Number of single moms rises 60 percent

The rise occurred between the years 2000-2011 according to the Central Bureau of Statistics report.

By DANIELLE ZIRI
A worried mother holding her baby 370 (photo credit: Thinkstock/Imagebank)
A worried mother holding her baby 370
(photo credit: Thinkstock/Imagebank)
The number of single mothers in Israel increased 60 percent between 2000 and 2011, according to a Central Bureau of Statistics report released on Wednesday.
The report, published ahead of next week’s Family Day, showed that in general, the number of households headed by single parents in Israel grew from 89,000 in 2000 to 107,000 in 2011.
The highest percentage of such households was recorded in Haifa, while the lowest was found in Petah Tikva.
Single-parent families with children up to 17 years old made up about 6% of all families in Israel in 2011.
According to CBS, the average number of children in these families in 2011 was 1.8 children, compared to 2.5 in families with two parents – a number higher than the averages recorded in other countries such as Italy, Germany and Denmark.
The report also revealed that 92% of single-parent families with children below 17 are headed by women.
Sixty percent of the singleparent families are headed by a divorced parent; 15% are headed by married parents who live separately; 13% are headed by a parent who has never gotten married; and 12% are headed by widows or widowers.
Some 5,050 single Jewish women gave birth in 2011, compared to 2,600 a decade earlier, an increase from 2.8% to 4.2% of births in Israel.
The CBS figures also revealed that out of the 520,000 families in Israel registered to social welfare services, a quarter are single- parent families.
In general, there were 1.83 million families in Israel in 2011, compared to 1.5 million in 2000. Of the families, 1.47 million were Jewish and 310,000 were Arab.
In terms of family, the survey found that the average number of people in Israeli families in 2011 was 3.7, with an average of 3.5 in Jewish families and 4.8 in Arab families. The document stated that this difference is due to both higher fertility rates among the Arab population as well as aging among the Jewish population.
A third of Arab families are composed of at least six individuals, a percentage three times greater than the percentage of Jewish families of the same size.