What makes us family

1
What makes us family

• Is the family in demise?
• Defining family.
• Demographic changes in Australian families.

2
Is the family in demise?

• Debate begins late 1960s
• Language of crisis, risk, demise or
  disintegration (Berger and Berger 1983, Laing
  1971, Cooper 1972, Fletcher 1988)
• As business, politics and diplomacy grow more
  savage and warlike, men seek a haven in private
  life, in personal relations, above all the family
  the last refuge of love and decency. Domestic
  life, however, seems increasingly incapable of
  providing these comforts. (Lasch 1979 xiii)
• Individual women will have to decide on their
  priorities. Our own hope is that many will come
  to understand that life is more than a career and
  that this more is above all to be found in the
  family. But however individual women decide, they
  should not expect public policy to underwrite and
  subsidize their life plans (Berger Berger 1983,
  205).

3
Defining Family

• The traditional nuclear family presented as a
  continuous fact of history
• Key debate during, 1994 International Year of the
  Family
• Debate opened up by
• Feminist scholarship
• Anthropological work (diversity in cohabitation,
  marriage parenting)
• Demographic changes

4
Defining family cont

• ABS definition
• Two or more persons, one of whom is at least 15
  years of age, who are related by blood, marriage,
  adoption, step or fostering and who are usually
  resident in the same household
• Family of origin vs family of choice
• Changes across the lifecycle
• Contemporary definitions focus on what families
  do, not the form they take

5
Demographic changes

• Composition of households
• Fertility, childbearing and parenting
  arrangements
• Marriage, relationship formation and dissolution

6
Households

• Fall in the number of persons per household
• (from 4.6 in 1911 to 2.7 in 1996)
• People are having children later in life
• Children are leaving home later
• Number of one person households has grown
• Australian spend more time living in couple
  families before they have children and after
  these children leave home

7
Fertility, childbearing and parenting arrangements

• Changing pattern in the fertility rate
• Women are having children later, and having fewer
  children. (7.6 first births were to women over
  30 years in 1971. In 1991 this was 31.1)
• Of the total number of births in Australia nearly
  ¾ of these women are in a registered marriage
• 84 of births outside of marriage are
  acknowledged by the father
• Around 13 of all families are lone parents
• Proportion of births to teenage mothers has
  fallen from 11.3 of all births in 1966 to 4.9
  in 1996

8
Marriage, relationship formation and dissolution

• Rate of marriage has always fluctuated
• Age at first marriage has always fluctuated
• Increase in de facto relationships
• Intermarriage
• Changes in divorce
• Remarriage and serial monogamy

9
Marriage dissolution

• Marriage
• Wife 25 years husband 27.5 years (similar to
  1891)
• 30 years later (wife aged 55 years)
• 1891 both partners would be alive in 46 of cases
  (41 still married)
• 1991 both partners would be alive in 88 of cases
  (53 still married)
• 45 years later (wife aged 70 years)
• 1891 both partners would be alive in 15 of cases
• 1991 both partners would be alive in 56 of cases

10
Summary

• New and changed family forms are emerging against
  a backdrop of social changes.
• People continue to form (and reform) families
• Families are integral to our social structure

11

• Fifty years ago, someone who decided to marry
  knew what he or she was doing marriage was a
  relatively fixed division of labour involving a
  specified status for each partner. Now no one
  quite knows any longer what marriage actually is,
  save that it is a relationship, entered into
  against the backdrop of profound changes
  affecting gender relations, the family, sexuality
  and the emotions. (Giddens 1996 153)