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  • Title: [What is a family? And who plans it?].
    Author: Lloyd C.
    Journal: Profamilia; 1993 Dec; 10(22):24-9. PubMed ID: 12287887.
    Abstract:
    This work questions the view of the family as a closed physical, economic, and emotional unit with longterm stability that has been the usual basis of demographic data collection and analysis, population policy formulation, and family planning program implementation. Simple models of the family assume that the parents and children live in the same household and function in a unified family economy, in which childbearing decisions reflect a longterm view of costs and benefits. But in reality, parents often live apart due to labor migration, polygamy, divorce, remarriage, or extramarital procreation. The hypothesis that family members share a household is valid only in some places, as Demographic and Health Survey (DHS) data have demonstrated. In families separated by migration for economic reasons, distance often loosens economic ties, especially with the passage of time. Financial exchanges are precarious when the father and mother are not united by marriage. It is frequently assumed that satisfaction of the family planning needs of couples is equivalent to satisfying the needs of men and women separately, but this assumption may be erroneous for nonmonogamous individuals. Recent research demonstrates that single women and their partners are a potentially important group of family planning users. The assumption that increasing costs of children in developing countries will discourage parents from having large families may overlook parental efforts to have some of the cost assumed by other relatives or the older children, or to invest in only some of their children. As new proofs of the limitations of the conventional view of the family are found, the need becomes clear for research including men, adding an individual perspective to the attention usually focused on couples, and establishing a more realistic perspective on the family in all its manifestations.
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