Family Formation and the Home

This article is based on data gathered in the 1960s, which included information on household composition and family formations. We explore different family formations and structures represented in this data and the meaning attached to issues around a number of ‘unusual’ family compositions encountered by the researchers at that time. We also examine the significance attached to atypical family units by both the respondents and the interviewers.

ABSTRACTMost research studies on return migration analyse remigration and reintegration as individual projects, without considering the interconnectedness of remigrants with their family members. This article addresses this research gap and seeks to add to our understanding of the role which the family plays in shaping reintegration outcomes through a qualitative analysis of the experiences of highly skilled Austrians who returned, with their co- or inter-ethnic family members, in the last 10 years. Results show that the relationship between family and reintegration is complex. Core family members may act both as constraints and as enablers of readjustment. Partners and children ease reintegration by providing enthusiasm, motivation and emotional support. At the same time, family members may also complicate the reintegration process by increasing the amount of administrative work to be done in order to re-organise family life or by triggering feelings of alienation, when family members face (re)-integration challenges. The reintegration process was also found to have a significant impact on highly skilled returnees’ family life. The problem-solving strategies which returnees develop during their process of reintegration either impede the formation of new families, impact on the structure of existing families or change the division of family work in the household.

This paper explores how the new family forms have been taken into account in the reshaping of the French family policy. Three recent reforms are examined through the analytical frame of familialism which was one of three drivers of the family policy when it was set up in the mid-20th century. Familialism allows for a consideration of both moral, social and gender order that is on families. Firstly, change in the family law is explored in order to assess how new family life arrangements are institutionalized. Secondly, family policy responses to the new social risks resulting from change in the family life course are explored. Then policy responses to change in the gender order within the family are examined. Difficulties in implementing the policy change are discussed, highlighting the obstacles encountered by the current government as well as the gap between the objectives and their implementation.

This book addresses the complexity of family change. It draws on evidence from two linked studies, one carried out in the 1960s and the other in the early years of the 21st century, to analyse the specific ways in which family lives have changed and how they have been affected by the major structural and cultural changes of the second half of the twentieth century. The book shows that, while there has undeniably been change, there is a surprising degree of continuity in family practices. It casts doubt on claims that families have been subject to a process of dramatic change and provides an alternative account which is based on careful analysis of empirical data. The book presents a unique opportunity to chart the nature of social change in a particular locality over the last 50 years; includes discussions of social and cultural variations in family life, focusing on younger as well as older generations; explores not only what happens within family-households but also what happens within networks of kin across different households and shows the way changing patterns of employment affect kinship networks and how geographical mobility co-exists with the maintenance of strong kinship ties. The findings will be of interest to students of sociology, social anthropology, social policy, women's studies, gender studies and human geography at undergraduate and postgraduate level.

Over the last few decades, the Iranian Kurdish society, including family and kinship systems, has experienced enormous changes as a result of government implemented modernization efforts. This paper reports the results of a quantitative/ qualitative mixed methods study aimed at exploring (a) the nature of change in family and kinship systems and (b) how people understand and interpret these changes. The sample for this study was drawn from the Mangor and Gawerk tribes residing in the Mahabad Township located in the West Azerbaijan Province of Iran. Using standardized questionnaires, 586 people were sampled as part of the quantitative portion of the study. For the qualitative portion, data was collected on 20 people using both in-depth interviews and participant observations. The quantitative data was analyzed by SPSS software and the qualitative data was interpreted using grounded theory procedures. The quantitative findings showed that the urbanization, modern education, and mass media have all contributed to the emergence of a new form of family and kinship life. In addition, while supporting quantitative findings, the qualitative results revealed that participants were aware of and sensitive to sources, processes, and effects of modernization on their family and kinship life.

As new forms of family and ‘non-traditional’ families grow in number, there is a need for understanding of these “new” arrangements and models of parenthood. This ground-breaking book discusses, using a comparative and a sociological perspective, examples of the relationship between changing gender identities and processes of family formation in the Western experience: including asexual couples; childfree women and men; living apart together (LAT) couples; lone mothers and fathers; homosexual and trans parents. The book shows that, in the 21st century, it is possible to live, love, form a family without sex, without children, without a shared home, without a partner, without a working husband, without a heterosexual orientation or without a “biological” sexual body. This unique book also discusses the political implications—in terms of social movements characteristics and demands—of these emerging dimensions of family life. Such changes are likely to be of interest for a wide range of educational and policy areas which impact on families, women, men, and children and the book will therefore be of interest to a wide readership.

