Single Parents on the Increase

Typical families consisting of two parents and their children account for less than half of all households across the country as the divorce rate grows and its population continues to grey, statistics show.

There were over one million single-parent households last year, according to the 2010 Census by Statistics Korea.

Meanwhile the percentage of households made up of two or three generations of a family including an unmarried child has dropped significantly over the last decade. They accounted for over half, or 56.6 percent, of the total in 2000, but dwindled to 43.2 percent in 2010.

On the other hand, the proportion of single-parent families, households headed by grandparents without parents, one-person households and those occupied by childless couples jumped from 37.9 percent to 55.7 percent over the same period.

Korea saw its divorce rate grow explosively in the 1990s. It hit a peak of 166,000 in 2003 but declined a little at around 120,000 a year from 2005. As of 2010, some 1.27 million people decided not to remarry while raising their children alone after divorce, up 40.2 percent from 2005.

"The main reason for the dissolution of the traditional family pattern has shifted from the death of a spouse to divorce," said Kang Ji-won, a researcher at the Korea Institute for Health and Social Affairs. "We now need to embrace single parents without social bias.

The children of divorced parents were 3.6 times more likely to be living with their mothers (1,247,000 households) than their fathers (347,000 households).

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