ABSTRACT
The turn of the millennium has witnessed a fruitful literature on family change (see, for example, Boh et al. 1989; Kuijsten 1996; Kaufmann et al. 1997). This is no coincidence but a response to evidence that the traditional family model, and traditional patterns of family formation, are gradually losing their hegemony in most Western countries. By the traditional family model, I refer to the nuclear family in which married spouses have a rigid gender division of labour, with the wife predominantly responsible for unpaid homemaking and caring and the husband focusing on a breadwinning role. Traditional family formation refers to the timing and progression of successive life events, such as leaving the parental home in the late teenage years to directly enter a marital union, followed by a series of births within that marriage.