The Taşkın case manifests mutual supportiveness of the Aarhus Convention and the European Convention on Human Rights as well as of the general international environmental and the right to private and family life. Interactions between the protection of the environment and human rights are complex and involve economic and political factors. Legal concepts of sustainable development, mutual supportiveness and balance of interests bring new principles governing the complex interactions. They are reflected in Taşkın.

The Unfinished Revolution: How a New Generation Is Reshaping Family, Work, and Gender in America. Kathleen Gerson. New York: Oxford University Press. 20 10. 297 pp. ISBN: 9780195371673. $24.95 cloth. A new generation's aspirations are never guarantees. Still, each cohort's dreams and fears are a critical barometer of shifting societal conventions and conversations. In Kathleen Gerson's new book The Unfinished Revolution: How a New Generation Is Reshaping Family, Work, and Gender in America, she provides an astute and compelling portrait of how young people today are redrawing crossroads of labor and love. Through an analysis of lifehistory interviews with 120 men and women between ages of 18 and 32, Gerson explores consequences of second-wave feminist revolution on ambitions of its nextgeneration sons and daughters. Two of Gerson's particularly gripping ideas are detailed here: role of gender flexibility in family adaption and growing disconnect between young men and young women's work and family fallback strategies. Gerson's participants grew up during a particularly tumultuous time in history of U.S. gender, economic, and caregiving politics. The late 20th century brought with it movement en masse of American women into workplace and related media fascination, as well as rise of diverse family forms and career patterns. What these young people saw and heard clearly shapes their current disconcerted sense of relationships and careers. Yet experiences of upheaval also provided many participants with an encouraging view of gender flexibility when they saw their parents go against well-tread gendered expectations to meet head-on pragmatic, ever-changing of their families. Throughout Gerson's analysis are threaded stories of divorced motiiers taking on successful breadwinning roles, fathers engaging anew in caregiving, and parents renegotiating gender in midst of crisis. Gerson reflects mat, although many of her participants' families faced economic crises and increasing parental discontent, homes where adults transgressed gender boundaries in breadwinning and parenting were better equipped to meet a child's economic and emotional needs (p. 216). One lesson Gerson draws for us - as scholars of family and everyday family members - is that we need to move away from our absorption on static family forms to more fully deliberate on varieties of family processes and pathways; she illustrates so well that the starting point does not determine destination (p. 215). Seeing positive effects of gender flexibility, for this generation, may serve to further loosen gender's grip on work and family life in decades to come. And for this generation of family scholars, seeing that static labels such as single parent or dual-earner household are often only temporary characterizations, not fixed categorizations, can help us focus on exploring ways families adapt to and take part in changing economic, relational, and gendered circumstances. Gender flexibility gives us one way to think about power of individually crossing gendered work and family boundaries, but this process, according to Gerson, is certainly not an easy or guaranteed course of action for this next generation. Individual and relational adjustment does not negate realities of unforgiving work structures, greedy institutions, and economic recessions. As such, fallback strategies are also central to Gerson's analysis. Most of her participants aspire to loving, committed, and equal partnerships and to rewarding and financially sustaining work lives. Yet facing an unsure future, children of gender revolution often express need to formulate backup plans or contingency strategies to compose a successful life. And new challenges, as we know, usually accompany new opportunities. Equal caregiving and wage earning in long-term relationships are ideal work and family aspirations for most young women whom Gerson interviewed; nonetheless, these women also anticipate or have already experienced necessity for a backup plan. …

