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Single Parents, Around the World

By Catherine Rampell

Published March 10, 2010, New York Times

A sizable minority of children in rich countries live with just one parent — a parent who is likely to be female, and also likely to be working.Those are some of the takeaways from the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development’s recent coverage this week of women in the world.

Across the industrialized world, about 15.9 percent of children live in single-parent households. The United States is at the higher end of the single-parent spectrum, with 25.8 percent of its children living with just a mother or a father.Usually it is just a mother. In the United States, as in every other industrialized country, most single-parent households are single-mother households:The only country where single fathers look like more than a faint sliver is Belgium, where there are still nearly twice as many children living with single mothers as with single fathers.

Exactly what it means to be a single parent — for your lifestyle and how you spend your time — varies greatly by country. In some countries, including the United States and Japan, nearly all single parents work; in others, like Malta and Turkey, most single parents do not have jobs.