From a life course perspective, newborn’s birth weight is considered a crucial indicator of perinatal health since it determines the likelihood of experiencing satisfactory growth and development. Low birth weight determinants may be biological, behavioral, or related to some mothers’ characteristics such as marital status. It has been argued that children of partnered mothers have better birth outcomes than those of unpartnered mothers. However, little is known about the effect of extended households on birth weight.
In their latest study, Chiara Dello Iacono (University of Salamanca), Miguel Requena (UNED), and Mikolaj Stanek (University of Salamanca) investigated the relationship between mothers’ partnership status and household structure and children’s low birth weights born in Spain between 2011 and 2012. To do so, they used a novel database provided by the Spanish National Institute of Statistics which links the 2011 Census and the Spanish vital statistics from 2011 to 2015.
The results suggest that the effects of partnership and extended households on birth weight are not substantial. First, the lack of a partner has no substantive impact on low birth weight in nuclear or in extended households. Second, partnered women living in extended households are more likely to have children with a low birth weight than partnered women living in nuclear households. The authors attribute these patterns to dissimilar socio-demographic characteristics among mothers in different coresidential situations. In conclusion, living with or without a partner in a nuclear or extended household structure is not sufficient to mitigate poor perinatal health outcomes if the mother’s starting condition is precarious.