From mothers to daughters

Starting from the mid-1960s, family and fertility patterns in Europe underwent fundamental changes. In the course of a few decades the rapid decrease in the number of children born per woman and the dramatic increase in age at first birth modified considerably the life-course experience of women. Sociologists and socio-demographers have increasingly turned to intergenerational models to explain family behaviour (Kahn and Anderson 1992; Wu and Matisen 1993). A number of studies show that there is a positive correlation between the fertility of parents and children, even in societies characterized by major changes in the timing of family-related events and in the occurrence of such events (Murphy and Knudsen 2002; Bernardi and White 2010). There is a long record of correlations between mothers’ and daughters’ completed fertility in historical population studies. ¹ Such empirical regularity in intergenerational correlations in fertility may reflect stability in family influences amid the dramatic cultural changes of post-war Europe. Part of the explanation for such continuity is that attitudes and meanings are transmitted from one generation to another and that intergenerational continuity generates life-course continuities in social behavioural and ideological systems (Putallaz et al. 1998).