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This chapter evaluates the importance of family factors as predictors of offending. The findings reveal that strongest predictor is usually criminal or antisocial parents while other quite strong and replicable predictors are large family size, poor parental supervision, parental conflict and disrupted families. The result suggests that child abuse and young mothers are relatively weak predictors. This chapter suggests that family-based programs targeting family risk factors might prevent delinquency.

The traditionally ideal Chinese family is a “large” one, in which many family members live together. This chapter investigates how this ideal pattern has changed in recent years. From the perspectives of family size (number of members in a family) and family type (nuclear, stem, joint and grand), we review various findings in the literature and compare them with the figures from our PSFD data. However, the readers are also warned about the special regulations in China that might disturb the family statistics. This chapter also studies what factors determine a young couple's decision to co‐reside with their senior parents. It turns out that spouses with more resources tend to avoid co‐residing with their parents‐in‐law, in contrast to previous findings.

This chapter shows that the dynamics of Jewish family life in early modern Germany did not differ markedly from those of their neighbors. Except for the wealthy, women generally married between their late teens and late twenties, and men usually wed in their twenties. Family size was not unusually large, nor was it likely to be when the age at marriage was not substantially different from that of non-Jews. Husbands and wives divided their responsibilities in ways that also paralleled the society around them. Residential and economic restrictions caused one fundamental and significant difference between Jewish and Christian family life. Both Jewish males and females were more likely than Christians to move away from their native homes to establish their own families and households, and males, working more in commerce than agriculture, were more likely to be away from the family in order to provide support.

This chapter examines the reasons behind the changes in the distribution of total income and discusses what they might mean for overall well-being among American adults. It explores the effects of changing family composition and family size, as well as the effects of shifts in the distribution of earning and other income components. It notes that about three-quarters of the increase in inequality in the overall distribution of income occurred because of increases in the inequality of income components—primarily, increases in annual earnings inequality. It explains that this, in turn, occurred due to the increases in wage inequality.

A high birth rate among most people meant offspring were spread over a wide age range creating an ‘intermediate generation’ between parents and younger children. Life in middle-class households could be crowded, added to by residential servants, pupils, apprentices, and visitors. Children and young people were expected to share space and possessions. Parents and others used a variety of routines and punishments to manage these large broods. Elder children, particularly girls, helped with and taught the younger. Given the high incidence of serious illness, and high infant and child mortality, religious beliefs were an important source of guidance and solace. Adults favoured some children over others. Youngsters were expected to conform to accepted forms of feminine and masculine behaviour. In the late nineteenth century, middle-class family size gradually declined, fuelling eugenicist fears. By the 1920s large families were looked down on, an attitude that fed class tensions.

This chapter discusses the attitudes of specific ethnic groups in Nigeria and Africa toward fertility, family size, and abortion. It examines some of the sayings, proverbs, and societal practices to aid our understanding of the general cultural beliefs about what constitutes appropriate family size and actual practices extant in the country. The main focus of this chapter is the cultural tradition of the Yoruba community and the sociocultural factors that influence their ideal of a large family size. One of these factors is the insurance strategy. This is the practice of having more than the desired number of children because of the fear of infant and child mortality, and to ensure survivorship of the sons to continue lineage.

The chapter discusses the relationship between population growth and the natural environment as mediated through economic development. It discusses both the classical and the neoclassical theories of relationship between population growth and economic development with varying implications of the importance of population growth and environmental resource limitations in development theory and policy. It analyses the relationship between fertility behaviour and economic growth and reviews the theory and evidence of demographic transition in terms of micro-economic logic of income – price based choice of family size, gender power structure, property rights, family institution and cultural norms at the different stages of development. Finally the chapter discusses the impact of population growth on environment by way of direct pressure on resource use due to reproductive externalities and focuses on the vicious circular relationship among high fertility, poverty, low female empowerment and over use of commons in the rural sector with its policy implications.

Fertility rates are of political, social, and academic interest because of their implications on future social and economic trends. In Australia, women are having, on average, fewer than two children, and each nominal couple is not replacing itself. At this rate and without the prospect of higher immigration, it is feared that Australia's population will decline and decrease in its size in the next fifty years. Since 2000, researchers and politicians have directed their attention towards understanding influences on fertility behaviour, and in particular ‘fertility gaps’ where people would have additional children under different circumstances. In these researches, much focus is given to economic and work-based constraints, shunning the valuable perspectives offered by social factors such as religious affiliations or contact with religious communities. This chapter hence explores the changing place of religions as a variable of interest in the demographic research on family size and fertility rate in Australia. It provides insight for those interested in religion and in social sciences. It argues that the lack of attention to religious influences on contemporary Australian fertility resulted from researchers adhering to an unquestioning belief in the hegemony of secularisation, and to a continued preference for aggregate-level quantitative analysis at the expense of qualitative methods, which contributed towards a ‘closed shop’ on research topics. The chapter also shows the benefits in disaggregating data rather than aggregating to traditional groupings that may hide important differences and trends. In particular, the chapter shows how qualitative research methods which talk to ‘the actors’ allow the voices of those in faith communities to be heard and explored.