One of the most pervasive aspects of the Cultural war (Hunter 1991; Wolfe 1993) over family life in the 1990s and next century is over the raising of children. Daycare versus within the family for children under school age is one highly contested aspect of this battle. Because of ideological conflicts, especially over family forms and family norms (Hartmann and Spalter-Roth 1994),and because of the history and politics of attempted family policy, there is no recognizable or coherent proactive family policy in the United States (Pleck 1992) but only a regulatory function unevenly present and enforced (Maynard and McGiniss 1992). In the absence of policy-making in the United States and societal agreement that would legitimate access to a variety of types of non-family for young children, couples are forced to make individual, complex, time-consuming decisions. As a result, and with trepidation, couples rely on community and extended family to inform and legitimate their decisions. Each couple alone comes to terms with integrating two jobs and the presence of young children in the household. Ideology in the U.S leads us to expect that we are constantly exercising free-will and that we are agents acting on our preferences. This paper will demonstrate that decision-making is as much influenced by constraint as by choice. Unlike all other industrialized countries (cf. Moen. 1989; Hartmann and Spalter-Roth 1994), the U.S does not provide either universal subsidized childcare (except Headstart) at any age or paid and extended parental leave. By contrast, in European countries, between 73% and 95% of children, aged three to five, are in publicly funded daycare. Even in these countries, for children under age three is largely not subsidized and pieced together. Parents use a combination of some subsidized in-home care, cooperative arrangements among families, family daycare, and center-based for infants. The overall absence of direct childcare subsidy for infants and young toddlers is mitigated somewhat by generous parental leave policies which allow the mother or father to remain home with the child during infancy without loss of income. For example, in Sweden most children under the age of nine months have one parent at home, which is made possible by State mandated policies (Ferber and O' Farrell 1991).' Despite ideological controversy in the U.S. over who should raise the next generation of children, mothers of young children remain in the work force in dramatically large numbers (Hayes et al. 1990). Thus, daycare is a reality for most U.S. families regardless of social class (Hayes et al. 1990; Pleck 1992). Because childcare is largely not subsidized in the United States, besides rent or mortgage payments, childcare is the single largest cost couples have. However, cost is not commonly the most important factor in choices about childcare. In this study reported below, we found that childcare decisions were embedded in implicit family sentiments. We discuss changing family practices and views of motherhood, the factors couples consider in the selection of childcare arrangements, the meaning of altering the mother's role and replacing her. Then, we turn to an examination of various consequences of workplace constraints and the strategies couples develop in order to participate in daily childcare. These concerns are also addressed by the kinds of childcare options from which parents can choose. The broad range of types of childcare are represented by the couples in this study: including live-in or live-out providers (nannies or persons who are not relatives), relatives, family daycare (based in the provider's home), center-based daycare (which include centers opened from 7 to 6.30 five days a week and centers which have more restricted hours). Additionally, most families supplement their primary arrangement with other adults who provide either back-up care when a child is sick, or occupy transitional hours from primary childcare arrangements to home. …

Social capital has become a key concept in Government policy-making and academic circles. Particular forms of social capital theorising have become dominant and influential, invoking certain conceptions of the nature of family life. Inherently, ideas about ‘the family’ not only draw on gender divisions in fundamental ways, but also on particular forms of intergenerational relationships and power relations. This paper explores the place, and understandings, of family in social capital theorising from a feminist perspective, including the way that debates in the social capital field interlock with those in the family field. These encompass: posing both ‘the family’ and social capital as fundamental and strong bases for social cohesion, but also as easily eroded and in need of protection and encouragement; the relationship between ‘the private’ and ‘the social’; notions of bonding and bridging, and horizontal and vertical, forms of social capital as these relate to ideas about contemporary diversity in family forms and the nature of intimate relationships; and analytic approaches to understanding both the natures of social capital and family life in terms of an economic or moral rationality. It argues for greater reflexivity in the use of social capital as a concept, revealing rather than replicating troubling presences and absences around gender and generation as fundamental axes of family life. ‘We can only realise ourselves as individuals in a thriving civil society, comprising strong families and civic institutions buttressed by intelligent government … a modernised social democracy for a changing world which will build its prosperity on human and social capital’. (Tony Blair, 1998, The Third Way: New Politics for the New Century: 3–20)

