Living arrangements, intra-household inequality and children's deprivation: evidence from EU-SILC

A non-negligible proportion of children in Europe live in multifamily households that include other adults beyond their parents: around 4% live with their grandparents and a further 7% with their adult siblings. In this paper, we investigate the extent to which living in these two household types protects children against deprivation and we provide tests of the relationship between the intrahousehold sharing of resources and children’s deprivation. We find that although most children in multifamily households face significantly higher deprivation risks than children in nuclear households this largely reflects the selection into co-residence of families facing financial difficulties rather than arising from an incomplete sharing of resources. We further show that co-residence with grandparents protects a large share of children against deprivation (i.e. they would face higher deprivation risk if they lived only with their parents) while co-residence with adult siblings has more mixed effects across countries.