CHANGES IN NONMARITAL COHABITATION AND THE FAMILY STRUCTURE EXPERIENCES OF CHILDREN ACROSS 17 COUNTRIES

Abstract

Only three decades ago, many demographers believed that the nuclear family – married adults and their biological children – was the modal family structure toward which all societies would rapidly converge (e.g. Goode, 1970). Indeed, during the two decades following World War II, marriage and childbearing in most Western nations tended to: (1) occur early in adulthood; (2) follow a predictable sequence; and (3) be tightly coupled. That is, young couples first married, and then quickly began having children. Over the past few decades in many Western countries, however, marriage and fertility have been increasingly delayed to later adulthood and decoupled from one another, such that the sequence and timing of partnership formation and childbearing have changed dramatically. As a result, most Western nations have experienced increasing rates of out-of-wedlock and out-of-partnership fertility and nonmarital cohabitation¹ (as well as divorce) (Goldscheider et al., 2001; Haskey, 2001; Hoem & Hoem, 1988; Kiernan, 2001; Martin & Bumpass, 1989; Murphy, 2000; Noack, 2001; Ostner, 2001; Prinz, 1995; Toulemon, 1997). The pace of change has been so swift that in the preface to the second edition of Marriage, Divorce, Remarriage, Cherlin (1992, p. vii) remarks that only ten years after the publication of the first edition a more appropriate title to the book might have been Cohabitation, Marriage, Divorce, More Cohabitation, and Probably Remarriage.

Citation

Timberlake, J.M. and Heuveline, P. (2005), "CHANGES IN NONMARITAL COHABITATION AND THE FAMILY STRUCTURE EXPERIENCES OF CHILDREN ACROSS 17 COUNTRIES", Bass, L. (Ed.) Sociological Studies of Children and Youth (Sociological Studies of Children and Youth, Vol. 10), Emerald Group Publishing Limited, Leeds, pp. 257-278. https://doi.org/10.1016/S1537-4661(04)10013-5