110,000 kids live in both parents' homes
Published : 17 Jun 2019, 18:56
Updated : 18 Jun 2019, 02:55
The issue of children living in both their parents was examined for the first time in Statistics Finland’s ad hoc module of the Labour Force Survey in 2018, said a Statistics Finland press release.
The data on children sharing parents' residences have not been readily available, as in the Population Information System, a child can only have one home address.
For example, in cases of divorce, the child is only recorded in the family of one parent, even if the child, in practice, would live with both parents alternately.
Around 63,000 women had children under the age of 15 living in two homes in 2018.
In the survey, shared residence was defined based on how the respondent answered the question “Do you have children of your own that have two homes?” If the respondent had such children, the living arrangements of each child was examined in more detail with the question: “Does your child live as much with one parent as the other or mostly with you or mostly with the other parent?”
Even though the questions about shared residence were asked to both parents, the results have been processed based on the responses of one parent, namely the mother, in the survey report in order to avoid possible overlapping in estimating the number of children.
Of the women aged 18 to 64 that responded to the survey and had at least one child aged under 15, nearly one in every six (14%) women had children that lived in two homes. Of the women that had children living in two homes, 44 per cent had one child living in two homes, 42 per cent had two children living in two homes and 14 per cent had at least three children living in two homes. There were around 110,000 children living in two homes.
Women who said their children had two homes were asked whether the parents had legally joint custody or whether one of the parents had sole custody of the children. Of the children that had two homes, 92 per cent had two guardians, i.e. the parents had joint custody.
The most common scenario was that the child with two homes spent a bulk time living in the home of the parent whose address was registered as the child’s home address. Around every third child lived almost equally with both parents. It was extremely rare that the child lived most of the time with the parent whose address was not registered as the child’s home address.
Of the children with two homes that lived mostly with their mother, around 40 per cent also lived with their father regularly, for example on weekends.