Prague, Dec 12 (CTK) – Every fifth family in the Czech Republic is incomplete, even as children without a father or mother are threatened by poverty, daily Lidove noviny (LN) wrote on Saturday, citing the latest Eurostat statistics.
In this respect, the Czech Republic is now close to Hungary and Poland, LN said.
“This state of affairs is caused by a high divorce rate on the one hand and extra-marital fertility on the other,” sociologist Michaela Roeschlova is quoted as saying.
“Along with the falling marriage rate, this can be denoted as one of the most important demographic changes in the Czech Republic since the early 1990s”, she added.
At present, every second marriage ends with divorce in the Czech Republic, LN said.
Some 48,000 out of the total 107,000 children were born outside marriage last year, it added.
The biggest proportion of illegitimate children are born to the women with low education and in the regions with a high unemployment rate, LN said.
By 1990, the proportion of the children born out of the wedlock was less than one-tenth, it added.
In the crushing majority, there are the families of single mothers, LN said.
According to the latest data released by the Institute of Sociology of the Czech Academy of Sciences, roughly one-third of these mothers have higher education and for them, marriage is a useless matter, it added.
“Roughly one-third of the women are single involuntarily and the last one-third chose the lone motherhood in their own right, but not as a matter of values, but for pragmatic reasons,” Roeschova said.
“For the latter, it is financially more beneficial to stay single,” she added. “
However, experts warn that incomplete families are most often threatened by poverty, LN said.
“Along with complete families with three and more children and the families with a jobless parent, lone parents are more afflicted by various forms of poverty,” Daniel Prokop, from the Median agency, told the paper.
Besides, singles’ households now account for almost 30 percent of all one-member households and roughly 9 percent of all households in the Czech Republic,” Roeschova said.
“The figure may not seem high, but it is an important social phenomenon,” she added.
The proportion of this type of households was considerably rising in the past decade.
According to the data of the Czech Statistical Office (CSU), there were 46,000 households of the singles aged 20-38 in 1970, while the figure surged to 300,000 by 2011.
