Unmarried parents more likely to separate

The percentage of Dutch 15 year olds not living with both their parents increased from 20 percent to 30 percent between 1997 and 2017. Children of unmarried parents are more likely to see their parents separate than kids of married parents, Statistics Netherlands said in its report New Families, released on Monday.

The reason for the vast majority of 15 year olds not living with both parents, is divorce or separation. Less than 5 percent of these teenagers don't live with both parents due to the death of one or both parents.

In 2016 over 53 thousand children saw their parents separate. 33 thousand of these separation cases involved divorce, in the other 20 thousand the parents were not married. The number of children seeing their parents divorce remained fairly stable over the past two decades, though the percentage of children not living with both parents increased. 70 percent of kids with divorced parents live mainly with their mother. More than a quarter of parents who split up in 2010 opted for co-parenting, where kids live about the same amount of time with each parent. In most cases, this co-parenting arrangement was still used two years later.

Of the kids who lived with both married parents at the start of last year, 1.5 percent lived in a broken home by the end of 2017. Among kids with unmarried parents, this was 3.6 percent. The chance that kids of unmarried children will see their parents split up increases in the first years after their birth, and then remains relatively stable during their primary school years. Among married parents, the chance of divorce increases until their child is 6 years old, and then decreases.

Of the 15-year-olds in the Netherlands with an Antillean mother, two thirds did not live with their father too at the end of 2016. The same was true for just over half of 15-year-olds with a Surinamese mother. Of the 15-year-olds with a Turkish or Moroccan mother, around three quarters lived with both parents at the end of 2016 - about the same proportion as kids whose mothers don't have a migration background.