Families are shrinking, and they are doing it all over the world. A girl born in 2024 will barely have siblings and cousins. At the same time, she is getting longer, since she will know all of her grandparents and most of her great-grandparents. If current trends continue, she herself will have an only child or not even at all. Her kinship network, when she is 35, will be the smallest in modern times. And, when she dies, already very old, she will probably do it alone. These are the consequences, according to a recent study, of the dynamics that demographers have been observing and have projected between now and the end of the century. However, they are clear that the family will continue to perform the functions of refuge and help that it has been fulfilling since the beginning of human evolution, no matter how different it may be. But, they add, it will be necessary to strengthen public assistance institutions and functions where they exist and, in most countries, begin to build them.
The size of the family, understood as the kinship network formed by the number of living great-grandparents, grandparents, parents, children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren, to which uncles, cousins and nephews should be added, has continued to reduce since 1950. According to recent research published in the scientific journal PNAS, a woman who was 65 years old in the middle of the last century had 41 relatives on average worldwide. Barely 150 years later, in 2095, another person who will reach that age then will only have 25 of her own.
Sometimes arithmetic means confuse more than they clarify. And that is what happens in this case. The global average obscures the depth of the changes that families are experiencing in most places. On a global scale, countries have not followed the same trends: the most developed societies have already made their classic demographic transition (the transition from high birth and mortality rates to low birth and mortality rates), while many other nations are in different moments of that revolution. Some even, like Japan, Italy or Spain, seem to have entered a kind of post-transition. Two examples illustrate the distortion of the averages perfectly: A woman who reached the age of 65 in Zimbabwe in 1950 had many relatives who took care of her: 82 people, including siblings, cousins, children, grandchildren, nephews… and even one or two grandparents. In 2095, the largest Zimbabweans will have a shrinking family of just 24 members. At the opposite extreme is the Italian case. As a country that has already completed its own demographic transition, the reduction is smaller: a nonna Italy in the mid-20th century had 18 relatives, a figure that will only drop to 12.7 at the end of this century.
The comparison between two Spanish-speaking countries shows the same trends: a Spanish woman who retired in 1950 kept a family of 21 people. The number of relatives almost halved (12.9) in 2095. However, the case of Mexico follows the line of Zimbabwe: the grandmothers of the middle of the last century enjoyed a very extensive kinship network, made up of 67 relatives. But at the end of this century, the Mexican country will look more like Spain than its past, with families made up of 18.9 members, including the 65-year-old birthday girl. The process is planetary, according to this work led by the demographer of the Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research (MPIDR, in Germany), Diego Alburez. Families in the global south had 31 more members at the beginning of the period studied than those in more developed countries. The distance will shorten to 20 by the end of the century.
“The lateral relationship is going to change. “The number of brothers, cousins, uncles and nephews is going to decrease”
Diego Alburez, researcher at the Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research (Germany)
Alburez remembers that this family shrinkage is not only quantitative, the family is losing weight in a certain way, along the sides. “The lateral kinship, as we call it, is going to change. The number of brothers, cousins, uncles and nephews is going to decrease,” she says. At the same time, he adds, “we are going to see families that are increasingly intergenerational, with more elders, with greater differences between the ages of relatives.” This is what demographers call “the transition from the horizontal to the vertical family.” According to the work led by this Guatemalan researcher, the distance between the newborn members of a family nucleus and the older ones has not stopped increasing. The most extreme case is that of China, whose process is similar to chewing gum that is stretched and stretched. In the 1950s, when the People's Republic of China had just been created, girls were born with many cousins, eleven. In 2095, the effects of the draconian one-child policy imposed by the authorities of the communist regime between 1982 and 2015 to control the demographic explosion will still be felt: a Chinese woman born at the end of the century will only have 1.1 cousins. However, she will meet all four of her grandparents and up to six of her great-grandparents, practically twice as many as those born in the times of Mao Zedong, the father of modern China.
China is the extreme of a global trend: families are lengthening to the point that it will be common for great-grandchildren and great-grandparents to meet and coincide for several years, something strange in modern societies. This will raise new problems. Alburez, who leads a group at the MPIDR that researches kinship inequalities, has been working on the concept of the sandwich generation for years. With the decrease in infant mortality and the increase in life expectancy first, and the decrease in the fertility rate and the delay in motherhood, the generations around 35-50 years old, especially women, support everything the system.
“To the extent that members of different generations are alive at the same time, we may have a father and a grandmother, and that grandmother may have her own parents still alive. Older people who also have a grandson. The sum of the demand for attention and care that people experience [de edades intermedias] It is going to increase,” says Alburez. The idea of the “sandwich generation” comes from sociology. The basic concept was originally proposed in the American context at the historical moment in which women (as happened in World War II) were massively incorporated into the labor market. “At the same time, people were living longer, they were having children at an older age, which was going to cause this generation of women to go to work and, on the other hand, were going to continue providing care for their families.” ”, he details.
“A quarter of women born in the 70s have not had children. Among men the percentage is even higher, up to 30%”
Clara Cortina, DemoSoc researcher at Pompeu Fabra University
In biological kinship networks there are new realities that complicate the work of demographers and their drawing of the family of the future. One of the most dramatic is the growing number of people who, being of fertile age, do not have children. For now it is a trend limited to the most advanced countries, but where it is, such as in Spain, it is very pronounced. The researcher of Sociodemographic Research Group (DemoSoc) of the Pompeu Fabra University Clara Cortina gives two conclusive data: “A quarter of the women who were born in the 70s have not had children.” [y biológicamente ya no los podrán tener]. Among men the percentage is even higher, up to 30%. We still don't know what will happen to the next generation, to the 80s, he says. In three decades, when they near the end of their days, they may have a brother or nephew nearby, but most likely they will have no one.
Although no studies have been done on the connection between this childless generation and their life satisfaction upon reaching old age (it has not been done because they have not yet arrived), Cortina has participated in works such as the SHARE project, a survey of health, aging and retirement in Europe. Here, the case of the spinsters and bachelors from other times could function as an analogue of those who have now decided not to have children. “In the past, networks of siblings and friends filled the void. But we don't know if this will continue to work in the future,” she opines. For their part, homoparental families barely represent just over 1% of all couples. Leaving aside the specific issue of marriages of gay men, “the fertility of lesbian women is somewhat lower, they tend to have fewer children; It continues to be more difficult for them to reach motherhood,” says the Pompeu Fabra researcher.
Another factor that diversifies the idea of family are immigrants. In Spain they represent just over 13%, but the vast majority are young and could not bring their parents, so there are no grandparents. Cortina also remembers another element that Alburez's work did not include: “Another layer of complexity must be added to kinship networks. To the biological relatives we must add the new members who join when a separated person re-pairs and the new couple brings their own children.” Part of this new reality is that last year more children were born to single mothers than to married ones. For the researcher, different kinship networks now overlap.
Teresa Castro, from the Institute of Economics, Geography and Demography (IEGD-CSIC), maintains that the family is always changing, but agrees that it is on the path of reducing numbers, increasing verticality and lengthening the ages between generations. “The children are going to be favored, with all their grandparents and some great-grandparents,” he says, half joking. “For the elderly, the situation is very different: they will have fewer and fewer potential caregivers,” he adds. Looking to the future, the fact that care can no longer be provided by the family may be the fundamental impact. “The elderly no longer expect their children to take care of them,” Castro concludes. In societies like Spain, with public institutions and private companies taking over, there will be no drama. It will be another thing in the rest of the societies that do not have a State and private initiative is not available to everyone. Even so, Castro ends up convinced that “whatever the family changes, solidarity, affection, and family ties will remain.”
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