ABSTRACT
This chapter charts the demographic changes characterising the last three decades, which have resulted in a diversity of family forms. It marks the magnitude of some of these changes, the exceptions to general patterns and how these may be combined to offer a new perspective on how we might view ‘families’ and ‘households’ in Europe. Macintyre states:
Though sex, marriage, and reproduction may be linked empirically in a particular society and its dominant ideology…We cannot assume a priori that people have babies because they are married, or marry in order to have babies; nor that people have babies because they have had sex, or that they have sex to produce babies.