Ireland’s fertility rate has decreased by 50% from an average of four children per woman to just two over the last 40 years. While it currently has one of the highest fertility rates in Europe, this may not continue, as Ireland continues to become more like its European partners. There are discrepancies between people’s ideal and expected number of children, demonstrating that people expect to have fewer children than they would ideally like to have. In order to better understand the factors contributing to people’s attitudes to having children, we examined potential predictors of ideal and expected family size. These included a wide range of measures including demographic characteristics and attitudinal variables. The results showed that the most significant predictors of both ideal and expected family size came from a range of attitudinal measures, which included Attitudes to Gender Roles, Attitudes to Having Children, Attitudes to Social Policies, and Attitudes to Family Formation, as well as measures of values and priorities, with only a single demographic characteristic a significant predictor, demonstrating the strong predictive power of attitudinal variables.

This chapter focuses on problems of measuring poverty and provides a brief historical overview of proposed remedies. It addresses key decisions to be made in developing an absolute measure of poverty. These issues are determination of minimal commodity consumption standards; adjustment for differences in family size and composition; and adjustment for cost-of-living differences among localities.

This chapter provides an overview of the family as the basic social unit of beaver society. A beaver family consists of the parents, the young of the year, and yearlings. Two-year-olds may or may not be present; they usually leave or are expelled when or before a new litter is born. On average, there are two kits of the year and two yearlings, so that a typical family on a reasonably good site numbers about six members, provided there is no trapping or other disturbance to the colony. This chapter discusses beaver family size and composition, lodge use and site defense, home range, behavior inside the lodge, and parenting. It shows that beavers rely on chemical secretions to recognize family members, which is important in coordination of social behavior, separation of roles, and defense against invading beavers. It also considers the division of labor in the beaver colony.

This chapter examines whether Russians calibrate their family sizes to their housing conditions. Restricting family size is one strategy for keeping one's living conditions tolerable, when a separate apartment and/or a separate child's room remain out of reach. However, little is known about how housing affects fertility, in Russia or elsewhere. This chapter considers whether housing conditions actually influence how many children Russians have. To elucidate the causal relationship between housing and reproductive behavior, the chapter analyzes the demographic literature on fertility and shows how housing might, or might not, influence childbearing. Based on a qualitative analysis of discourses on having children, it identifies possible cultural mechanisms that could link housing to reproduction. Statistical evidence suggests that Russians, particularly those with higher education, restrict family size when they lack separate apartments and/or separate rooms for each of their children.

This chapter is motivated by the observation that parental families are not static entities, but dynamic and evolving organizations. Although children may experience many continuities in family life from infancy through childhood and into adolescence, most also experience numerous changes in their family environment. The chapter examines how the children's marital and cohabitation decisions are related to their familial experiences during these years of childhood and early adolescence. Two types of family factors are considered: how the education, employment, childbearing, divorce, and remarriage experience of parents from birth to age fifteen relate to their children's subsequent marital and cohabitation decisions; and how parental financial resources, family-size preferences, attendance at religious services, sex-role attitudes, and relationships with family and friends when the children are age fifteen relate to their own subsequent decisions about marriage and cohabitation.

The marked variations in the distribution of family sizes over time are further explored, as also are the major variations between women married to fathers in different occupations. The significance of very small families in fertility constraint is explored. The role in Scotland of possible methods of family limitation at different dates is examined, in the context of ongoing historical debates about when, if ever, most couples began consciously to ‘plan’ the size of their families, and at what point in their marriages they may have done so. In the same context, Scottish evidence is reviewed on the possible reasons for the timing of the onset of fertility decline and its spread through to the 1930s.

While the current Irish birth rate is still high by European standards, at approximately two children per woman, the total fertility rate has nevertheless fallen 50% over the last four decades from approximately four children per woman in 1970 to two children today. This chapter discusses the causes, significance and implications of this and presents results of new measures developed to explore current attitudes to childbearing. Four distinct dimensions emerged through factor analysis, including a Belief in the Necessity of having Children for Fulfilment, Perceived Economic Constraints to having Children, Belief in the Value of Smaller Families, and the Belief that Men want Children as much as Women do. The prevalence of these attitudes in the representative sample is presented as well as differences among groups. Respondents’ ideal, expected and actual family size, as well as discrepancies between these, are also explored.

This paper investigates the effects of spatial housing price risk on housing choices over the first half of the life-cycle. Housing price risk can be substantial but, unlike other risky assets which people can avoid, most people want to eventually own their home thereby creating an insurance demand early in life. Our contribution focuses on the importance of home ownership as a hedge against future house price risk for individuals that plan to move up the housing ladder. We use a simple theoretical model to show that people living in places with higher housing price risk should own their first home at a younger age, live in larger homes, and be less likely to refinance. These predictions are shown to hold using panel data from the United States and United Kingdom.