Long‐Term Effects of the Demographic Transition on Family and Kinship Networks in Britain

the first demographic transition started in many western industrialized societies around the latter part of the nineteenth century with steady mortality improvement. expectation of life at birth, about 40 years at the start of the transition, has now doubled (riley 2001). Fertility declined from a level of about five children to under two children per woman over the same period (Coale and watkins 1986; Chesnais 1993; dyson 2010). this decline was interrupted in many industrialized countries by the baby boom and associated marriage boom in the post–world war ii period, peaking in the early 1960s. the decline resumed to such an extent that some countries experienced ultra-low fertility, with total fertility rates below 1.3, together with very low rates of marriage (Billari and Kohler 2004; Frejka et al. 2008). widespread signs of stabilization or reversal from these historically unprecedented low fertility levels only started to appear in the early twenty-first century (Goldstein, Sobotka, and Jasilioniene 2009). these widespread fertility declines have led to population aging, initially resulting from reductions in fertility and more recently compounded by mortality improvement at older ages. while countries have shown some variations in the timing and magnitude, broadly similar trends are observed. trends in fertility and life expectancy for the country that is the subject of this chapter, england and wales (hereafter Britain), are shown in Figures 1a and 1b. this resumption of fertility decline in the second half of the twentieth century was associated with changes in partnership behavior in many countries that some consider to be a second demographic transition (van de Kaa 1987; lesthaeghe 1995), although this contention has been challenged , (e.g., Coleman 2005). these changes included substantial reductions in marriage and increases in marital breakdown. nonmarital cohabitation