Title:	Negotiating the Life Course
Authors:	Ann Evans Janeen Baxter
Keywords:	Life
Issue Date:	2013
Publisher:	Springer
Description:	Pathways through the life course have undergone considerable change in recent years. Compared to previous generations, young adults today face a very different set of choices and constraints to their parents and grandparents. The typical life course trajectory of leaving school, dating, becoming engaged, marrying and having children has been turned upside down so that it is now almost as common to have children prior to marriage as afterwards, and certainly much more common to live together before marrying than to marry directly without a period of defacto cohabitation. In the mid-1970s in Australia, just 16% of couples lived together before marrying. Now, more than three-quarters do. In the 1950s in Australia, approximately one in every 25 children was born outside marriage. Now, the corresponding fi gure is one in three. About 32% of Australian marriages end in divorce (Australian Bureau of Statistics 2005 ) , and the traditional nuclear family, with a full-time male earner and a full-time female housewife and mother is now less common in Australia than a household in which both partners work for pay (De Vaus 2004 ) . Changes in pathways into and out of family relationships have been accompanied by major changes in the structure and organization of the labour market, perhaps most critically, the large scale entry of married women into the labour market. This has brought both new opportunities and new challenges to the lives of women and their families over the last 30 years. Most Australian children now live in households where both parents are in paid employment and many will witness the increased pressures faced by parents attempting to juggle the dual demands of paid employment and household responsibilities (Hayes et al. 2010 ) . In a society where labour market institutions have made few adjustments to the rigid time schedules and work-day patterns that dominated in an era when men could count on a fulltime stay-at-home wife to take care of domestic duties, many Australian mothers opt for part-time employment in order to accommodate their competing responsibilities at home and at work. Part-time work, between 1 and 35 hours per week, is the most common form of employment for mothers in Australia with 58% of employed women whose youngest child is aged under 6 years employed part-time in 2002 (ABS 2007 ) . This is much higher than the OECD average of 38% or the United States where in 2002 only 29% of employed mothers with their youngest child under 6 years of age worked part-time (Australian Bureau of Statistics 2007 ) . But part-time employment often comes at a cost, including reduced pay and promotion opportunities, fewer bene fi ts and entitlements and less security of tenure (Vosko et al. 2009 ) .
URI:	http://10.6.20.12:80/handle/123456789/52520
ISBN:	978-90-481-8912-0
Appears in Collections:	Population Studies

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