Family Formation and the Home

Contemporary Family and the Diversity of Family Life Forms

The issue of ‘family ideology’ has been systematically ignored by a majority of ‘family’1 scholars whilst it has been taken for granted by a minority. The following study arises from the author's attempts to explore the issue of alternative theoretical approaches to the analysis of ‘family life’.2 Increasing numbers of contemporary researchers concur in recognising the diversity of ‘family forms’ and the inappropriateness of speaking of ‘The Family’.3 Despite these recognitions many researchers find themselves re-adopting the term ‘The Family’ in their discussions and especially in the titles of their work. For example, Segal clearly recognises that the ‘traditional family model’ no longer reflects the reality of our lives (1983, 11) and yet the title of her book is What is to be done about THE FAMILY)? (emphasis added). One reason for the re-importation of the idea of ‘The Family’ may be found in the rather limited nature of previous conceptualisations of ‘family ideology’. With the exception of Barrett (1980), recognitions of ‘family ideology’ tend to be conceptualised in terms of sets of partisan beliefs supporting a particular ‘family form’. Thus the concept of ‘The Family’ is rarely regarded as being problematic in itself, rather attention is paid to the presumed virtues or deficiencies of the particular form of ‘The Family’ which is assumed to be prevalent. Notwithstanding the recognition of ‘family diversity’ or the inappropriateness of the term ‘The Family’, nearly all discussion becomes a straightforward attack upon, or defence of, ‘The Family’.4 Only very rarely does analysis avoid this trap and question whether ‘The Family’ really exists to be attacked or defended; thus Collier et al. have asked ‘Is there a Family?’ (1982) and the present author has asked ‘Do we really know what “The Family” is?’ (Bernardes, 1984a). The objective here is to identify and explore a specific conceptualisation of ‘family ideology’. The aim is to avoid engaging in attacks upon, or defences of, ‘The Family’ but rather to address the ideological context of such debates themselves, especially in respect of the assumed existence of ‘The Family’. It is hoped that this approach will stimulate a much more critical examination of ‘family ideology’ and the concept of ‘The Family’. More generally, the attempt to conceptualise ‘family ideology’ in this much broader sense is seen as a pre-requisite for the development of an alternative theoretical approach to the analysis of ‘family life’.

Where Is Home?

Our Constitution stipulates that marriage and family life should be established and maintained on the basis of individual dignity and equality of sexes, and the state has an obligation to guarantee this.
 However, recent changes in marriage and family life are occurring due to various factors of society. In Korea, too, family forms are diversifying due to the collapse of the traditional family system and various choices for freedom of marriage due to late marriage, non-marriage, graduating from marriage, and reduced fertility. Our Constitution stipulates marriage, family life and the obligation of the state to guarantee it in Article 36, but the current legal concept and constitutional response to marriage and family seems insufficient.
 In order to effectively respond to this, I think it is necessary to appropriately revise marriage and family provisions when revising the constitution. The content and form of the discipline of Article 36, Paragraph 1 of the current Constitution has a limit to constitutionally embrace and guarantee the deinstitutionalization of the family in modern society because the traditional family system has a strong guarantee character.
 Problem solving through the existing constitutional interpretation may be the next best thing, but in order to protect and support a new type of community that does not correspond to traditional marriage and family forms as marriage and family, it is necessary to fully consider the possibility of acceptance into our society and accept it based on constitutional possibility and grounds through consensus of the public sphere.
 Furthermore, in recognizing a new type of marriage and family form, it is time to change the sense of solidarity of being a companion to live together in this age, avoiding discriminatory judgment based on preconception and prejudice on the constitutional basis.

