This chapter reflects on the twelve-year Swiss research program, “Overcoming vulnerability: Life course perspectives” (LIVES). The authors are longstanding members of its scientific advisory committee. They highlight the program’s major accomplishments, identify key ingredients of the program’s success as well as some of its challenges, and raise promising avenues for future scholarship. Their insights will be of particular interest to those who wish to launch similar large-scale collaborative enterprises. LIVES has been a landmark project in advancing the conceptualization, measurement, and analysis of vulnerability over the life course. The foundation it has provided will direct the next era of scholarship toward even greater specificity: in understanding the conditions under which vulnerability matters, for whom, when, and how. In a process-oriented life-course perspective, vulnerability is not viewed as a persistent or permanent condition but rather as a dormant condition of the social actor, activated in particular situations and contexts.

In this chapter, we investigate the contribution of changes in union experience to increases in parental separation. We ask whether increases in parental separation might not have been greater if couples had not postponed childbearing or had fewer opportunities to test their relationship before becoming parents. We investigate the question in two contexts where marriage and childbearing were dramatically delayed, while at the same time young people continued to leave home and enter partnerships at relatively young ages, i.e., late twentieth century Sweden and Norway. We use union and birth histories from the Generations and Gender Surveys (conducted in 2012–2013 and 2007–2008, respectively) to estimate separation risks for parents who had their first child between 1960 and 10 years before the interview. We decompose those risks in terms of the parents’ union experiences prior to first birth, to identify those that contributed to or suppressed increases over time in parental separation. We conclude that the increasing differentiation of parents’ union experience contributed to increases in parental separation. Pure compositional shifts did not, though they likely compensated each other, some generating an increased likelihood, others a decreased likelihood of parental separation.

In this chapter, we identify structural features of families with shared physical custody that differ from those of nuclear families or those of families where one parent has sole physical custody, and discuss the implications for family and kin relationships. We pay particular attention to the ways in which shared physical custody alters the gendered nature of parenting and kinship. We argue that the structural features of shared physical custody create distinct contexts for parent-child and sibling relationships and produce differences in shared understandings of obligations between family members. The unique context for relationships and obligations together constitute a new family form. Our analysis generates an agenda for future research on the nature and consequences of shared physical custody.

In this chapter, we investigate what can be termed multi-partner fertility, i.e., the birth rate among women at risk of having a child with a new partner. We used data from 14 European countries and the United States, all with high-quality birth and union histories. We divided a woman’s exposure to the birth risk into three types – single spells up to and including the first birth, spells in a marital or cohabiting union up to and including the end of the first fertile union, and spells after a first non-union birth or after the end of the first fertile union. The last set of spells are those in which a woman is at risk of having a child with more than one partner. Age-specific fertility rates were estimated and combined to generate fertility rates for each union status across five decades in 14 European countries and the United States. We found that, with one exception, multi-partner fertility is quite modest, up to 9% of total fertility. In the United States, however, multi-partner fertility contributes more than 20% of total fertility. Countries with relatively high rates of non-union first births also have relatively high rates of multi-partner fertility. Multi-partner fertility is spread out across older ages, in comparison to single-partner fertility that peaks sharply in the early- to mid-20s. Although the exposure to risk of multi-partner fertility has increased over the decades observed, rates of multi-partner fertility have remained relatively stable.

The Covid-19 pandemic is shaking fundamental assumptions about the human life course in societies around the world. In this essay, we draw on our collective expertise to illustrate how a life course perspective can make critical contributions to understanding the pandemic's effects on individuals, families, and populations. We explore the pandemic's implications for the organization and experience of life transitions and trajectories within and across central domains: health, personal control and planning, social relationships and family, education, work and careers, and migration and mobility. We consider both the life course implications of being infected by the Covid-19 virus or attached to someone who has; and being affected by the pandemic's social, economic, cultural, and psychological consequences. It is our goal to offer some programmatic observations on which life course research and policies can build as the pandemic's short- and long-term consequences unfold.

