Introduction

There have been many changes in the patterning of family relationships over the last 40 years. While mid-20th-century family organisation was less uniform than the Parsonian emphasis on a conjugal/nuclear family system indicated (Parsons, 1959), the level of diversity now found, and accepted as normal, in people's experiences of family relationships is far greater than it was. In particular, since the 1970s, patterns of family and household formation and dissolution have altered quite dramatically and in ways that were certainly not predicted then. As is now widely recognised, the very idea of a stable, highly structured family cycle is no longer viable as an organising framework for understanding the dynamics of people's family life. Instead, the much looser, less deterministic notion of family course has become a more appropriate one for exploring people's family transitions. The central idea of the family course is not that people's family changes are entirely unstructured or haphazard, but rather that under contemporary social conditions the transitions that mark family life are inherently more fluid and thus less predictable.

There is a general tendency to assume that these changes have had a particularly marked impact on younger cohorts. Most certainly the family experiences of people currently in their 20s and 30s are quite different from those of people who are, say, aged 60 or over. Not only has the younger cohort been more likely to experience parental divorce and stepfamily involvement, but equally their typical partnership and childbearing trajectories have been quite different. The older cohort tended to marry early and have children at a relatively young age. In contrast, the younger cohort experienced greater sexual freedom, tended to marry later, frequently after one or more cohabiting relationships, and usually had children in their late 20s or early 30s. As importantly, there is now greater diversity – less uniformity around the mean, that is – in these patterns than there was previously.

It is important to realise that the changes there have been have also had direct and indirect consequences for the family relationships of older people. At some stage during their lives, they too may have experienced divorce, cohabitation with one or more others, remarriage and stepfamily relationships.