Household composition in post‐socialist Eastern Europe

Abstract

Two perspectives provide alternative insights into household composition in contemporary Eastern Europe. The first stresses that individuals have relatively fixed preferences about living arrangements and diverge from them only when they cannot attain their ideal. The second major approach, the adaptive strategies perspective, predicts that individuals have few preferences. Instead, they use household composition to cope with economic hardship, deploy labor, or care for children or the elderly. This article evaluates these approaches in five post‐socialist East‐European countries, Bulgaria, Hungary, Poland, Romania, and Russia, using descriptive statistics and logistic regression. The results suggest that household extension is common in these countries and provide the most evidence for the adaptive strategies perspective. In particular, the results show that variables operationalizing the adaptive strategies perspective, including measures of single motherhood, retirement status, agricultural cultivation, and poverty, increase the odds of household extension.

The intermediate effect of geographic proximity on intergenerational support

“…The family system in Bulgaria has historically been characterised as a "patrivirilocal-lifecycle complexity: newly-weds live with the groom's parents and any other of his married brothers or unmarried siblings" (De Vos and Sandefur 2002:23). This cultural tradition could explain the differences by gender in co-residence (Ahmed and Emigh 2005).…”

“…Co-residence makes it possible to pool economic resources. Furthermore, the need for kinship care can trigger coresidence as well, particularly for single mothers and retirees (Ahmed and Emigh 2005). In France, the nuclearisation of families resulted in a decline in multigenerational households and an increase in older people living alone or as couples (Kalmijn and Saraceno 2008).…”

“…These two countries differ greatly in terms of the geographic proximity of adult children and their parents. Intergenerational co-residence is a well-established living arrangement in Bulgaria (Ahmed and Emigh 2005), whereas it is less common in France (Hank 2007). Structural and cultural differences at the macro level (e.g., economic resources, welfare regime, and the cultural orientation of the two countries) can account for this (Igel et al 2009).…”

Pathways, background and outcomes of the transition to adulthood in the early 2000s in Hungary

“…In the 2000s, the median age for moving out of the parental household was 25 for women and 27 for men, and by the age of 35, 81% of women and 77% of men had left their parents' home (though some returned later) (Murinkó, 2009). Compared to adult children in their twenties, those in their thirties (or older) living with their parents are more typically adapting to financial or housing difficulties (Ahmed and Emigh, 2005;de Jong Gierveld et al, 2002), or resort to the "safety net" of their parents as they go through life crises (e.g. divorce, unemployment) (Monostori and Murinkó, 2019).…”

Starting a Family at Your Parents’ House: Multigenerational Households and Below Replacement Fertility in Urban Bulgaria

“…The legal scholar, Velhia Todorova (2000), also argues that nuclear families were more prevalent in the urban areas where European values and ideals held more sway, although she attests to the persistence of extended families throughout the rural areas of Bulgaria. Whatever the historical tmth of the traditional Bulgarian family form, many Bulgarians believe today that the multigenerational household is a ñmdamental part of their cultural heritage, and more importantly, is a key strategy for surviving times of economic Starting a Family at war Parents 'House 4 4 3 uncertainly (Botcheva and Feldman 2004;Barova 2008;Ahmed and Emigh 2004). During the fieldwork and the interviews conducted for the present study, even urban Bulgarians living in the capital city of Sofia viewed extended co-residence with parents as an accepted norm for young families in their early twenties.…”