Key Words: cohabitation, disadvantage, family formation, marriage, meaning, norms. Marriage is down, cohabitation is up, and the divorce rate remains high in the United States. Further, in 1950, only 1 in 20 births was to an unmarried woman, whereas today, more than a third of American children are born outside marriage. The number of gay and lesbian couples raising children together is also on the rise. These important demographic changes are evident in Canada, the United Kingdom, and in much of Western Europe as well. Each author in this print symposium documents the extent of these massive transformations in family life and speculates about what they mean for the future of marriage. The virtues of the articles in this issue far outweigh their shortcomings. Each demonstrates a commanding knowledge of the data on the magnitude of family changes and how they are arrayed across societies-and, in some cases, for various subgroups within societies. We see three ways in which scholars could build on these articles to expand our scientific understanding of these important trends. First, documenting changes in cohabitation and marriage for whole societies, though vital, often masks the substantial variations within societies by race/ethnicity and immigration status, social class, or other factors such as region or sexual orientation. Two articles in this volume focus on large and important variations in cohabitation and marriage by subgroups within the United States and Canada, and are a vivid testimony to the importance of studying subgroup differences. We advocate for more work in this vein, especially in the neglected area of social class. Differences by socioeconomic status in childbearing, cohabitation, and marriage behavior are often large, even controlling for characteristics such as race/ethnicity (Ellwood & Jencks, 2001). Second, researchers should pay more attention to parental status and how it affects attitudes and behaviors with regard to cohabitation and marriage. Third, following Max Weber (1949), we believe that human behavior cannot be fully understood unless social scientists understand the meanings that humans ascribe to their actions. Following Oropesa and Landale (2004), we advocate for qualitative research that allows us to peek inside the 'black box' in order to identify the content of culture (p. 914). The purpose of our article is fourfold. First, we want to explore the meanings of childbearing, cohabitation, and marriage for a specific subgroup in U.S. society-low-income residents of large cities-and to speculate about the role that these meanings may play in influencing the behaviors we observe. Second, we focus on unmarried parents who share children, and we look at how parental status plays a unique role in shaping views and actions with regard to cohabitation and marriage. Third, we aim to show, by example, how vital it is to understand the meanings that these men and women ascribe to their actions. Finally, as do the other authors in this volume, we speculate about what our findings may mean for the future of marriage. BACKGROUND Though nonmarital childbearing, nonmarriage, cohabitation, and divorce have increased in nearly all segments of American society, all are still most common in the low-income population and members of some disadvantaged minority groups. In Huston and Melz's (2004) words, among these groups, it would appear that the strings that pull people into marriage and bind them together have lost much of their fiber (p. 947). In fact, America's least advantaged citizens, nonmarital childbearing has become the rule (Ventura & Bachrach, 2000), and marriage just might eventually become the exception (Lichter & Graefe, 2001). This fact has led some to charge that America's poorest and most disadvantaged citizens have abandoned the institution of marriage altogether. Recently, though, a new longitudinal survey of nonmarital births has provided evidence that seems to counter these claims. …

Couples (have to) make several decisions with regard to their family life and work. Theories focus on different mechanisms at work in these decisions: rational choices, structural constraints, cultural conditions (see Bernardi, in Chapter 6 below). Both stratification and mobility research and family formation studies have for a long time omitted consideration of the couple as a unit and even neglected the wife as an individual subject of a family or employment career. As decisions on the family formation usually rely upon both partners involved, characteristics of both partners are important determinants because partners constitute, to a certain degree, each other’s constraints.

A sample (N = 706) of children, adolescents, young adults, and older adults were surveyed with regard to their views of family. Young adults endorsed more nontraditional views than children and older adults and were more likely than other age groups to indicate that there is no best family type. Children and older adults were more likely than adolescents and young adults to endorse married or living together parents as the best family type. Women and respondents who had experienced parental divorce endorsed traditional views of family less strongly, but women also endorsed stronger expectations for their own family formation. Findings support the possibility of both developmental and sociocontextual influences on attitudes toward family life.

In the debates about the future of work there is a lack of analysis on how young women and men are approaching their future work and family lives. In this article we use data collected in the Australian Women’s Working Future (AWWF) Project 2017 to analyse what young workers imagine will be important to their future success in work and family. We find that formal workplace supports for care, such as paid parental leave and childcare, and workplace flexibility are identified as very important. Shared domestic labour is also desired. Parents have the strongest expectations for care policy supports. Young men without children are least likely to factor these into future work trajectories, while young women do. However, data on women’s plans for family formation, compared with men’s, suggests that difficulties accessing vital care supports pose a risk to young women’s ability to work, form families and care.

Now in its seventh edition, and fully revised with a complete reimagining of voice, structure, and purpose, Introduction to Family Processes explores the complex workings of inner family life. Focusing on family processes and dynamics, rather than sociological trends, political topics, or the individual psychological approach, the text presents the research underlying core family processes and offers practical strategies to enhance family well-being and strengthen positive relationships. Key features of this edition include: A new chapter focused on parenting and intergenerational relationships, exploring how family roles evolve and shift over time. A contemporary focus, fully reflecting the values of inclusivity and diversity in the study of families, and including topics that speak directly to the lives of today’s students, including digital life, family formation, identity, and resilience. A wealth of pedagogical features throughout, including Points to Ponder and TL;DR summary boxes, a Family Toolbox of activities, study questions, and suggested readings. Tailored for students across undergraduate, postgraduate, and professional programs related to family studies, this book provides essential insights into the complex dynamics that shape how families function and thrive.