The Current Shape of Family Life

The family life of advanced democracies in the 2020s bears only partial resemblance to the family life of the 1950s or even the 1980s. The shift is sometimes described as a crisis, sometimes as a liberation, and sometimes — more usefully — as a transformation whose shape can be empirically described and whose causes can be analyzed. The descriptive task comes first. What does family life actually look like in rich countries today?

The age of partnering has risen substantially. In the United States, the median age at first marriage in 2022 was approximately 28 for women and 30 for men, up from roughly 20 and 23 in 1960. In Northern European countries the figures are higher still: in Sweden, Denmark, and the Netherlands, the median age at first marriage is in the early thirties for women and mid-thirties for men (OECD Family Database 2022; Raley, Sweeney, and Wondra 2015, pp. 95-98). This is not a small shift. A generation that on average married in its early twenties has been replaced by a generation that on average partners, if at all, in its late twenties or thirties.

Cohabitation has become common and in many places normative. In the Nordic countries, France, and the Netherlands, cohabiting before marriage is the statistical default, and substantial shares of couples never formally marry at all. In the United States the majority of young adults who marry have cohabited first, and cohabitation without marriage has become a stable family form rather than simply a precursor to it (Cherlin 2004, pp. 850-853). The institutional distinction between marriage and cohabitation has weakened legally in many jurisdictions — through registered partnerships, common-law recognitions, and parental-rights frameworks that no longer depend on marriage.

Non-marital childbearing has risen across the board. Scandinavian countries report that roughly 40 to 60 percent of births occur outside marriage, most to cohabiting couples. In France the share is comparable. Across the OECD the average is around 40 percent, with wide variation: low in Japan, South Korea, and southern European countries; high in northwestern Europe and the Anglophone world (OECD Family Database 2022). The decoupling of childbearing from marriage, once a feature of specific social strata, has become a mainstream demographic fact.

Single-parent households are a substantial share of all households with children. In the United States, roughly a quarter of children live with a single parent, overwhelmingly the mother. In the United Kingdom the figure is similar. In Scandinavia the share is somewhat lower but still meaningful. Single parenthood is not a marginal family form; it is a standard one, and the policy environment it encounters shapes the welfare of millions of children (McLanahan 2004, pp. 609-612).

Same-sex households are legally recognized in many jurisdictions. Marriage equality arrived in the Netherlands in 2001, Spain in 2005, and the United States via Obergefell in 2015. Dozens of countries have followed. Same-sex couples raise children at rates that have risen with legal recognition, and the empirical literature on the outcomes of these children is now substantial (Biblarz and Stacey 2010, pp. 10-13).

Lesthaeghe (2010) termed this constellation of shifts the second demographic transition: a phase of demographic history distinguished from the first demographic transition — the decline in fertility and mortality of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries — by its ideational and behavioral content. The second transition involves delayed marriage, cohabitation, non-marital childbearing, low fertility, and the decoupling of sex, partnering, and parenthood from the mid-twentieth-century marital package. Some countries are far along the transition (the Nordic model); others are in earlier phases (southern and eastern Europe); and the United States occupies a particular position characterized by high rates of relationship churn across the income distribution (Lesthaeghe 2010, pp. 211-214).

The descriptive picture is thus one of substantial, measurable change. What remains is to ask why it happened, how it varies by social class and country, and what its consequences have been. Those questions occupy the remainder of this topic.