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The present study explores the social and economic consequences of the migration of adult children to urban areas for rural parents in Thailand. Attention is given to the circumstances under which such migration takes place, including the role parents play in the process and the extent to which the implications of migration for the parents are taken into consideration. The analysis relies primarily on open‐ended interviews conducted in 2004 with older age parents with migrant children in four purposely selected rural communities that were studied ten years earlier. Our findings suggest that migration of children to urban areas contributes positively to the material well‐being of their elderly parents who remain in rural areas. Negative impacts of migration on social support, defined in terms of maintaining contact and visits, have been attenuated by the advent of technological changes in communication and also by improvements in transportation. Phone contact, especially through mobile phones, is now pervasive, in sharp contrast to the situation ten years earlier when it was extremely rare. Much of the change in Thailand in terms of the relationships between rural parents and their geographically dispersed adult children is quite consistent with the concept of the ‘modified extended family’, a perspective that has become common in discussions regarding elderly parents in industrial and post‐industrial societies but rarely applied to the situation of elderly parents in developing country settings. Copyright © 2006 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Examination of the reproductive histories of a sample of German married couples during the 18th and 19th centuries provides insights into behavioral changes involved in the shift from natural fertility to deliberate marital fertility control. A simple accounting scheme is used to assess the relative contributions of starting, spacing, and stopping to changes in family size during the initial phases of the fertility transition. The results suggest that in rural Germany, attempts to terminate childbearing prior to the end of the reproductive span were far more important in initiating the onset of fertility transition than efforts to deliberately prolong intervals between births or changes in the timing of the start of childbearing.

A major assumption of the biometric analysis of infant mortality as developed by Bourgeois-Pichat is that the age structure of infant deaths after the first month of life is virtually constant across time and cultures. Reanalysis of results from studies which compare the mortality of infants according to the type of feeding indicated that the relationship between mortality and age within the first year of life followed different patterns for breast fed and artificially fed infants. Historical data for populations with different breast feeding customs reveal similar differences in the age pattern of infant mortality. In populations where breast feeding was uncommon or of very short duration, infant mortality rises particularly steeply during the early months of the first year of life. The age structure of infant mortality in less developed countries where breast feeding is decreasing rapidly may bsimilarly affected. When substantial deviations from the linear relationship are evident, particular caution is required in applying the biometric technique, since in such situations the estimated endogenous mortality is very much affected by the particular set of data points within the first year of life which are chosen for the basis of the estimates.