ABSTRACT
Over the past quarter of a century, Swedish society has undergone a substantial cultural transformation. A once very formal, integrated, and hierarchical society, guided by the Protestant ethic, has become a "looser" aggregation of people where informality and permissiveness are common and egalitarianism is the dominant cultural motif. In this cultural transformation no other element of Swedish society has changed more rapidly, or in a more dramatic way, than the Swedish family. Contemporary family change in Sweden can be viewed as an extension of the global family trend, underway in all modernizing societies, in which the institution of the family shifts structurally from an extended to a nuclear family-kinship system. The particular institutional family type that emerged in the Western world over the past few centuries has variously been called the Western conjugal family, the modern nuclear family, or more commonly the traditional nuclear family.