Social science has long studied the relationships between processes of family formation and health, although empirical patterns in this domain of study are often variable, and their interpretation uncertain. Constrained by lack of suitable data, analytic techniques, and conceptual tools, work in this area has until recently been largely static, focussed on documenting and interpreting cross-sectional associations between occupancy of family roles and health. However, as data and methodology matured and developed economies continued their transition away from the once dominant ‘male breadwinner’ model of the family, more sophisticated approaches that acknowledge the dynamic relationships between family formation and health have become both more feasible and more urgent. This thesis applies a life course approach to the study of family formation and health in the Australian context. The sociological life course tradition highlights the importance of timing, context, and interdependence between multiple role trajectories, while the parallel epidemiological tradition emphasises accumulation of risk and later-life consequences of bodily insults experienced much earlier. Although previous Australian research has investigated associations between family roles and health status, in doing so it has mostly failed to incorporate the insights of life course theory, and there is consequently broad scope for life course research to add new insights. Data for the research are drawn from the Household Income and Labour Dynamics in Australia (HILDA) study (2001-2014), and form the primary material for four empirical chapters. The first empirical chapter utilizes multichannel sequence analysis and growth models to investigate how holistic patterns of family formation (incorporating both partnership and fertility trajectories from ages 18-50) are associated with trajectories of physical health at ages 51 and older. For men, family life course trajectories characterized by early family formation, failure to marry, or early divorce without subsequent remarriage are found to be predictive of poorer health outcomes, while for women only those who experienced high fertility paired with a disrupted marital history were found to be in poorer health than those who experienced a normatively ‘standard’ family life course. The second, third, and fourth empirical chapters focus on different aspects of the relationship between parental age at first birth and later life heath. The first of these contextualizes changes in first birth timing in historical context, presents a descriptive analysis of the characteristics of younger/older first time mothers and fathers, and uses multinomial logistic regression to assess the contribution of early-life family and socio-economic disadvantage, health, and cognitive and non-cognitive skills to first birth timing. Consistent with prior research, background family disadvantage and age at school leaving was found to have strong effects on birth timing, in particular for women. There was also some evidence of health selection into early first birth, with the largest effects again found for women. The third empirical chapter considers the effect of first birth timing on long-term health outcomes (ages 41 and older). In addition to the primary issue of whether there is an effect of birth timing on health, the analysis pays particular attention to several research questions: first, which pre-parenthood factors confound the relationship between birth timing and health? Second, is first birth timing consequential for processes of cumulative advantage in health? Third, what mid-life factors mediate the relationship between first birth timing and health? Fourth, does the strength of the effect of first birth timing depend on early-life disadvantage, education, marital history, parity, or birth cohort? Results indicate persistent positive effects of older first birth timing for both men and women, which are partially mediated by mid-life socio-economic status. For women, the magnitude of the effect increases over time, indicating cumulative advantage, although the analysis suggests that this may not be attributable to birth timing per se. Only scant evidence is found that the relationship depends on other factors, as only remaining never married alters the effect of birth timing for women. The final empirical chapter investigates short term changes across the parenthood transition at different ages, aiming to identify potential mechanisms for the long-run health effects of birth timing. Potential mechanisms considered included health-related behavioural changes (alcohol consumption and physical activity) and indicators of socio-economic hardship. Results indicated no support for health-related behaviour change or change in the likelihood of socio-economic hardship as mechanisms, as changes at the time of the parenthood transition and in the years thereafter did not differ depending on age at first birth. Younger parents do experience potentially harmful changes in alcohol use and socio-economic hardship before parenthood, suggesting that these factors may be part of the reason why young parents tend to be in poorer health in later life, however it is unlikely that alcohol use or socio-economic hardship form part of a causal pathway from fertility timing to later-life health status. Implications for the broader literature and directions for future research are discussed in the final chapter.

Context/Background: Developed by Amartya Sen, the Capabilities Approach (CA) has been applied in several domains of abstraction for understanding human well-being and development. However, there is very little about CA in the processes of forming families, particularly in Africa. This paper employs CA to examine the Ghanaian family formation trajectories. It explores the norms and preferences, the choices and decision-making processes, timing as well as constraints embedded in the family formation process.Data sources and methods: This paper draws on a bigger Ghana/Mali qualitative research that contrasted individual realities and collective images of family formation trajectories in the two countries, but specifically focuses on the Ghana case to understand the individual family formation trajectories in terms of their family life histories, resources available to them as well as their notions on the ideal family life. It is based on analyses and discussions of thirty (30) in-depth interviews conducted in rural and urban Ghana.Results:The results show an inherent interplay of agency-driven idealized goals and socio-cultural concerns, in other words, realities that reflect agency-structure concerns with regards to different family life domains (pre-marital relationships, partner choice-making, marriage, etc.).Conclusion:Based on the analyses, we conclude that the concepts of ‘ambivalence’ and ‘agency’ are important in smoothening the difficulties family formation actors encounter in pursuing their personal family life goals within the context of socio-cultural family life requirements.

This article explores Stephen Daldry's The Hours (US/UK, 2002) as a feminist and queer meditation on the dilemma of marriage. An important queer-authored crossover film in the tradition of the family melodrama and the woman's film, The Hours offers a considered return to the iconic cultural form of the white middle-class nuclear family in a context where norms of heterosexual family and conjugal life are at once firmly entrenched and widely contested. Largely overlooked in film criticism, The Hours is characterized by its baroque and generative temporality and intertextuality that contribute to a nuanced meditation on women's experience of conjugal and family life. While much of the literature on melodrama draws on psychoanalysis and theories of spatiality, this article develops three distinct yet interrelated temporal and affective readings: Mikhail Bakhtin's dialogism and Virginia Woolf's modernist “moment of being”; the performativity of gender and kinship (Judith Butler, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick); and theories of queer time and affect (Judith Halberstam, Elizabeth Freeman, Lauren Berlant). These readings probe The Hours's return to mediated cultural ideals of white conjugal and family life across time through the prism of feminist and queer cultural production and critique. Daldry's film is treated as a dense and fascinating work in itself, but it is also read against a small but influential cycle of recent queer-authored melodramas: Far from Heaven (dir. Todd Haynes, US, 2002), Savage Grace (dir. Tom Kalin, Spain/US/France, 2007), and A Single Man (dir. Tom Ford, US, 2009). Released at a historical conjuncture when queer debates about marriage and conjugal life are deeply polarized, these works share an ambivalent and stylized fascination with the white bourgeois family melodrama that is at once problematic and generative. I situate the film at the crossroads of two complementary and sometimes contradictory genealogies: the “thinking woman's film,” engaged with female subjectivity and authorship belonging to an influential white liberal feminist genealogy, and the genealogy of queer, white male – authored melodrama.

