Families in the Life Course: Interdependency of Roles, Role Configurations, and Pathways

TLDR

Families are central to the life course, with internal and external dynamics that shape individuals and society, making a life‑course perspective valuable for understanding family roles and their implications. This paper presents a family life‑course perspective that defines core concepts of roles, role configurations, and pathways; introduces a latent class approach to model multilayered dynamic interdependencies; and illustrates the method with an empirical analysis of childbearing timing and teen parenthood using NLSY 1979 data. The authors employ a latent class modeling framework to capture the complex, multilayered interdependencies among family life events, applying it to 2,191 women from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth 1979. The empirical example shows how the timing of childbearing and teen parenthood intersects with the transition to adulthood in this cohort, highlighting patterns that inform family life‑course theory.

Abstract

Families are central in the unfolding life course. They have both internal and external dynamics that reflect and characterize the modern life span, and a life course perspective has particular utility for understanding the role and implications of families for individuals and society. The purpose of this paper is 3‐fold. First, we offer a family life course perspective that delineates core concepts of roles, role configurations, and pathways, specifies the links between them, and highlights the importance of linked lives and structural context. Second, we elaborate a latent class approach for modeling the multilayered dynamic interdependencies that characterize modern family life. Third, we provide an empirical example by considering the timing of childbearing, teen parenthood, and its place in the transition to adulthood using women's data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth 1979 ( N = 2,191). We conclude by discussing further avenues of family research that are enhanced with a life course approach and complementary latent structure methodology.