Tipos de familias e desenvolvimento

THE DIVERSITY OF FAMILY TYPES

That there might be persistent family-type differences across the globe that might influence post-transition conditions is suggested by the linkages Emmanuel Todd postulates between family relations and value formation (Todd, 1985). Families he says, shape the worldview of their children, reproducing people who share the same beliefs and values. Each generation
absorbs parental values and bases it own fertility decisions and child rearing on these values.

As family type varies, so do these beliefs and values which, in turn, shape individuals' expectations about social, economic, and political relationships. Todd argues that there are eight basic family types, which can be grouped into three broad families.


Nuclear Families


Three of Todd's family types are nuclear

-- the absolute nuclear family of the Anglo Saxon world that socializes children to individualized values, according to which they must strive to succeed to be able to support their own independent family units;

-- the authoritarian Germanic nuclear family in which there is a transfer of an unbroken patrimony to one of the sons, and children are socialized to hierarchy, authority, and inequality;

-- and the egalitarian Latin nuclear family, which produces a continual tension between the individualism demanded by the nuclear family and the equality built into the rules of inheritance.



Community Families

In a second set of three types, Todd says, child-rearing is the respon-
sibility of a larger collection of kin. Community families are characterized
by equality between brothers and cohabitation of married sons and their
parents. They are differentiated into

those in which marriages are exogamous(Slavic, Chinese),

those in which marriage is endogamous, with frequent marriages among cousins (Arab), and

those within asymmetrical or caste-structured societies in which endogamous marriage is enforced within subcastes and marriage among cousins also is frequent (e.g. India).




Anomic and Polygynous Families


The two remaining types are more fluid in their structure and interpersonal relationships.

The anomic family of Southeast Asia is typified by inheritance rules that are egalitarian in theory but flexible in practice, cohabitation of married children with their parents is rejected in theory but accepted in practice, and consanguineous marriage is possible, often frequent.

The polygynous family unit of sub-Saharan Africa is characterized by absence of stable interpersonal relationships except between mother and children, and by a multiplicity of sexual partners, including close family members.


Both level of development and family type contribute to fertility and infant mortality differences, individually and in combination. Do fertility and infant mortality respond differently to rising levels of development in regions characterized by different traditional family types?

comparing the intercepts and coefficients of the regressions of the fertility and infant mortality rates on real GDP of countries with traditional community or anomic/polygynous family types with those for nuclear family regions.

With respect to fertility, community family regions have a significantly higher intercept but a slope that does not differ from that of the nuclear case: at any level of development, community-family fertility is greater than that of nuclear families, but the response to rising levels of development is the same.

In the case of anomic/polygynous families it is the response rate that differs: fertility declines much more slowly with rising levels of development in such regions than in regions where nuclear families prevail.

In the case of infant mortality, there are no differences in either level or slope between the nuclear and community cases, but again, the response rate of anomic/polygynous families to rising levels of development is significantly lower than in the two other cases.


"Family type does make a difference.

In particular:

(a) controlling for level of development, countries where the traditional family structure is endogamous or asymmetric community, anomic or polygynous have significantly higher fertility and infant mortality rates that countries with nuclear or exogamous community families;

(b) the response to rising levels of development is less where anomic or polygynous families are the traditional norm than in the community and nuclear cases. Nuclear-family regions
have the lowest rates and the most rapid response to rising levels of devel-
opment. Community-family regions have higher rates than nuclear family
regions at comparable levels of development, but respond similarly to
modernization. Anomic/polygynous-family regions combine higher rates
with slower responses."



" With respect to mortality, endogamy has important effects. Gibbons (1993), reporting on reviews of epidemiological studies across the world by the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, provides evidence that the offspring of first-cousin marriages are 1.4 times more likely to die before they reach adulthood than the children of other unions. Even in the US, she reports Mormon children whose parents are first cousins had a 22 percent chance of dying before 16 (including miscarriages and stillbirths), compared with a 13 percent risk for children of less closely related Mormon parents.

Since consanguineous marriages account for 20 to 50 percent of all unions in many regions of Asia and Africa, a higher intrinsic fertility will be required to offset higher mortality in those regions than in areas with other marriage patterns. This difference is unlikely to go away with modernization, unless changes in the role of women significantly change patterns of
endogamy and male domination, or the hypothesized convergence on the
nuclear family occurs with increasing levels of development. "

IN: Brian J. L. Berry (2000) Household Type and  the Demographic Transition in Population and Environment: A Journal of Interdisciplinary Studies  Volume 21, Number 3, January 2000
9 2000 Human Sciences Press, Inc.