Teaching and Learning Guide for: Family Leisure and Changing Ideologies of Parenthood

This chapter examines the interpretation of ‘family life’ under Article 8 and the way that this has evolved throughout the Court’s history. It contrasts the approach of the Court to ‘family life’ between children and mothers, with ‘family life’ between fathers and children, noting the focus of the Court on function over form. It then turns to the establishment of parenthood, both in terms of maternity and paternity, as well as the right of the child to establish information concerning their origins. Finally, the chapter examines the changing face of the family, considering new family forms, including same-sex couples and transgender parents, as well as new methods of reproduction, such as artificial reproductive techniques and surrogacy.

SUMMARY It is obvious that there are a variety of family structures and forms. This variety is usually described in terms of the nature of the parental presence, namely, two parent, single-parent, and step-parent (or blended) families. There is also variety regarding life stages, usually described in terms of the presence or absence of children with a focus on their age; e.g., families with infants, toddlers, elementary age children, adolescents, or “empty nesters.” But in what ways does the core purpose of the family in the lives of its members remain constant regardless of the family's configuration or life stage? How might this constancy impact the task of those who deal with families from both theoretical and therapeutic perspectives? This paper addresses these questions by presenting a simply-stated framework defining the purpose of the family that focuses on the nature of an individual's relationship to his or her family regardless of that family's life stage or structure. The breakdown of the “WE” of the family unit as the source of family pathology and dysfunction will be described within this framework and therapeutic strategies presented.

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.

Using family stress theory, this study examined the relationship between adolescent reports of selected demographic variables (gender, age, family form), interparental conflict (style, content, intensity, resolution), stress due to the pileup of stressors, coping strategies (social support, detrimental coping), and adolescent family life satisfaction. The sample was comprised of 155 adolescents ranging from 14 to 18 years of age who completed self‐report questionnaires at one of three rural Oklahoma high schools. Four dimensions of interparental conflict (overt conflict style, conflict about childrearing, conflict about family roles/finances, conflict resolution), stress due to pileup, social support coping, and detrimental coping were significantly related to family life satisfaction. Adolescent age was positively related to family life satisfaction.Within the scope of family stress theory, scholars have addressed how the combination of stressors and coping strategies relates to the adaptation of individuals within family systems (McCubbin and Patterson 1983). Further, investigations of the relationship of parental divorce to well‐being in children and adolescents suggest that interaction patterns within various family forms may be more fruitful in explaining the adaptation of youth than parental marital status (Demo 1992). The perception by youth of conflict between their parents (i.e., interparental conflict) has emerged as a key family stressor that has the potential to explain variation in adolescent adaptation in a variety of family forms (Buehler, Krishnakumar, Anthony, Tittsworth, and Stone 1994).Stressor events for adolescents such as interparental conflict generally do not occur in isolation. Rather, they exist within the context of other stressors such as economic stress, difficulties at school, or normative developmental tasks for families with adolescents (e.g., changing family roles to allow greater adolescent autonomy; McCubbin and Patterson 1986). Further, considerable variation exists in the coping strategies (e.g., social support, avoidance) that adolescents use in response to stress (McCubbin and Patterson 1986). Finally, previous research shows variation between certain demographic variables and adolescent adaptation. Thus, the current study was developed to examine how selected demographic variables (gender, age, family form), adolescent perceptions of interparental conflict (style, content, intensity, degree of resolution), stress based on the pileup of stressor events, and coping strategies relate to adolescent satisfaction with family life (one indicator of adaptation).

