Family and marriage: Crisis or modernization?

Abstract

According to the theory of “second demographic transition”, cohabitation is the equivalent of a legal marriage. The author criticizes this viewpoint. Most men and women marry with three main goals in mind: 1) to be happy; 2) to avoid loneliness; 3) to have children. The author determines the degree to which these purposes are achieved, according to data from the study “The Russian monitoring of economic situation and population health” (RLMS-HSE), conducted by the National research University “Higher school of Economics” and LLC “Demoscope” with participation by the Population Center of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and the Institute of Sociology of the Federal Theoretical and Applied Sociology Center at the Russian Academy of Sciences. Calculations show that, for all indicators (namely the percent of respondents who consider themselves happy and free from feelings of loneliness, the number of children per 100 women and the percentage of women without children), cohabitants occupy an intermediate position between single and married. Cohabitation is not a special form of modern marriage but an intermediate form of marital status between loneliness and legal marriage. The decreasing number of legal marriages and growing number of cohabiting couples lead not to the modernization of the family, but to its weakening as a social institution. The basic functions of family are reproduction of the population, raising children and providing psychological comfort to family members. “Progressive” modern families, based on cohabitation, often remain childless. These families perform such functions to a much lesser degree than the traditional “natural family” based on a lawful marriage with several children. This modernization leads to the destruction of family as a social institution.

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