Couples, parenthood, friendship, solitude and transmission: contemporary societies are not merely changing the way people live. They are progressively redistributing functions that the family performed for centuries. Behind individual emancipation therefore lies a major collective question: who will assume the responsibilities that families no longer assume?

For a long time, the family did not need to be defended as an institution. It existed before modern public policy, before the welfare state and long before private life became a privileged sphere of individual fulfilment. It simultaneously organised reproduction, education, the transmission of wealth, intergenerational solidarity, part of economic production, care for dependent relatives and social belonging. It could be protective or restrictive, egalitarian or deeply hierarchical depending on the society and the period, but its centrality was rarely questioned.

That certainty has gradually faded.

Across much of the developed world, people marry later, postpone parenthood, have fewer children and increasingly organise adult life outside marriage or without children. Friendship, meanwhile, has acquired greater importance in representations of intimacy and solidarity. These developments are sometimes portrayed as evidence of the dissolution of the family; conversely, they are celebrated as the logical culmination of individual emancipation.

Both narratives are too simple.

The family is not disappearing. But it is gradually ceasing to be the compulsory infrastructure around which every adult life must be organised. And this transformation raises a question far deeper than the opposition between conservatism and progressivism: when an institution that once performed essential functions of social reproduction becomes optional, what happens to those functions?

From institution to choice

The contemporary transformation of the family belongs to a much longer history. Industrialisation, urbanisation, the development of the welfare state, women's mass access to education and employment, contraception, declining infant mortality, rising incomes, geographical mobility and changes in law have progressively altered the conditions under which individuals form couples and have children.

The family itself has changed in nature. In agricultural societies, it was largely a unit of production. In industrial societies, it increasingly became a unit of consumption and protection. In post-industrial societies, it is increasingly expected to function as a space for emotional fulfilment.

This evolution is fundamental. When marriage constitutes an economic and social necessity, its stability depends relatively little on the emotional satisfaction of each individual. When it becomes primarily a voluntary relationship, its legitimacy increasingly depends on its ability to satisfy those who compose it.

The contemporary couple is therefore paradoxically both freer and more demanding. A partner is expected to be simultaneously a companion, confidant, source of emotional support, sexual partner, co-parent and sometimes economic partner. The freedom to leave an unsatisfactory relationship has increased; the reasons for remaining in one when it no longer meets expectations have diminished.

It would nevertheless be excessive to interpret this evolution as the result of a coherent political programme designed to destroy the family. Similar transformations across countries with very different cultures and political systems suggest that much deeper structural mechanisms are at work.

The individualisation of modern societies has not eliminated the need for attachment. It has changed the conditions under which attachment is considered legitimate.

The silent demographic revolution

Demography is where this transformation becomes impossible to ignore.

In 1960, the total fertility rate averaged 3.3 children per woman across countries that are now members of the OECD. By 2022, it had fallen to 1.5, far below the level of roughly 2.1 required for generational replacement in the absence of migration. The average age of women at childbirth had meanwhile risen to 30.9 years, compared with 28.6 in 2000.

The phenomenon extends far beyond Western Europe. Italy and Spain have recorded particularly low fertility rates. Japan has long confronted population ageing and decline. South Korea has reached even lower levels. China, after decades spent restricting births, is now attempting to reverse their decline.

Even France, long considered a relative European exception, is no longer escaping the trend. In 2025, 643,905 children were born in the country, 2.3% fewer than in 2024 and 24% fewer than in 2010. The decline continued into early 2026.

Yet these figures do not support a simple narrative of women rejecting motherhood or societies rejecting family life.

The OECD identifies a combination of factors: housing costs, labour-market conditions, financial security, the cost of education and childcare, the ability to reconcile employment and parenthood, changing social norms and evolving individual preferences. Rising housing costs, in particular, appear negatively associated with fertility.

The issue is therefore as economic as it is cultural.

A generation may want children while postponing parenthood because stable employment, adequate housing or sufficient financial security arrive later in life. Postponement can eventually become renunciation, whether voluntary or not.

Falling fertility does not necessarily mean that societies have ceased to value families. It may also reveal that they have made forming one more difficult.

The paradox of emancipation

There is nevertheless a cultural transformation that economic explanations alone cannot capture.

Having children is no longer universally regarded as an obligatory stage of adulthood. The OECD has observed growing acceptance of childlessness and notes that younger generations increasingly find sources of meaning outside parenthood. At the same time, expectations surrounding what it means to be a “good parent” have intensified.

That combination matters.

Parenthood is becoming less compulsory at precisely the moment when it is becoming more demanding.

It is no longer necessarily considered sufficient to feed, house and educate a child. Contemporary parents are increasingly expected to optimise their child's development, education, activities, psychological wellbeing, nutrition and future prospects. The financial cost of children rises with these expectations; so does the cost in time.

In a society that places a high value on individual autonomy, this intensification of parenthood directly competes with other aspirations: lengthy education, career advancement, mobility, leisure, travel, personal development or simply control over one's own time.

Here lies one of the central paradoxes of contemporary societies. They have dramatically expanded the range of possible individual trajectories, but this multiplication of possibilities also increases the opportunity cost of long-term commitments.

And few commitments are as irreversible as parenthood.