In this study, we investigate through microsimulation the link between cohabiting parenthood and family instability. We identify mechanisms through which increases in cohabiting parenthood may contribute to overall increases in separation among parents, linking micro-level processes to macro-level outcomes. Analyses are based on representative surveys in Italy, Great Britain, and Scandinavia (represented by Norway and Sweden), with full histories of women's unions and births. We first generate parameters for the risk of first and higher-order birth and union events by woman's birth cohort and country. The estimated parameters are used to generate country- and cohort-specific populations of women with stochastically predicted family life courses. We use the hypothetical populations to decompose changes in the percentage of mothers who separate/divorce across maternal birth cohorts (1940s to 1950s, 1950s to 1960s, 1960s to 1970s), identifying how much of the change can be attributed to shifts in union status at first birth and how much is due to change in separation rates for each union type. We find that when cohabiting births were uncommon, increases in parents' separation were driven primarily by increases in divorce among married parents. When cohabiting parenthood became more visible, it also became a larger component, but continued increases in parents' divorce also contributed to increasing parental separation. When cohabiting births became quite common, the higher separation rates of cohabiting parents began to play a greater role than married parents' divorce. When most couples had their first birth in cohabitation, those having children in marriage were increasingly selected from the most stable relationships, and their decreasing divorce rates offset the fact that increasing proportions of children were born in somewhat less stable cohabiting unions.

Using data from administrative registers for the period 1970-2007 in Norway and Sweden, we investigate the intergenerational transmission of multipartner fertility. We find that men and women with half-siblings are more likely to have children with more than one partner. The differences are greater for those with younger versus older half-siblings, consistent with the additional influence of parental separation that may not arise when one has only older half-siblings. The additional risk for those with both older and younger half-siblings suggests that complexity in childhood family relationships also contributes to multipartner fertility. Only a small part of the intergenerational association is accounted for by education in the first and second generations. The association is to some extent gendered. Half-siblings are associated with a greater risk of women having children with a new partner in comparison with men. In particular, maternal half-siblings are more strongly associated with multipartner fertility than paternal half-siblings only for women.

Increases in parental cohabitation, separation or divorce, and re‐partnering or remarriage have generated an increase in the complexity of family and kinship ties. As a result, many scholars claim that family and kinship have become voluntary, with rights and obligations to be negotiated in the same way as those between friends and neighbors. This essay briefly reviews the demographic trends that have produced complex families and kin, and their projections into the future. It argues that kinship structures arising from stable nuclear family and kin networks provide a template for the organization of more complex family ties. Although a considerable degree of voluntariness can be found in ties among complex families and kin, rights and obligations remain structured in terms of blood and marriage, and are also strongly influenced by periods of coresidence. Guidelines do exist for relationships in complex families and kinship networks, and they can be used to further institutional arrangements that fit the circumstances of increasingly diverse types of families and kin.

BACKGROUND A key resource for cross-national comparative research on family dynamics (Andersson and Philipov 2002) is seriously outdated. OBJECTIVE AND METHODS We provide an update of the life-table estimates by Andersson and Philipov (2002) based on data from the Generations and Gender Surveys and other related surveys in 18 countries across Europe and the United States. RESULTS Life-table estimates of family formation of women and men, union dynamics, and children's experience of family disruption and family formation demonstrate the degree of variation in family dynamics across countries. CONCLUSIONS Our findings provide the basis for more in-depth research on the causes and consequences of differences in family dynamics across contexts. CONTRIBUTION The Appendix of the current manuscript is a new resource for comparative research on family dynamics in the early 21st century.

In demography, the value of children refers most often to the benefits parents receive from having and rearing children. Benefits may accrue from the children themselves, from the experience of rearing them, or from the responses of kin, community, and society at large. Children also entail costs for parents and the value of children sometimes refers to their net value (benefits less costs). Benefits and costs of children are shaped by the economic conditions of life, forms of social organization, and cultural beliefs and practices. Studies using surveys to measure the value of children report variation in values across societies; by socioeconomic status; between women and men; for first, second, and higher order births; and for daughters versus sons. Cultural foundations for the value of children have also been explored. The net value of children underlies parents' desires for children which, in combination with their ability to achieve those desires, influences their decisions to have children and how many children they have.