By 2095, each individual will have fewer family members and they will be older. This demographic shift could reshape the societal model of care.
This will also interest you
(ON VIDEO) How high will the world population rise? In 1950, the world population was estimated at 2.6 billion people. Today we are…
The number of members in an individual’s family is expected to decline by more than 35% by 2095, according to a new study by an international team of researchers. For example, a typical 65-year-old woman in 1950 would have had 41 family members on average, while a typical woman of the same age living in 2095 would only be expected to have 25. While there are differences between countries, this global trend should be observed everywhere in the world.
In fact, the structure of families will change to become more “vertical”: the number of brothers and sisters, cousins, nieces and nephews will decrease sharply, while the number of grandparents and great-grandparents will increase. . We are living longer and falling mortality rates at different ages help explain this phenomenon. Additionally, couples are having fewer and fewer children and they are having them later in life.
Family solidarity risks changing
“ As the age gap between individuals and their relatives widens, people will have not only smaller, but also older family networks », reports social scientist Diego Alburez-Gutierrez, from the Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research (Germany).
Kinship structures are important because family solidarity – a crucial source of informal care for millions of people around the world – is conditioned on the survival of family members. “ For example, we expect great-grandparents to be more numerous in the future, but they may be too old and too frail to provide support », write the authors of the study published in the journal PNAS. This will result in a significant societal change, which public health policy makers will need to take into account.
