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1 June 2021

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Last year has been challenging for many working parents due to the coronavirus pandemic. Balancing work and family responsibilities has been especially difficult for parents with young children. At the occasion of the Global Parents Day, we look at single-parent households in the EU.

In 2020, there were 195.4 million households in the European Union (EU). Almost one-third of these households (29%) had children living with them. Approximately 14% of households with children (7.8 million households) consisted of single parents, accounting for 4% of total households.

Household composition

 

Source dataset: lfst_hhnhtych

 

Share of single-parent households differs greatly between countries

The share of single parents varied considerably from one country to another. Looking at the share of single-parent households among all households with children, six countries recorded a share of over 20% of all households with children: Sweden (34%, see note below), Denmark (29%), Estonia (28%), Latvia and Lithuania(both 25%) and France (21%).

In contrast, the lowest shares were registered in Croatia (5%), Romania (7%) and Finland (8%), while Greece, Slovakia, Malta, Poland, Spain and Slovenia all recorded 9%.

share of sinlge parents with children

 

Source dataset: lfst_hhnhtych

 

For more information:

  • See the Statistics Explained article on Household composition statistics
  • Data for Sweden should be interpreted cautiously, as household data is not calibrated for non-response against administrative data.
  • In Germany, since the first quarter of 2020, the Labour Force Survey (LFS) has been integrated into the newly designed German microcensus as a subsample. Unfortunately, for the LFS, technical issues and the COVID-19 crisis has had a large impact on the data collection processes, resulting in low response rates and a biased sample. Changes in the survey methodology also led to a break in the data series. The published German data are preliminary and may be revised in the future. For more information, see here.

 

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