Essays
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Changing Family Patterns - Gerson, Kathleen
All societies have families, but their form varies greatly across time and space. The history of the family is thus one of changing family forms, which result from the interplay of shifting social and economic conditions, diverse and contested ideals, and the attempts of ordinary people to build their lives amid the constraints of their particular time and place. Because the family is a site of our most intimate experiences, the study of families tends to prompt heated theoretical and empirical debate. From the early anthropological charting of kinship systems to current analyses of proliferating family forms, studying the family has been a contested terrain. If the 1950s produced a short‐lived consensus on the “ideal nuclear family,” the current context of rapid family change poses a series of puzzles and paradoxes. What is a family, and why has its definition become so controversial? What are the emerging contours of adult commitment, and what is the future of marriage? How is family life linked to institutions outside the home, and how are the boundaries between public and private spheres blurring? What role does family life play in the structuring of social inequality? In addition, what are the prospects for creating social policies that meet the needs of diverse family forms? These questions draw our attention to the dislocations and contradictions of family change, but they also point to new opportunities to build more just and humane family forms. The challenge will be to find common ground for addressing the needs of diverse families and realigning both public and private institutions to better fit the circumstances of family life in the twenty‐first century. -
Divorce - Härkönen, Juho
There is by now a large literature on divorce which seeks to understand the underlying reasons behind trends in divorce rates and establish the predictors of divorce as well as its consequences for adults and children. Early research examined divorce over time and across societies, and developed conceptual models to understand which factors affect partners' decisions to divorce. Recent cutting edge research has expanded on this literature and examined the multiple causes and consequences of divorce, heterogeneity in causes and effects, and the role of new demographic trends such as the increase in cohabitation. Future advances can build on (i) the use of new data, cutting edge methods, and cross‐fertilization across disciplines, (ii) continued focus on emerging demographic realities, (iii) heterogeneity of divorces and their consequences, (iv) the mechanisms and processes that predict divorce and can help in understanding its effects, and (v) focus on cross‐national differences and societal contexts. -
Emerging Trends: Family Formation and Gender - Matysiak, Anna
Family formation is a well‐studied topic in demography and the social sciences. Yet, open questions to be addressed by future research remain. Focusing on the childbearing side of family formation, we discuss how a gendered lens, which led researchers to concentrate on women's experiences, has shaped previous studies. We argue that future research can be advanced by (i) going beyond this perspective and addressing men and their experiences pertaining to work and family and by (ii) broadening research on couples in order to understand how his and her resources, values, and experiences interact in relating to family formation. Furthermore, we discuss (iii) the relevance of incorporating a larger array of macrolevel factors into studies on family formation, such as regulations affecting the practical and daily lives of families, or the cultural context of emotions and (iv) which methodological advances are needed to address the complexity of the studied processes. -
Family Complexity and Kinship - Thomson, Elizabeth
Increases in parental cohabitation, separation or divorce, and re‐partnering or remarriage have generated an increase in the complexity of family and kinship ties. As a result, many scholars claim that family and kinship have become voluntary, with rights and obligations to be negotiated in the same way as those between friends and neighbors. This essay briefly reviews the demographic trends that have produced complex families and kin, and their projections into the future. It argues that kinship structures arising from stable nuclear family and kin networks provide a template for the organization of more complex family ties. Although a considerable degree of voluntariness can be found in ties among complex families and kin, rights and obligations remain structured in terms of blood and marriage, and are also strongly influenced by periods of coresidence. Guidelines do exist for relationships in complex families and kinship networks, and they can be used to further institutional arrangements that fit the circumstances of increasingly diverse types of families and kin. -
Family Formation in Times of Labor Market Insecurities - Huinink, Johannes
Family formation is still a major life goal for an overwhelming section of the population in contemporary societies. It is a major transition in the individual life course because bringing up children in modern societies is a challenging and costly task. Men and women are increasingly aware of this fact. That is why family formation is no longer taken for granted as an obligatory marker of the transition to adulthood. It is increasingly a matter of conscious decision making—at least in modern societies. One would expect economic uncertainty to be a major issue in this decision. Labor market insecurity in particular should prevent couples from realizing family formation and impact the timing of childbirth or the likelihood of remaining childless. -
Family Income Composition - Smith, Kristin E.
