ABSTRACT
This chapter provides an overview of its major elements, particularly in the West, and considers its implications for the comparative analysis of parenthood and child development. It explores the following terms: the shift from agrarian to urban-industrial institutions, the demographic transition, mass schooling, and the rise of a public interest in children. The abandonment of unilinear evolution as a conceptual framework for analyzing social change in family life does not mean the denial of recurrent trends that can be documented and are clearly significant. While A. MacFarlane's cultural argument is subject to controversy, there is no dispute concerning English primacy in industrial development and urbanization and in the utilitarian ideology of market relationships that social scientists have seen as an integral part of the urban-industrial transformation. Between the late 18th and mid-20th centuries Western birth and death rates declined drastically, eliminating the agrarian expectations of natural fertility and a relatively short life as normal features of the human condition.
