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This paper documents increasing cohabitation in the United States, and the implications of this trend for the family lives of children. The stability of marriage-like relationships (including marriage and cohabitation) has decreased - despite a constant divorce rate. Children increasingly live in cohabiting families either as a result of being born to cohabiting parents or of their mother's entry into a cohabiting union. The proportion of births to unmarried women born into cohabiting families increased from 29 to 39 per cent in the period 1980-84 to 1990-94, accounting for almost all of the increase in unmarried childbearing. As a consequence, about two-fifths of all children spend some time in a cohabiting family, and the greater instability of families begun by cohabitation means that children are also more likely to experience family disruption. Estimates from multi-state life tables indicate the extent to which the family lives of children are spent increasingly in cohabiting families and decreasingly in married families. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper was developed with two purposes in mind: first to extend the study of the family life cycle for this sub-population on the United States back to the 1800 birth cohort and secondly to examine the features of the family life cycle under conditions of high natural fertility. Evidence Consistent with a natural-fertility regime is presented using Mormon genealogies of married women who were born between 1800 and 1869. The family life cycle for this high-fertility population indicates how the reproductive potential of a population is tempered by life-cycle phenomena. Age at marriage greatly affects completed family size: Women who married by the age of 20 average about nine live births against an average of only six for women married at age 25. However. the age at birth of the last child is high and unrelated to age at marriage as would be expected under conditions of natural fertility. By using direct information on the age at death for these couples. we find that the average age at dissolution of the conjugal unit has not varied by more than a few years and has consistently been in the mid 60's. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper information about cohorts of young women in the National Longitudinal Survey of Work Experience is used to examine the extent to which women maintain a continuity of work attachment during their early years of childbearing, the years when traditionally they were most likely to withdraw from the work force. The results indicate that women who maintain closer ties to the work force immediately before and after their first birth are also more likely to be employed in 1978 - between five and ten years after their first birth - independently of intervening fertility events and other labour supply factors considered to be important predictors of work. The notion that work and fertility are increasingly becoming complementary activities for American women is supported by these data. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper some findings of a family reconstitutions study of a group of high-upper-class American families are reported. The study extends over almost 2000 years, from the early colonial period to the Civil War. A substantive analysis of fertility patterns of a group of socially significant Philadelphia families provides interesting comparisons with the demographic experience of European social elites and raises additional questions regarding certain assumptions of classical demographic transition theory. The focus of the analysis is on fertility trends and evidence concerning the initiation of family limitation. If this group took a vanguard position by initiating the practice of family limitation in society as did other social elite groups, one might anticipate some evidence of this by the late eighteenth century.

This article focuses on American Catholism and the International family planning movement. First, the involvement of the government in fertility control both in the United States and throughout the developing world was an involvement in family life. Children, after all, are born into and reared by families. Family life is a central concern of the Church. Even among non-practising Catholics, the key life-cycle events-birth, marriage, and death-demand an appearance in Church. Objections were raised not only because of the details of what the government proposed, but also because Church leaders saw the government usurping an area in which the Church claimed special competence.

The article focuses on emigration trends during 1831 from the British Isles to the United States. The trends are derived from the passenger lists available at sea ports of the U.S. These lists were maintained according to the Passenger Act of 1819, especially for English immigrants to the U.S. The migrants of this period consisted of the movement of family groups and they were in their main productive age. The number of children was quite large but men outnumbered women among the adult immigrants of over the age of 15. According to a researcher, the rural emigration was continuous and constant, the migrants were joined by skilled workers from the manufacturing cities, victims of cyclical unemployment.

The purpose of this research is to investigate trends in rural fertility during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries in Western Massachusetts. Utilizing census and vital records registrations from towns in Franklin County we are able to identify a decline in the mean completed family beginning as early as the 1780s. This decline is substantiated in a cohort analysis and reflected in a Variety of fertility measures. Evidence suggests that the decline in fertility was the result of at least some conscious effort at family limitation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Whether or not blacks in the United States desire a larger family size than whites is controversial. But the overall black-white differential in fertility is well established. Blacks not only exhibit higher fertility but also expect more births than whites. Basically, two views about excess Southern black fertility seem to emerge from the literature. According to the first which may be labelled "`assimilationist," it is suggested that "by the time non-white couples are one generation or more removed from the rural South, their fertility is very much like that of white population." It is assumed that socioeconomic inequality in the South is responsible for black-white differentials in fertility and as blacks move away from the Southern milieu and are exposed to a more open social structure their fertility will decline. The South differs from other regions in many respects. Southerners differ from Northerners not only socially and economically, but also in their personalities. Northern-born blacks have considerably higher self-esteem than those born in the South. They do not have a lower self esteem than whites. Possibly distinct patterns in family life developed both among blacks and whites in the South because of their geographical and cultural isolation from each other.