Women’s work and family life courses have experienced remarkable changes since the 1970s. Almost all developed countries across Europe, Northern America, and East Asia have to some extent experienced a delaying and declining trend of marriage and fertility. Meanwhile, with women’s increasing education and labour force participation, a gender revolution against the conventional male-breadwinning family model has placed women’s gainful employment at the center of household economics. Over the past few decades, population and family researchers across disciplines have been dedicated to exploring whether and how these two macro-level trends are coevolving, reinforcing, or inhibiting each other. In the centrality of this issue is to understand the micro-level relationship between women’s work and family behaviours. Specifically, it is crucial to examine how women’s working careers are affecting and being affected by family formation, including marriage or cohabiting union formation and childbirth. In this dissertation, I consider women’s family formation as a stepwise process consisting of three parts: (1) forming a partnership union (marriage or cohabitation), (2) the transition to motherhood, and (3) the post-motherhood life course. With a particular focus on the work-related causes and consequences of family formation, this dissertation covers the following three general questions. First, how women’s employment situations affect their transition to partnership union, including cohabitation and marriage? Second, how women’s employment situations affect their birth transitions? Third, how motherhood transitions affect women’s post-motherhood career outcomes? Building on these three general questions, I further investigate advanced topics regarding the institutional embeddedness of work-family relationship and their life course dynamics. The overarching goal of this dissertation is to systematically study the relationship between women’s work and family formation. Taking a holistic perspective, I study the employment-related causes and consequences of women’s family formation process including union formation, childbirth transitions, and post-motherhood life courses. Rather than conceptualizing the linkage between women’s work and family behaviours as a static, homogeneous relationship, I added an institutional and a longitudinal dimension to emphasize the contextual embeddedness and time dynamics of individual life courses. For women, work and family situations are both important factors triggering social stratification. Moreover, short-term disadvantages in these two dimensions could reinforce each other under certain conditions, which might result in cumulative disadvantages throughout individual life courses. Therefore, it is crucial for scholars and policymakers alike to better understand what are the contextual factors that could alleviate or intensify social inequalities emerging from the work-family relationship, and how these inequalities are cumulated over the life course.

The release of formal restrictions on the free movement of Central and Eastern Europeans that started with the end of the Cold War and the eastward enlargement of the European Union in the 2000s have led to new migration flows in Europe. In the Netherlands, in absolute terms, Poles are the largest group amongst emigrants from the central and eastern European countries which accessed the European Union in 2004. The Families of Poles in the Netherlands (FPN) survey aims to develop a database which allows examining different aspects of Polish migrant family life, including family formation, generational interdependencies, espoused family obligations and life outcomes.The sampling frame of the FPN study was population registers (Basisregistratie Personen, BRP). Names and addresses of sample members were drawn by Statistics Netherlands based on the following criteria: the potential respondent was born in Poland, registered in the Netherlands for the first time in 2004 or later, and was between 18 and 49 years old at the time of the most recent registration. In total 1131 Polish migrants participated in the survey. The fieldwork started in October 2014 and lasted until the end of April 2015.A blueprint for the survey is the questionnaire of the Generations and Gender Surveys (GGS). The FPN data can be thus matched with the Polish and Dutch GGS, and Onderzoek Gezinsvorming data (OG; a longitudinal data on fertility and family formation executed in the Netherlands) to reveal the impact of contextual and policy influences on, among others, family relationships.To study the determinants of family solidarity and migration choices, following changes in respondents’ situations over time is necessary. Therefore, the FPN has a panel character – the second wave of the survey will be repeated in 2017.The FPN survey was carried out by the Erasmus University Rotterdam and is a part of Pearl Dykstra’s ERC Advanced Investigator project “Families in Context”. Financial support from the European Research Council, Advanced Investigator Grant “Families in Context” (grant agreement no. 324211) is gratefully acknowledged.The data from the FPN are accessible via the DANS website to researchers affiliated with academic and (semi-)government organizations. No one has any exclusive right or priority to use the FPN to work on any research question. Karpinska, K., Dykstra, P.A., & Fokkema, T. (2016). Families of Poles in the Netherlands (FPN) survey. Wave 1. DANS. doi: http://dx.doi.org/10.17026/dans-zep-et7y

This book brings together ten original empirical works focusing on the influence of various types of spatial mobility -- be it international or national -- on partnership, family and work life. The contributions cover a range of important topics which focus on understanding how spatial mobility is related to familial relationships and life course transitions. The volume offers new insights by bringing together the state of the art in theoretical and empirical approaches from spatial mobility and international migration research. This includes, for example, studies that investigate the relationships between international migration and changing patterns of partnership choice, family formation and fertility. Complementing to this, this volume presents new empirical studies on job-related residential mobility and its impact on the relationship quality of couples, family life, and union dissolution. It also highlights the importance of research that looks at the reciprocal relationships between mobility and life course events such as young adults leaving the parental home in international migration context, re-arrangements of family life after divorce and spatial mobility of the elderly following life transitions. The scholarly work included in this volume does not only contribute to theoretical debates but also provide timely empirical evidence from various societies which represent the common features in the dynamics of spatial mobility and migration.