Relationships, their typology and meanings have profoundly changed over the past decades in Western societies. These changes constitute an important challenge for welfare states because policies need to take into account new living arrangements in order to support all types of families. Nora Sánchez Gassen and Brienna Perelli-Harris examine the incidence of cohabitation and match it with the associated legal regulation across eleven European countries and Russia in order to quantify the number of couples that fall outside the scope of classical family policies.

Maximising health in later life is one of the most important policy issues for the welfare regimes of ageing societies. At the same time, health outcomes in later life can only be fully understood when also taking into account past experiences. For example, a woman who worked during most of her life might find herself with more economic and social resources later in life than a woman who mostly devoted her time to family responsibilities, and such accumulation of resources can positively influence her general health. 

Currently a large share of marriages in Europe ends in separation. Marital separation not only causes psychological and emotional stress, but it also affects residential mobility. This occurs because, generally, at least one of the ex-partners leaves the shared dwelling after separation. In this study, Philipp Lersch and Sergi Vidal analyse residential moves to owned and rented dwellings by relationship status and gender, and examine selection processes between ownership and separation in Britain and Germany.

Public child care provisions play a fundamental role in modern societies: They facilitate mothers’ participation in the labour market and foster children’s educational outcomes. If children spend much of the day in child care institutions, their mothers may decide to return to employment after childbirth, better reconciling work and family life. At the same time, providing education to children at early stages of life seems to have a positive impact on later social, behavioural, and cognitive outcomes. 

Lone motherhood is increasing in many countries. The experience of parenting without a partner is generally associated with health problems, including physical limitations in daily activities and poor health. In their study, Lisa Berkman, Yuhui Zheng, M. Maria Glymour, Mauricio Avendano, Axel Börsch-Supan, and Erika L. Sabbath look at the single motherhood histories of older women to answer the following questions: How does single motherhood relate to health at older ages? Do these effects vary across 13 European countries, England, and the USA?

What is the ideal age to become a parent? The recent boost in the use of assisted reproduction techniques that allow women (and men) to have children at older ages has opened up a wider debate about the most appropriate age limit for using techniques to facilitate conception outside of the biological reproductive life cycle.