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Romania Changes in Family Structure
Not only did households become smaller--mostly because
of a
lower fertility rate--there was also a transition from the
traditional extended family of three generations in a
single
household to the nuclear family of only a couple and their
children. By the late 1960s, only 21.5 percent of families
had
grandparents living with them. This trend was hastened by
improved
old-age pensions that made it unnecessary for the elderly
to live
with their children and by the cramped quarters of urban
living.
However, in the countryside, where about half of Romanian
families
still lived in the late 1980s, families tended to have
more
children, and extended families were common. And even when
parents
and their children lived in separate households, the close
relations of kinship were not abolished, even after one or
the
other had moved to the city. Strong ties between
households were
evident in the extended family strategies that were aimed
at
maximizing resources by placing family members in various
sectors
of the economy. This process led to jointly owned property
such as
livestock, joint cultivation of garden plots, and shared
material
comforts from salaried labor.
Data as of July 1989
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