The changing family in international perspective; families are becoming smaller and less traditional as fertility rates fall and more persons live alone; Scandinavian countries are the pacesetters in developing nontraditional forms of family living, but the United States has the highest incidence of divorce and of single-parent households - The American Family During the 20th Century

Monthly Labor Review, March, 1990 by Constance Sorrentino

Italy is the only European country studied in which the divorce rate remains low, and divorce laws have not been liberalized there. Japan's divorce rates are lower than in all other countries except Italy, but, unlike Italy, there has been an upward trend in Japan since 1960.

Divorce rates understate the extent of family breakup in all countries: marital separations are not covered by the divorce statistics, and these statistics also do not capture the breakup of families in which the couple is not legally married. Studies show that in Sweden, the breakup rate of couples in consensual unions is three times the dissolution rate of married couples.(4) Statistics Sweden tabulates data on family dissolution from population registers that show when couples previously living together have moved to separate addresses. The data indicate that the family dissolution rate rose more than fourfold between 1960 and 1980, while the divorce rate merely doubled.

Births out of wedlock. Rates of births to unmarried women have increased in all developed countries except Japan. (See table 4.) The phenomenon arises from the decline of marriage, the increase in divorce, and the rising rates of cohabitations. Close to half of all live births in Sweden are now outside of wedlock, up from only 1 in 10 in 1960. Denmark is not far behind. In the United States, France, and the United Kingdom, unmarried women account for more than 1 out of 5 births, while the rates are far lower in the Netherlands, Italy, and Germany.

Although relatively high proportions of Swedish and Danish children are born out of wedlock, it should be noted that nearly all of them are born to parents who live together in a consensual union. These cohabiting parents are typically in a relationship that has many of the legal rights and obligations of a marriage. Statistics Sweden estimates that only 0.5 percent of all live births in the early 1980's involved a situation in which no father was identified and required to pay child support.

A relatively high proportion of births out of wedlock in the United States and the United Kingdom are to teenagers--more than 33 and 29 percent, respectively. In Sweden, teenagers account for only 6 percent, and in France and Japan about 10 percent. More than half of the births out of wedlock in Sweden are to women between the ages of 25 and 34, while only one-quarter are to women in that age group in the United States and the United Kingdom.(5)

All of the foregoing demographic trends have had an impact on household size and composition in the developed nations. This impact can be seen clearly in developments since 1960.

Household size declines

One of the major ramifications of the demographic trends, especially the declining fertility rates and the aging of the population, is that households have diminished in size throughout this century. All of the countries studied have seen declines from an average of four or five members per household in the 1920's to an average of only two or three persons living together in the mid- to late 1980's. (See table 5.) Denmark, Germany, and Sweden currently have average household sizes in the range of 2.2 to 2.3 persons. The United States, Canada, France, Italy, and the United Kingdom have households in the 2.6- to 2.8-person range. Japan maintains the highest average, at about three persons per household. This is explained, in part, by the prevalence of three-generation households there.