




































AUSTRALIAN POPULATION STUDIES  2019 | Volume 3 | Issue 2 | pages 37-40 

 

© Pribesh et al. 2019. Published under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial licence 3.0 Australia (CC BY-NC 
3.0 AU). Journal website: www.australianpopulationstudies.org 

The flow of family transitions of 
Australian families 

Shana Pribesh*  Old Dominion University 

Matthew Usevitch  Baylor College of Medicine 

Elizabeth Koch Sigler  Brigham Young University 

Kaijsa Angerhofer Heninger  Brigham Young University 

Yuanyuan Yue  Old Dominion University 

Mikaela J Dufur  Brigham Young University 

Jonathan A Jarvis  Brigham Young University 

* Corresponding author. Email: spribesh@odu.edu. Address: Department of Educational Foundations 

and Leadership, Old Dominion University, DCOE 2307, Norfolk VA, USA 23529. 

Paper received 13 June 2018; accepted 14 November 2019; published 18 November 2019 

 

Family structure disruption has been linked to negative child educational and health outcomes 

(Perales et al. 2016). Australia has relatively stable families, but income disparities between 

Australians are widening, and single-parent families make up a large proportion of families living in 

poverty. Cohabitation is also common in Australia with approximately three-quarters of marriages 

preceded by cohabitation. If substantial family structure churning affects Australian children this may 

expose a need for special policy interventions aimed at family creation and dissolution to ameliorate 

the negative effects of such stressful experiences. To highlight family structures and transitions 

Australian children experience, we use Sankey flow diagrams charting data from ‘Growing Up in 

Australia: The Longitudinal Study of Australian Children (LSAC)’ (Gilding 2001). We track children 

from birth to 11 years old using waves 1-6 and population weights to represent 183,521 children 

born into Australian families. 

We used household rosters to construct three baseline family structures in wave 1 (0-1 years old): 

Biological Married, Biological Cohabit, and Biological Single. In subsequent waves, we placed children 

into one of five additional categories if they experienced a family transition: 

 Disrupted Biological Married – two biological parents who married after the child’s birth and live 

in the same household. 

 Disrupted Non-Biological Married – two married parents where one parent is not the biological 

parent of the child (stepfamilies, adoptions, etc.) and the stepparent lives in the same household. 

 Disrupted Biological Cohabit – two biological parents who began cohabiting after the child’s birth 

and live in the same household. 

 Disrupted Non-Biological Cohabit – two cohabiting parents where one parent is not the biological 

parent of the child (social families, etc.) and the social parent lives in the same household.  

 Disrupted Single – a single-parent family where a parent exited the family after the child’s birth. 

D
e

m
o

G
ra

p
h

ic
 

 

http://www.australianpopulationstudies.org/
mailto:spribesh@odu.edu


38 Pribesh et al.  Australian Population Studies 3 (2) 2019 

 

 

Figure 1: Paths of family transitions for children who were born to married, cohabiting and single parents 



Australian Population Studies 3 (2) 2019  Pribesh et al. 39 

 

Each combination of consecutive family structures defined what we call a family structure path. 

Children with the same family structure path were grouped. We then created Sankey diagrams to 

visualize the most common paths overall based on children’s family structure at birth (Figure 1). We 

include only those paths that represent at least 0.6% of the population. 

Most common family structures and transitions 

Over three-quarters of children were born into a family with biological parents who were married, 

16% into a cohabiting parent family, and 7% into a single parent family. While nearly two-thirds of 

children remained in a family with married biological parents, we discovered 57 distinct family 

structure paths after birth. But generally, family structures were stable with 75% of children 

experiencing no transitions and very few children experiencing more than one family transition. Six 

primary paths represented 90% of children. Still, 1% of children experienced three or more 

transitions. Among children who experienced at least one transition, 74% were exposed to family 

instability before age nine.  

Born to Married Parents 

Children born into families with biological parents who were married experienced the least 

turbulence with approximately 84% experiencing no family changes. The next most common 

experience for this group was for the child’s parents to transition from married to a single-parent 

family representing 9.6% of children born to married parents and 7.4% overall. These two-family 

experiences make up almost 94 % of all children originally born into families with two biological 

parents who were married.  

Born to Cohabiting Parents 

Children who were born into a family with cohabiting parents took 11 distinct paths. The largest path 

(44%) remained in households with two biological parents who were cohabiting. A fifth of children 

whose biological parents were cohabiting at the child’s birth then transitioned into marriage. The 

third largest path in this group consists of children whose parents cohabited at birth but then split up 

indicating a transition into a single-parent family that persists--a path that represents 15.7% of 

cohabiters at birth and 2.5% of the total sample.  

Born to a Single Parent 

Forty-five percent of children born into a single-parent family remained in that path. Of the 15 

additional paths for children born into single-parent families, the most common was for the single 

parent to enter a cohabiting relationship. Approximately 8% began cohabiting with the biological 

parent of the child and 15.7% began cohabiting with another person. Marriage was less common 

among those who had a child while single with 7.4% of single parents marrying the biological parent 

of the child and 6.2% marrying someone else. 

  



40 Pribesh et al.  Australian Population Studies 3 (2) 2019 

 

References 

Gilding M (2001) Changing families in Australia. Family Matters 60: 6-11. 

Perales F, O’Flaherty M and Baxter J (2016) Early life course family structure and children’s socio-

emotional and behavioural functioning: a view from Australia. Child Indicators Research 9: 1003-

1028. 

Waldfogel J, Craigie T A and Brooks-Gunn J (2010) Fragile families and child wellbeing. Future Child 20(2): 

87-112. 

 


