ABSTRACT
Ethnographic voices from India and China draw attention to the fact that it is parents, would-be parents and grandparents who express preferences, decide plans and rationalise the number, spacing and gender of children and that they do so in accordance with familial needs and interests. It is primarily inter-generational obligations which shape parental expectations, child entitlements and influence reproductive choices and behaviour. All these factors suggest that demographic and ethnographic enquiry should focus on the family rather than the nation and individual. Within demography there has been a recent interest in the ways in which household and family demography might fill the gap between the nationaland individual-focused analyses that have customarily defined and limited the field of demography. Frances Goldscheider, in an article in Demography (1995), challenged the discipline’s existing preoccupation with the ‘two extremes’ —of individual and nation-and instead advocated more attention to family decision-making.
