Dr. JiHandout 10

SOC310

CHAPTER 10

The Family and Household Transition

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Chapter Outline

What is the Family and Household Transition?

Proximate Determinants of Family and Household Changes

Changing Life Chances

The Intersection of Changing Life Chances and the Family and Household Transition

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What Is the Family and Household Transition?

Family Demography:The study of family households in terms of formation, change, and dissolution over time.

  • Families represent the fusion of people from other families.
  • Families split into other families as children leave families to form their own.

Family: Two or more people related to one another by marriage, birth, or adoption

Nuclear family: Parents and their children

Extended Family: Parents and their children extending to other generations such as aunts and uncles, cousins

Housing Unit: Physical space used as separate living quarters for people

Family Household: A residential unit occupied by people related to one another by birth, marriage, and adoption

Non-Family Household: A residential unit occupied by people living with non-family co-residents such as friends or cohabiting couples, not related to one another by birth, marriage, or adoption

Ascribed Characteristics: Inborn characteristics = sex, race, color, or age over which one has no or little control

Achieved Characteristics: Made possible by a person through some effort over which one does exercise some degree of control, such as education, income, etc.

The Growing Diversity In Household Composition And Family Structure

  • Married couples with children are less common in the United States
  • Rise in nontraditional households: inhabited by unmarried people including never married, divorced, widowed, and cohabiting couples

Gender Equity and Empowerment Of Women

-The combination of longer life and lower fertility opens up the fact that women are in a position to contribute in the same way that men do

Demographic Transition Accompanied By Rising Status of Women

  • Increasing age at marriage
  • Encouraging high level of education
  • Increase women’s ability to labor force
  • Gain economic independence
  • Enhance women’s ability to choose a life pattern of their own
  • Changed life chances contribute to transformation of family/household structure

Proximate Determinants of Family and Household Changes

  • These Changes Include, but not limited to:

-Delayed marriage

-Cohabitation

-Out-of-wedlock birth

-Childlessness

-Divorce

-Widowhood

Delayed Marriage

-Early marriage is likely leading to high fertility

-Higher fertility is associated with lower status of women

-A delay in marriage encourages a decline in fertility

-The slow-down economic growth delays marriage due to:

-Competition for jobs

-Pursue of education and career opportunities

-The supply of labor over demand by the Baby Boom 1960s

-The availability of contraceptives

-Postpone marriage

Cohabitation

  • Delay marriage brings another form of sexual life-cohabitation
  • The sharing of a household -“Partners of the opposite sex sharing living quarters” - by unmarried persons who have a sexual relationship increasing
  • % couples cohabitating before marriage going up

1965199519702000

8% 90%500,0003.8million

Out-of-Wedlock Birth

  • Great gaps of out-of-wedlock birth exist for women between

-Age groups

-Racial/ethnic background

-Educational attainment

Childlessness

-The percent of childless for women aged 40-44 steadily goes up, increasing the household diversity

Divorce

  • 50% of marriages likely end up in divorce
  • Changes in divorce laws- “No-Fault-Devoice”- in 1970s contributed 17% of divorces: people could divorce without having reasons.

Why Divorce?

  • Cherlin (1999) summarized major factors:
  • Low income – causing stress and tension
  • Early marriage-poorer job of choosing a spouse
  • Spouse’s similarity-homogamy likely keeps people together
  • Parental divorce-”copy-cat phenomena”-children likely divorce due to influence of their parental divorce
  • Cohabitation-“Grass Greener Effect”
  • Unrealistic expectations to marriage
  • Marrying the wrong person for the wrong reasons
  • Declining intimacy and quality overtime
  • Inability of couples to handle marital life conflicts
  • The difficult nature of marriage –
  • “Two Marriages in one family!”

Six Qualities of Strong Families

  1. Commitment: Trust, honesty, dependability, faithfulness
  2. Time Together: Quality time and in great quantity, good things take time, enjoying each other’s company, simple good times, sharing fun times
  3. Ability to Cope with Stress and Crisis: adaptability, seeing crises as challenges and opportunities, growing through crises together, openness to change, resilience
  4. Spiritual Well-Being: Hope, faith, compassion, shared ethical values, openness with humankind
  5. Positive Communication: Sharing feelings, giving compliments, avoiding blame, able to compromise, agreeing to disagree
  6. Appreciation and Affection: Caring for each other, friendship, respect for individuality, playfulness, humor

Of 351 Couples 300…

  • Think of marriage as a long-term commitment
  • Believe that marriage is sacred
  • Strongly want the relationship to succeed
  • Think of their spouse as their best friend
  • Like their spouse as a person
  • Agree with their spouse on aims and goals
  • Believe that their spouse has grown more
  • interesting over the years
  • Laugh together

