Children Family Trajectories and Demographic Change

Since the second half of the twentieth century Mexico has experienced a series of major political, social, economic, cultural and demographic transformations. At the demographic level, there was an impressive mortality reduction that raised life expectancy from 49 years in 1950 to 75 years at the end of the century. Fertility had a precipitous decline from an average of 6.1 children per woman in 1975 to 1.9 today. Migration, especially international migration, accentuated over time and diversified its forms of occurrence; while nuptiality, after remained relatively stable for a long time, has shown significant changes in recent decades.

All these, along with important changes at cultural and social levels, as those related to women status, education, employment, among others, has had a considerable impact on families, whose transformations have been documented by several studies. However, few specific research attention has been paid to the effects those changes have had on Mexican children’s family lives, particularly in relation to the people with whom they grow up.

From a life course perspective and keeping in mind the importance that family composition and stability has shown to have for children’s well-being, this paper analyzes and compares residential trajectories from birth to 17 years of age, of three cohorts of men and women born between 1962-1997. Residential trajectories are built using Sequence Analysis Techniques considering the kinship composition of households in which children lived at each single age.

Interest is focused on aspects such as co-residence family structure and its variations with age, the duration of that co-residence, the stability of family environment along childhood, the timing, type and sequence of changes, as well as the relationship of all these with demographic and social contexts over time. The longitudinal and retrospective data come from the Mexican Retrospective Demographic Survey carried out in 2017.