Patterns of Family Building and Contraceptive Use of Middle-Class Couples

Abstract

SummaryInterviews with 103 middle-class wives on their family building experiences and use of birth control techniques show this highly educated group to be effective family planners in comparison with other social groups. The wives developed clear ideas early in marriage about family size, timing and spacing, formulated with reference to sets of beliefs about the transmission of cultural advantage from parents to children, and their social responsibility in relation to world population levels. Ideas about the spacing of children and desired family size appear to be influenced by the women’s orientation towards returning to employment, but their relatively late age of terminating full-time education has had remarkably little effect on the timing of either marriage or the first child’s birth. Female contraceptive methods were most popular with this sample, and their relative effectiveness as family planners may be explained by their preference for the more reliable techniques and high level of motivation to use them efficiently. Variations in patterns of contraceptive usage noted between this and other studies are probably a function of age differences in the groups of women surveyed.