Introduction

Abstract

Pathways through the life course have undergone considerable change in recent years. Compared to previous generations, young adults today face a very different set of choices and constraints to their parents and grandparents. The typical life course trajectory of leaving school, dating, becoming engaged, marrying and having children has been turned upside down so that it is now almost as common to have children prior to marriage as afterwards, and certainly much more common to live together before marrying than to marry directly without a period of defacto cohabitation. In the mid-1970s in Australia, just 16 % of couples lived together before marrying. Now, more than three-quarters do. In the in Australia, approximately one in every 25 children was born outside marriage. Now, the corresponding figure is one in three. About 32 % of Australian marriages end in divorce (Australian Bureau of Statistics 2005), and the traditional nuclear family, with a full-time male earner and a full-time female housewife and mother is now less common in Australia than a household in which both partners work for pay (De Vaus 2004).