Changing Families in Europe: Convergence or Divergence?

Tracing the transformations in European family life from historical and comparative perspectives, Manuela Naldini distinguishes the patterns of change among five groups of countries: Scandinavian, English-speaking, Continental Europe, Mediterranean, and Central-Eastern Europe. These clusters represent not only different geographical regions, but alternative gender and welfare regimes as well. Naldini’s analysis of the trends and patterns from the 1960s to the present illustrates the lines of convergence and divergence among these regions in the changing dimensions of family life. These dimensions include rates of marriage, cohabitation, divorce and out-of-wedlock births, increasing labor force participation of women, norms governing sexual relations, “new family” forms, and revised timing of basic stages (marriage, childbirth, leaving home) in the family life cycle. She finds a number of common patterns among the countries, such as low fertility rates, increasing pluralization of family life, and later transitions from the parental home. At the same time, much diversity remains in family arrangements, such as the introduction of marriage equality.