Family Development

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Family Development
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Family

• Key social institution
• Caregiving
• Socialization
• Definition?
• group of people related by blood, marriage, or
  adoption
• Changing definition
• Structures
• Blended families

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• Nuclear (co-residing)
• Extended (do not co-reside)
• Family of orientation (birth/adoptive)
• Family of procreation (having own children)

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Statistics Canada

• Census Family
• Married (legal, common-law) with or without
  never-married children, or
• Lone parent with at least one never-married child
• Economic Family
• 2 or more people related by blood, marriage,
  common-law, adoption
• Living in same household

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Stats Can

• Private Household
• Person or group of people who occupy a private
  dwelling
• Family Household
• Private household that contains at least one
  census family
• Non-Family Household
• Private household that consists of one person
  living alone or group of people who do not
  constitute a census family

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• Complexities of categorizing
• Change over lifespan
• Problem in co-residency as defining
  characteristic of families
• Why?
• E.g., widowed woman living with granddaughter
  family member but in non-family household

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Family Development
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Family Development

• Dynamic
• Reciprocity
• Changing
• Birth Rates in Canada
• Dropping Why?
• Economics
• Delayed Parenthood

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Average age at first birth increasing
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Increased percentage of women in labour force
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Economics of Parenthood
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Family Life Cycle

• Evelyn Mills Duval (1997)
• 8 stages
• Relation to marital satisfaction
• Changing perceptions of equity (fairness)
• Why?

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• Robert Havinghurst (1953)
• Family Developmental Tasks
• Growing responsibilities
• Problems (Butler, Duval, Havinghurst Family
  Development models)
• Assumption of universality
• Increase in off-time childbearing (applicability
  to late life families?)
• Increased life expectancy, earlier retirement
  need for pre-, early-, and post-retirement
  stages?

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Assumption of Universality

• No accommodation of individual variations
• Increase in blended families
• Increase in lone-parent families
• Reduced family size
• Changing parental roles

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Myths about families in the past

• Traditional nuclear family
• But demographics of past generations
• High infant, child mortality rates
• Maternal mortality
• Life expectancy

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People with one parent alive
Age of Parent Birth Year of child
1860 1960
40 42 82
50 16 60
60 2 23
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• Multigenerational families rare in past
• Wealth of elderly family members determined
  treatment/status

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Structure of Aging Families

• Marital status of males and females
• Middle to late adulthood

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Males
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Females
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Gender differences

• Older men more likely to be married than older
  women
• Widowhood expected life event for women in late
  adulthood
• Greater life expectancy
• Age difference between spouses
• Men more likely than women to remarry
• Demographic reality fewer unmarried older men
• Sexist social norms age differences

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Divorce

• More commonly experienced life event
• Data unclear with growing incidence of common-law
  marriages
• Preceding cohabitation more likely to end in
  divorce
• Negative economic consequences for women, not as
  likely for men
• Remarriage after divorce decreasing
• Partly due to increases in cohabitation
• Men more likely to remarry after divorce
• Current elderly not likely to have experienced
  cohabitation, divorce, remarriage
• Implications for future generations?
• More complexity, financial security?

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Living Arrangements

• Living with spouse
• 60 elderly men
• 40 women
• Living alone
• Women 30-50
• Men 13-20

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• Increases in female life expectancy
• Declining fertility
• Economic feasibility not a significant factor
• But pension improvements may be important
• Normative changes related to independence,
  privacy, individualism

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Multigenerational Living

• Approximately 13 of Canadian elders
• Influence of ethnic origin
• Foreign-born, more likely to live in 3-generation
  household
• beanpole families
• 4-5 generations
• Not common
• Late childbearing age age gap between generations

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• Sandwich generation
• Needs of dependent children and elderly parents
• Not commonplace in Canada
• Empty nest vs. cluttered nest
• Children leaving home at older ages
• Adult children more likely to boomerang back

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Grandparenthood

• Majority of elderly
• Contribution to grandchildren
• Gender differences affect

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Affect differences

• Women more likely to be grandparents for longer
  time
• Grandparent-child tie more emotionally close
  among grandmothers
• Mediated by middle generation opposite effects
• Divorce in middle generation possible denial of
  contact
• Grandparents as parents if middle generation
  unable to care for children

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Widowhood

• expected life event
• Associated with financial difficulty
• Stress
• Change in identity
• New relationships with children, other family
  members, friends, other men

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Adult sibling relationships

• Importance varies over life course
• Later life
• Growth in importance
• Influenced by
• geographical proximity
• Gender (sisters closer)
• Marital status (more importance to never-married)
• Parental status (more important to childless)

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Family Conflict

• Elder Abuse
• Extreme form of conflict/elder maltreatments
• Physical, psychological, financial
• Not as common as other forms
• 4-8 percent victims of abuse/neglect in home and
  institutional settings
• Family
• Spouses more likely to be perpetrators than
  children
• Men more likely to be physically abusive
• Women more likely to be abusive through neglect

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Violence against elderly

• Related to four factors
• Problems of abuser (mental illness, drug
  addiction)
• Dependency of abuser on victim (especially
  financial dependency)
• Social isolation
• External stresses on family members
• Perpetuation of wife abuse into later life
• Need for social solutions

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Review

• Cognitive development
• Intelligence change, stability, growth
• Distinction cross-sectional vs. longitudinal
• Social development
• theories, friendship, mate selection, sexuality
• Family development
• structure, changes, relations