Abstract
Chapter 9 (Family Resources), is concerned with life course events – such as marriage, divorce and widowhood – and changes in living arrangements that have a bearing upon people’s resources for maintaining independence, security and social integration in later life. The chapter discusses the rising diversity in life course experience associated with the second demographic transition. This has made complexity and instability more pronounced features of the family life of older people, and has diminished the family resources potentially available to them. Trends in marriage, cohabitation, divorce and living arrangements all reflect this transformation of family life, making it unlikely that the characteristics of the future aged will closely resemble those of current generations. The chapter also shows that cross-national differences in family circumstances persist. Countries with relatively low levels of divorce and cohabitation, and relatively high levels of coresidence of the aged and their offspring, tend to be those with very low fertility and unfavourable trends in population aging. Changes in family resources also raise the question of whether friends have increasing importance in the lives of older people. This is discussed toward the end of the chapter, together with the choices of people who leave their family home for reasons related to their age or their health.
Improvements in life expectancy have changed the structure of multigenerational families; joint survivorship within and across generations has resulted in extended periods of support exchanges (including caregiving) and affective connections over the life span. At the same time, relationships in aging families have become more fluid and less predictable, as reduced fertility and increased rates of divorce, remarriage and stepfamily formation have altered the microcontext in which intergenerational, spousal, and sibling relationships function. (Silverstein and Giarrusso 2010: 1039)
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Rowland, D.T. (2012). Family Resources. In: Population Aging. International Perspectives on Aging, vol 3. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-4050-1_9
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