance for new forms of behavior have spurred the cohabitation boom and, as a byproduct, also the rise in single motherhood. but we also observe an unmistakably latin american version of the Sdt, which is offered by the potential of living part of the life cycle in an extended family.

taking these points together, it is clear that in many instances the latin american family exhibits a greater degree of robustness than its european or northern american counterparts. Hence, if some features of the Sdt, such as steep rises in cohabitation, are making inroads, then this occurs in specific historical contexts. these contexts vary substantially between countries, so that the rise of cohabitation and single motherhood poses different challenges depending on economic conditions and the degree of flexibility of the family in a given country. moreover, this heterogeneity should be taken into account when interpreting the changes in household formation patterns since the 1970s. we are clearly not witnessing a wholesale import of the european Sdt, but neither do we find a universally intact and immune “strong family sys-tem” as defined by Reher (1998). Presumably, most situations lie somewhere in between, with countries such as argentina, brazil, chile, costa Rica, and uruguay following a more european pattern, and the central and northern andean countries maintaining stronger traditional family cohesion.


Notes

References

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1 the liPRo master sheets, the iPumS-to-liPRo syntax, and the detailed reference tables for this article can be accessed via «http://www.ced.uab.es/worldfam/esteve_etal_PdR2012_liPRo.xlsx».

2 Spouse-to-spouse links are established according to five basic rules (from strong to weak relationships). iPumS-international SPRule reports the rule that applies to the link in question. on average, 97.6 percent of spousal links were based on strong relation-ships, meaning that the census microdata pro-vided unambiguous information to identify who is partnered with whom. the proportion of strong relationships ranges from 90 percent in argentina 1970 to more than 99 percent in all brazilian samples, mexico 2000, and Puerto Rico 1980. Similarly, the proportion of child-to-parent links based on unambiguous information was 97.6 percent.

3 Parental co-residence for young couples may have different meanings depending on whether parents provide support for young couples or elderly parents receive support from their offspring. censuses offer few clues to distinguish between these situations except for knowing who is identified as head of the

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4 any analysis of latin american house-hold data encounters the problem of women in visiting unions who do not report a partner and are therefore often referred to as “false singles.” our analysis here is no exception, hence the proportions of single mothers could be overestimated. However, visiting unions are much more typical for the caribbean and for black or mulatto populations who stem from the slaves imported to regions with large-scale plantations. Furthermore, men in visiting unions are mobile in terms of partner-ships and may have more than one female partner. all of this means that women in such unions more closely resemble the “real” single mothers than they do mothers in regular and more stable consensual unions.

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