Divorce

The parameters of household structure and childhood experience described above dramatically changed for the middle class during the first half of the twentieth century. The steady decline of the birthrate in Europe and North America from the nineteenth century was an important underpinning of this transformation. During the twentieth century highly reliable BIRTH CONTROL methods and legalized abortion made the one- or two-child family the norm. During the 1990s, for example, the average number of births per household in Italy was only 1.2, and in Muslim communities of Europe such as Albania they averaged no more than 2.5. With fewer children, parents devoted more time to their proper care and upbringing. Other developments that contributed to the transformations in household structure and childhood experience included state intervention in child labor, rising real wages, COMPULSORY SCHOOL ATTENDANCE, and new ideals of childhood and family life. Extended families also declined. In the nineteenth century, a grandparent often lived with an adult child and her children, and rates of co-residence in Europe actually increased. But in the 1920s older people began more consistently to live separately, a sign of quiet change in family structure.
Increasing prosperity had the effect of extending childhood beyond the minimum that had been experienced by working-class families. For the more fortunate, life shifted from the farm, domestic manufacture, factory, or streets to the home where parents nurtured and emotionally protected youngsters and socialized them for the wider world. While poorer children continued to receive minimum schooling so that they could help support their families, middle-class children increasingly withdrew from the labor force, enrolled in schools, and became the focus of parental investment both emotionally and financially. The age at which children became wage earners for their families was thus delayed to the late teens or beyond, and the period in...