A Study of 600 Families Found that Happy Families

  • Spend a lot of time together
  • Are quick to express appreciation
  • Are committed to promoting one another’s welfare
  • Do a lot of talking and listening to one another
  • Are religious
  • Deal with crises in a positive manner

Widowhood

  • The incidence of widowhood has been steadily pushed to older years due to higher mortality of men than of women
  • High divorce of women remains widowed
  • Blacks are more likely to be divorced or widowed

The Combination of These Determinants

  • From 1970-1995
  • The proportion of women who would expect to marry declined from 96% to 89%
  • Average age of marriage was increasing
  • The percentage of marriages ending in divorce was increasing

Changing Life Chances

Some important aspects of changing life chances are represented by:

  • Education
  • Labor force participation
  • Occupation
  • Income
  • Poverty
  • Wealth
  • Race and ethnicity
  • Religion

Education and Life Chance

  • Education is the most dramatic and significant change introduced into people’s life-vehicle for personal success.
  • American people have made tremendous progress in educational attainment in terms of percentage, numbers, median years of education, levels of education, etc.
  • All over the world, an important achievement in education is for women who are gaining more equal chances and opportunities.
  • Better educated, better paid, and better life chances.

Labor Force Participation and Life Chance

  • Increased education attainment increase chances of being in labor force.
  • By 2000, 78% of women in the US aged 35-54 (Baby Boomers) were in labor force.

Female Labor Force Participation and Fertility

  • Rising educational attainment raises women’s status
  • Lower fertility increases women’s labor force participation
  • Earning power reduces the benefit of marriage but makes more attractive cohabitation, self-reliance, self-pleasure-seeking, career pursuit, single life, and divorce.
  • These factors help explain family/household structure transition

Female Labor Participation and Empowerment

  • Economic independency gives self-reliance
  • Self-reliance gains higher status and greater freedom
  • Increasing participation increases women’s gaining power both in family and in social lives

Occupation and Life Chance

  • Occupation is the most social defining aspect of a person’s social identity
  • It is a clue to education, income, residence, and social status
  • Higher status occupations derive more intrinsic satisfaction from work
  • Occupational distributions differ between men and women
  • Higher education goes hand-in-hand with higher occupational status

Income

Three broad explanations for the increasing inequality:

  1. Public policy changes, such as tax reforms that benefit some groups more than others
  2. Labor markets change, such as an increasing mismatch between the demands of jobs and the skills of the labor force
  3. Changes in demographic structure, such as the increasing fraction of households headed by females

Poverty

Poverty Index:A measure of need that in the United States is based on the premise that one third of a poor family’s income is spent on food; the cost of an economy food plan multiplied by three

Wealth and Life Chance

-Marriage, or non-marriage, and remaining in marriage or not, makes difference in the general well-being for individuals and families.

Advantages vs Disadvantage of the Marriage

  • healthy behaviors vs risk-taking behaviors
  • lower death rates vs higher death rates
  • partners sex vs casual sex
  • higher quality of sex vs low quality sex
  • more property vs less property
  • better-off children vs worse-off children

Wealth

-Wealth is measured as Net work—The difference between the value of assets and the money owed on those assets

Three basic ways to generate wealth

  • Inherit assets
  • Save part of your income to purchase assets
  • Borrow money to purchase assets

Race/Ethnicity and Location

  • African Americans are concentrated in southeastern states
  • Hispanic and Latinos are concentrated in southwestern states
  • Asians are in California, Alaska, Hawaiian, and widely spread

United States:

  • The shifting US Racial-Ethnic Mix by Whites, Latinos, Blacks, Asians, native Americans, and claim memberships in two more groups in 2000

Canada:

  • “Visible Minority” accounts for 13.4% in 2001 census
  • Language is major identifier

Mexico:

  • According to the 2000 census, 7 percent of Mexicans speak an indigenous language

Religion and Life Chance

Religion Pluralism:The existence of two or more religious groups side by side in society without one group dominating the other

  • Religion is a system of belief and plays a role toward abortion, sexuality, infanticide, attitudes, marriage, and fertility
  • America’s history is of religious pluralism
  • Religion is a kind of ascribed characteristics

Religion and Fertility

  • People of different religions have differentials in fertility
  • The world of Muslim and Taoism may be against abortion and birth control
  • Fundamentalism tends to support more children
  • Higher fertility is related to Mormon Church – Utah State’s fertility is the highest

The Intersection of Changing Life Changes and the Family and Household Transition

  • Modernization goes with demographic transition
  • Women are gaining independence by more involvement and participation
  • Worldwide economic change emphasizes the value of non-domestic labor
  • Smaller families and longer lives diversify households and family structure
  • Does marriage matter?