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The Covid-19 pandemic is shaking fundamental assumptions about the human life course in societies around the world. In this essay, we draw on our collective expertise to illustrate how a life course perspective can make critical contributions to understanding the pandemic's effects on individuals, families, and populations. We explore the pandemic's implications for the organization and experience of life transitions and trajectories within and across central domains: health, personal control and planning, social relationships and family, education, work and careers, and migration and mobility. We consider both the life course implications of being infected by the Covid-19 virus or attached to someone who has; and being affected by the pandemic's social, economic, cultural, and psychological consequences. It is our goal to offer some programmatic observations on which life course research and policies can build as the pandemic's short- and long-term consequences unfold.

Proximity to family forms a quite common motivation for moving. Older adults' care needs may underlie this motivation, but little is known about the extent to which this is the case. We investigate how moving motivated by proximity to family is associated with (1) the residential locations of parents, siblings and children and (2) indicators of older adults' care needs. We employ data from five Netherlands' Housing Surveys (2006, 2009, 2012, 2015, 2018) matched with register data. Uniquely, we use indicators of parents' formal care use in analyses for respondents aged 30–64, and own care use for respondents aged 65 and older. We find that, as hypothesised, those whose parents or children live far away are more likely to move for proximity reasons than others. However, we do not find such an association for siblings living far away. Contrary to expectations, respondents are more likely to report moving for proximity reasons if they have geographically distant parents who do not use care than if they have distant parents who do. We find no convincing evidence that older parents' own care needs induce moves motivated by proximity to family. Rather, own care needs induce moves that are motivated by health or a need for care but are mostly not directed towards family. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We review the literature on the role of geographically nearby and distant family in moving and staying. We also introduce papers in the Special Issue 'Moving and Staying in the Context of the Family'. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

There are well‐documented associations between life course changes and migration; yet, the occurrence, order, and timing of reasons for migrating are growing increasingly diverse. Migration following adverse life events, such as a divorce or an involuntary job loss, may be qualitatively distinct from migration undertaken for other reasons. Moves, especially long‐distance moves, following adverse life events, may be defined more by seeking family and familiar locations. Moreover, a heightened probability of migration may occur not only immediately after an adverse life event but also in the years after. We explore these questions in the US context with longitudinal data from the 1983 to 2019 waves of the Panel Study of Income Dynamics, which provides information on residential locations, locations of family members, and adverse life events for individuals over time. We focus on five specific events: divorce, the death of a spouse, involuntary job loss, the onset of a chronic physical health condition, and the onset of a chronic mental health condition. Using multivariate regression, we find that divorce and job loss induce long‐distance moves, especially return moves and moves towards family. Chronic physical conditions deter moving in general but increase the chances of return moves (after a period of time) and moves towards family. These results have implications for understanding migration as a response to adverse life events, both immediately and over time. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

One of the most pressing questions in the rural gentrification literature is whether rural residents face difficulties in finding a home within their locality due to the influx of more wealthy newcomers. In this paper, we investigate the extent to which intended local movers and intended non-local movers have realised their rural residential preferences in their preferred municipality. We perform multilevel multinomial logistic regression analysis on data from two housing surveys for the Netherlands that are enriched with register data from the longitudinal Social Statistical Database (SSD). Our results show that, despite of their lower income, intended local movers are more likely to find homes within their preferred rural location than are intended non-local movers. Intended non-local movers move more often to a location other than that initially preferred, with urbanites facing a higher likelihood to move to an urban area. The findings suggest that ties to the residential environment are more important in successfully finding housing in one's preferred rural location than are financial resources. (Contains 5 tables and 1 figure.)

We investigate which partner of a 2-gender couple moves out after separation. We test hypotheses on the impact of differences between the partners in the costs of moving out and resources, using data from the Divorce in the Netherlands survey (N = 1,537 ex-couples who separated between 1972 and 1998). Ex-partners initiating the separation were more likely to leave, as were those for whom a new partnership was a reason for the separation. An ex-partner with custody of children was less likely to leave, as was an ex-partner with more resources. A woman was less likely to leave when the joint children no longer lived at home or when the partnership had been longer lasting.