The freedom and fears of a society in transition
Page Tools
![Kuppy Nambiar and Tom Podeu with 7 month old Harry at their Elsternwick home.](/web/20161116080542im_/http://www.theage.com.au/ffximage/2004/11/26/wbfamily_wideweb__430x265.jpg)
Kuppy Nambiar and Tom Podeu with 7 month old Harry at their Elsternwick home.
Photo: Mario Borg
The nature of the Australian family may change
radically, but it is
a resilient institution.
Until the 1960s, the script for family life was predictable, says David de Vaus, professor of sociology at La Trobe University. "The script was boy meets girl, fall in love, get married, set up house, woman stops work to have babies. Then he retires at 65 and one of them dies." Since then, slowly but steadily, Australians have been tearing up the template. As Professor de Vaus documents in his statistical analysis Diversity and Change in Australian Families, the norms once imposed by one's family, gender, class or ethnic group have largely fallen away. What remains, for better or worse, are individual choices.
As recently as 1976, the most common family type was the couple with dependent children, comprising 48.4 per cent of families. In 2001, this family type was still the most common, but its number had fallen to 38.6 per cent. Also in 1976, 6.5 per cent of families were lone parents with dependent children; in 2001 this type of family had risen to 10.7 per cent. A family can consist of a couple only - in 2001 they made up 35.7 per cent of all family types, up from 28 per cent in 1976 - but, as has been well documented elsewhere, the shrinking of the family has been shadowed by the growth in lone-person households. In 2001, an astonishing 24 per cent of all Australian households contained only one person. While one person living alone cannot be considered a family, Professor de Vaus points out that "many people who live alone have lived in a family household for much of their life. The death of a partner and marriage breakdown are the main reasons for living alone." The fact that almost a quarter of Australian households (or 9 per cent of individuals) fit this category can be further explained by other well-documented phenomena: the falling fertility rate; the growing fragility of marriage (at least 32 per cent of marriages will end in divorce); and the ageing population. What remains unexplored, however, is the impact all this solitude will have on society. Some optimists predict it will lead to a rise in community activities as people are forced to join local choirs and cricket clubs to counter their aloneness. It may also lead to deeper dependence on the informal interactions that help to sustain us - with networks of friends supporting a person throughout their life and not just in their youth, in much the same way a family has always done.
We have more freedom now - and more space to worry about the decisions we have made. The degree of comfort a person feels with the looser arrangements now in place largely depends on how well he or she is able to adapt to the present period of unpredictable transition. To be the first person in a family to divorce, for instance, or to decide not to marry, can be a lonely and challenging experience, even if, from an individual perspective, the choice was the right one.
For each one of us the future is unknown, and always has been, but for the tens of thousands of Australians who have broken from tradition - by embracing single parenthood, say, or by choosing career over family - where their trajectory will take them may also, in dark moments, appear unimaginable. Life without the script is life stripped of comforting certainties.
And while the future is unknown for each of us as individuals, it is perhaps encouraging that it is also a mystery to demographers and sociologists. A day after the Productivity Commission this week released its gloomy predictions about the impact of an ageing population on the Australian economy, the Bureau of Statistics reported that the nation's fertility rate had stopped its 40-year fall and had levelled off at 1.75 babies per woman. The reason, according to Australian National University demographer Rebecca Kippen, was that women who had devoted their 20s to establishing their careers and partnerships were turning to motherhood in their 30s and 40s. This is good news, and not just for those concerned about Australia's future budget deficits. According to the Institute of Family Studies, more than a quarter of men and women have fewer children than they would ideally like to have. The figure indicates that a reservoir of pain and regret may surround the decline in the nation's fertility. It also indicates that, despite the enormous upheavals the family has undergone in recent times, it is likely to prove to be a resilient institution. The template may be different now, but the need to connect remains unchanged.