家族の個人化

Abstract

The family has become a central issue of concern for policy makers in Japan due to demographic and socioeconomic changes. The resurgence of the family-crisis theme in the United States in the 1970s reflected the changing patterns of familial living as options among alternative life styles. The break-down of such assumptions as “the family as a group” and “two-parenthood”, and the increasing visibility of non-modal living styles over time has legitimated the emergence of new perspectives. Sex roles and gender research has accumulated a considerable amount of evidence to indicate that the wife's decreasing economic dependency on the husband, or woman's increasing autonomy, has shaken the modern family ideology. Life course studies and social network studies have shown the effectiveness of using the individual as the unit of analysis in studying the family. Through the review of the above research areas, this paper attempts to present a framework to explain a mechanism of family change, claiming that woman's independent access to economic resources brings the modern family system based on the “provider-housewife” role-pairing to an end. This process is the “individualization of the family” because the autonomy of each spouse is assumed. An application of such a framework is intended to interpret seemingly relevant scenes of contemporary Japanese families.