Lone Motherhood and its Educational Outcomes for Children in Vietnam

Abstract

Micro-data from the 2009 Vietnam census indicate that lone mothers represent 11.0% of all women aged 15 to 49 living with at least one of their children (≤17 years old). Results from logistic regression models show that school enrollment and attainment levels are lower for children of lone mothers than for children living with two parents. This negative effect is observed for children of never married, divorced or separated, and widowed lone mothers as well as for children of women currently married to a migrant not residing in the household provided they are not head of household. This disadvantage may be explained by reduced availability of human, material, and financial resources; restricted agency of the mother; and long-term socioeconomic and demographic processes shaping family relations and migration.

KEYWORDS:

• census
• children
• education
• family
• household
• lone motherhood
• migration
• Vietnam

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

This article uses data from the Minnesota Population Center. Integrated Public Use Microdata Series, International: Version 6.2 [Machine-readable database]. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota, 2013. The author acknowledges the Vietnam General Statistics Office for providing the underlying data that made this research possible. The author also thanks Christophe Guilmoto (Institut de Recherche pour le Développement CEPED), Marc Pilon (Institut de Recherche pour le Développement CEPED), Marie-Christine Roubaud (Aix Marseille University LATP), Joseph Larmarange (Institut de Recherche pour le Développement, CEPED), Hyunjoon Park (University of Pennsylvania, Department of Sociology), and Wei-Jun Jean Yeung (National University of Singapore, Sociology, ARI and CFPR) for their comments on earlier versions of the article. Responsibility for the views expressed and any errors therein remains the author's.

Notes

For Western countries, see for example Heuveline, Timberlake, Furstenberg, and Furstenberg (2003). For worldwide comparisons, see for example Child Trends (2013) and infra.

Previous studies have shown that migration remittances are mostly spent on everyday expenses (La & Leung, 2012; Locke et al., 2008).

Among them are administrative data from the GSO (since 2003), the household survey data from Demographic and Health Surveys, the Vietnam Living Standard Surveys, the Vietnam Household Living Standard Surveys, and Multiple Indicators Surveys. Indicators are also available from the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) Institute for Statistics.

Our 15% sample include a total of 2.56 million mothers, among whom 0.27 million are lone mothers. Because each mother has at least one child, the number of children is as high as 4.17 million, among whom 0.35 million live with a lone mother.

A migrant is defined as someone who was not living in the same commune 5 years before the census (GSO, 2011b). Because of the high level of correlation between mothers’ and their children's migration status, to avoid colinearity problems, only migration status of the children is taken into account in the regression models.

A person with disability is defined as someone who has at least one little difficulty in one of the four domains among hearing, seeing, concentrating or paying attention, and walking or using lower extremities. This information has been gathered for people aged 5 years and above (GSO, 2011c).

The wealth index has been calculated using a principal component analysis based on 11 variables significant of the goods, materials, and equipment of the household.

The discrepancy between proportions regarding children and their mothers is because lone mothers have a lower number of children than women living with their husband or partner (1.58 versus 1.95 children per women, see Table 2).

Among females, the proportion of divorced (1.4%) is higher than the proportion of separated (0.6%) (GSO, 2011c).

The coefficients in Table 7 take into account the marital status of lone mother, the relationship with the household head, and the interaction effect between these two correlates.

Migration abroad is very uncommon: It concerns only 0.1% of children aged 7 to 17. For insight on consequences of remote parenting in Vietnam transnational families, see for example Graham and Jordan (2011) or Hoang and Yeoh (2012).