ABSTRACT
This chapter briefly considers aspects of change in the family in contemporary Britain. Two statistical measures are of importance: the illegitimacy rate and the incidence of one-parent families. Both are ambiguous and misleading and need to be treated with caution. The freedom or enlightenment school regards the family as a relic of an oppressive and collectivistic past, where humankind were enslaved by custom, tradition and religion, and the individual subordinated to the group. The family formation survey also found evidence of an increasing trend towards premarital cohabitation, 10 per cent of the women respondents married in the years 1971–5 having lived with their future husbands before marriage compared with 5 per cent of those married during the previous quinquennium. Demographic changes, by changing the shape of the family, may therefore significantly affect the level of marital breakdown and dissolution at longer marriage durations.
