On the Way to a Post-Familial Family

Abstract

Whereas, in preindustrial society, the family was mainly a community of need held together by an obligation of solidarity, the logic of individually designed lives has come increasingly to the fore in the contemporary world. The family is becoming more of an elective relationship, an association of individuals who each brings to it their own interests, experiences and plans, and who are each subjected to different controls, risks and constraints. It is therefore necessary to devote much more effort than in the past to the holding together of these different biographies. Whereas people could once fall back on rules and rituals, the prospect now is of a staging of everyday life, an acrobatics of balancing and coordinating. This does not mean that the traditional family is simply disappearing. But it is losing the monopoly it had for so long. Its quantitative significance is declining as new lifestyles appear and spread. These in all their intermediary and secondary forms represent the future of families, or what I call the contours of the `post-familial family'.