The Flow of Family Transitions of Australian Families

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