Family income has increased overall in the United States since the 1950s, but increased prosperity has not been distributed evenly, with family economic well‐being increasing more for some families than others. The end result has been increased family income inequality. Married couple families with a wife in the labor force have seen the largest gains over the decades. In general, families experienced increased prosperity over the 1950s and 1960s, a time when earnings increased for men and women. Starting in the early 1970s, however, the gap between families with a wife in the labor force and other families expanded markedly, as men's wage inequality grew and women's earnings continued to rise. This resulted in a flat trend line for families dependent only on men's earnings. Meanwhile, female‐led families have seen only modest increases in family income. This uneven growth in family income has its roots in demographic changes in the family, the focus of this essay. Markedly, the rise in women's employment and earnings, the rise in men's wage inequality, and shifts in family structure and increased marital homogamy on earnings all contributed to the shifts in family income composition. -
Household Economy - Lein, Laura
Debates about poverty—the nature of poverty, the measurement of poverty, and appropriate responses to poverty—are at the core of a great deal of research, policy debate, and political discussion. Since the 1950s the prevalence of poverty in the United States has been measured against a national poverty income line that is recalculated every year. A great deal of poverty research concentrates on income levels: how these are assessed, and their implications for family and individual well‐being. Furthermore, access to a number of poverty programs is based on the poverty line or a related measure of income. -
Maternal and Paternal Employment across the Life Course - Kreyenfeld, Michaela
This essay provides a condensed summary of major findings in trends in maternal and paternal employment patterns. Key theoretical concepts (such as cultural approaches, welfare state approaches, preference theory, economic approaches, and life course theory) are briefly summarized. The increase in maternal employment rates in most European countries, and the extent to which this increase has been related to growth in part‐time and marginal employment, are also discussed. In studying the dynamics of the employment behavior of mothers, empirical researchers have mainly looked at the amount of time it takes for women to return to work after childbirth. While these studies often capture only a snapshot of the life course—namely, the period between childbirth and labor market reentry—new approaches (so‐called sequence analyses) that map the lifetime employment patterns of women have been developed. The analysis of the employment patterns of fathers is an emerging field of research as well. However, little is known so far about how fatherhood affects men's lifetime employment patterns, and how paternal employment varies in different cultural and social policy contexts. -
Recent Demographic Trends and the Family - Wu, Lawrence L.
For demographers, perhaps the most stunning set of changes in the family to have emerged over the last century are changes that drove what appeared to have been exploding populations, both in the world at large as well as in individual countries, to changes that now raise the distinct possibility of future population decline in a non‐negligible number of nations. These changes are in turn intimately connected to profound changes in family life and most particularly in fertility—trends in how many women, on average, remain childless over their lifetimes, and for those women who become mothers, how many births they will have. What is especially intriguing is “American exceptionalism”—that the United States appears to have been largely immune, at least to date, from demographic trends that are so pronounced and potentially worrisome in so many other advanced industrialized nations. I review what lies behind the shift from exploding populations to the possibility of population decline in at least some parts of the world, and then speculate on what may be the likely sources of why the United States has been an exception to these trends. This then leads me to highly speculative remarks about why two specific groups very often seen in a negative light—immigrants and women who give birth outside of formal marriage—have played an important role in American demographic exceptionalism, and why these groups may likewise continue to be a major factor in why the future of the United States may be far rosier than that of other advanced industrialized nations. However, I caution that this optimistic scenario depends crucially on realizing the social, economic, and demographic potential of these subpopulations. -
The Future of Marriage - McClintock, Elizabeth Aura
After briefly examining the history or marriage and the development of modern marriage, this essay describes major themes in the study of marriage, including research on the rise of alternatives to marriage, the “deinstitutionalization” of marriage, and the consequences of these changes. It next considers current demographic trends, recent advances in research, and likely future directions of research. In particular, the imminence of same‐sex marriage and the increasing importance of the internet in partner selection are likely to be important areas of research and social change. The conclusion considers the implications of these trends for marriage's future and for future research on marriage. -
The Intergenerational Transmission of Fertility - Bernardi, Laura
The intergenerational transmission of fertility has direct consequences on population dynamics and is indirectly related to the reproduction of social inequality. Early studies focused on the positive correlation of parents and children fertility outcomes such as family size or childbearing timing. Explanations for the observed correlations have spanned from genetic and social status inheritance mechanisms to role modeling and socialization processes based on social learning and social influence. More recently, the focus has shifted from fertility outcomes to similarities and dissimilarities of family formation patterns across generations, framing fertility in the context of interrelated life course trajectories. Recent cutting‐edge research has also expanded upon the existing literature by focusing on the role played by multigenerational relationships and by bidirectional influence processes in parents‐children fertility behaviors. Challenges for future research are provided by the need to disentangle the interplay between genes and culture in defining tastes and preferences for given values and norms related to fertility and the increasing family complexity and migration that interfere with socialization processes.