Aart Liefbroer is a sociologist and researcher at the Netherlands Interdisciplinary Demographic Institute. His research into fertility, family formation and social and demographic change has gained him recognition across Europe as an authority on the subject. One of his main focuses of analysis is the influence that family values have on demographic behaviour and the resulting impacts on people’s life course. This has led him to study the determinants and consequences arising from demographic events such as marriage, early parenthood or separation.

Your recent research has analysed the influence of family experiences on the start of adult life. This is what you call the intergenerational transmission of demographic behaviour.
Indeed. My interest in this area of study was sparked by the sensation I had that very little attention was being paid to family backgrounds in the analysis of demographic behaviour.
The conclusion of our research is that the intergenerational transmission of demographic behaviour takes place in different ways.
Firstly, it is frequently the case that parents try to transmit certain values to their children and, as a result, their children act in their adult life taking these values into consideration.
Something else that may happen is that children detect how their parents experience certain life events – the births of their younger siblings, marriage, divorce, etc. – and then in their adult life they modulate their behaviour on the basis of the attitudes that they observed in their parents when these events occurred.
And finally, it may turn out that the behaviour of children resembles that of their parents because their life circumstances are more or less similar. In this case we are talking about the intergenerational transmission of economic opportunities.
But other factors also exist that transcend the family sphere and determine whether or not this transmission of values and behaviours takes place...
Of course. Let’s imagine that children become more economically dependent upon their parents. This will probably strengthen the influence that their parents have on them. And the opposite is true. If people become more individualistic, which often occurs when independence on an economic level is achieved, it is easier for young adults to act in accordance with their own personality, instead of reproducing the behaviours of their parents.
In general, the intergenerational transmission of demographic behaviour becomes more limited as society becomes more individualistic. In contrast, it gets stronger if society’s economic situation deteriorates.
In some Western societies, there has been a major transformation of family structures in a relatively short time period. What are these changes in demographic behaviours indicating?
In my opinion, the number of children that a couple ultimately has is rarely strictly a question of obeying ideals. Frequently it is the result of a mixture of cultural reasons, economic issues and the social policies that are applied in each country (which often also have an economic undercurrent).
The economic situation is a relevant factor when analysing whether demographic patterns are repeated or not. Within a context of a lack of economic growth during a prolonged period, it is normal for the number of people who put off their decision to get married or have children to increase. But it is not the only determining factor.
In the case of the enormous reduction in the number of marriages in Spain, it is obvious that the crisis has an influence, but it also has to do with a profound change in the values of societies.
Previously, when a certain age was reached or at a certain point in a couple’s relationship, the natural step was to get married. But these days, young people ask themselves: “Should I get married?” or “What difference does it make?” is is clearly a cultural change.
If we analyse the medium- or long-term scenario, the probability of the children of these new generations getting married will be lower than in previous generations and they could also have fewer children. If your parents are not married, for you that is the normal situation. So, why would you get married?
Another situation that is now common in Spain is that it is the grandparents who are taking care of the children, during more hours than their parents themselves, who are working...
True. It is difficult to predict how this situation may afect the children. In the Netherlands our studies on the “sandwich generation” – adults who take care of their children and also of their elderly parents – indicate that when grandparents participate in the care of a firstborn child, the possibilities of the parents having a second child are much greater.