What the family did without appearing in the accounts

Reducing this evolution to the private sphere would nevertheless be a mistake.

Much of the family's historical contribution never appeared in gross domestic product. Caring for a child, helping an ageing parent, housing an unemployed young adult, financially supporting a relative or transmitting knowledge within the household generally involves no market transaction.

Yet these activities have considerable economic value.

When families can no longer, or no longer wish to, perform them, those functions do not necessarily disappear. They are transferred.

Childcare becomes a public or commercial service. Elderly dependency mobilises specialised institutions, insurance systems and public budgets. Intrafamily transfers are partly replaced by redistribution mechanisms. Social support becomes a profession. Some educational functions are outsourced to schools, private activities or digital platforms.

Modernisation can therefore be understood partly as the progressive socialisation and marketisation of functions once performed within households.

This evolution has liberated individuals from forms of dependence that could be extremely restrictive. It has notably enabled women to become less economically dependent on the family household and vulnerable individuals to obtain protections that no longer rely exclusively on relatives.

But it also shifts dependency elsewhere.

Individuals become less dependent on their families because they become more dependent on collective institutions, public services, insurance systems, labour markets and their ability to purchase services.

Emancipation from family dependency does not necessarily abolish dependency. It can transform it.

Can friendship become an institution?

It is within this context that the growing importance attached to friendship deserves serious consideration.

Treating friendship merely as a consolation for people unable to form families would be sociologically reductive. In large metropolitan areas, among people living alone, highly mobile populations or individuals geographically distant from relatives, networks of friends can already perform functions once almost exclusively associated with families.

They provide emotional support, material assistance, temporary accommodation, help during illness and everyday care.

The question then becomes legal and institutional: should societies formally recognise more of these chosen solidarities?

Some protections remain largely structured around kinship and couples: inheritance, medical decision-making, housing rights, taxation, partner protection and arrangements for dependency. A society containing more people who live alone can legitimately ask whether some of these protections should be extended to other durable relationships.

Yet an important distinction remains.

Friendship can perform some of the emotional and solidarity functions of the family. It does not automatically reproduce its intergenerational dimension.

A society does not merely need adults to enjoy satisfying relationships. It must also produce the next generation, raise it, transmit material and immaterial resources to it, and organise solidarity among people at different stages of the life cycle.

This is precisely where demography brutally reasserts the difference between individual and collective outcomes.

When private choice becomes a public question

Whether or not to have a child is an individual decision. But the aggregation of millions of private decisions produces a macroeconomic reality.

Persistently low fertility gradually alters the ratio between workers and retirees. It increases pressure on pension systems, changes healthcare demand, can reduce the size of the labour force and forces governments to arbitrate among immigration, higher labour-force participation, later retirement, automation and productivity gains.

The OECD therefore recommends that governments not only attempt to support fertility but also prepare their economies for a future of persistently low birth rates. Even an immediate increase in births would not produce additional workers for roughly two decades.

The family thus becomes an issue of economic policy without ceasing to be an intimate matter.

This presents a particular difficulty for liberal democracies. The state can make parenthood easier; it cannot legitimately determine citizens' family projects. Governments can intervene in housing, childcare, parental leave, taxation and working conditions. They cannot manufacture the desire to have children.

International experience also demonstrates the limitations of natalist policies when considered in isolation. Significant financial incentives can influence some behaviour, but no simple formula has succeeded in sustainably restoring the fertility levels observed in the middle of the twentieth century. The OECD itself stresses that family policies, although important, cannot fully explain differences among countries and that a widespread return to replacement-level fertility appears unlikely given changing preferences.

An ideological battle that obscures the problem

These transformations have become a major arena of political confrontation.

Some conservative movements interpret declining marriage rates, low fertility and the rise of alternative lifestyles as the consequence of a cultural project aimed at dismantling the family. At the other end of the spectrum, some progressive interpretations have reduced the traditional family to a structure of domination whose weakening would almost automatically constitute progress.

Each interpretation captures part of reality while obscuring another.

The family has indeed been a site of hierarchy and dependency. Economic autonomy, the right to divorce, reproductive control and legal equality have profoundly expanded individual freedom. It would be difficult to describe these developments simply as decline.

But it would be equally imprudent to conclude that the collective functions historically performed by families can disappear without having to be replaced.

A society composed of perfectly autonomous individuals does not exist. Children are dependent. The very old can become dependent. Illness creates dependency. Economic shocks can do the same. Every society must therefore decide how this human vulnerability will be absorbed: by families, communities, markets, the state or, more plausibly, some combination of all four.

The real debate may therefore concern less the survival of one particular family model than the architecture of solidarity itself.

The family after individualism

The transformation now underway probably means neither the disappearance of the family nor a return to its previous forms.

The family retains a distinctive power precisely because it combines several dimensions that are difficult to reproduce elsewhere: affection, duration, material solidarity, kinship and transmission between generations. But it now operates in an environment in which individuals possess far greater power to determine the shape of their own lives.

That achievement is unlikely to be reversed.

The question therefore becomes whether two principles contemporary societies wish to preserve can remain compatible: individual autonomy and collective continuity.

It is not enough to tell people that they should have more children for demographic reasons. Nor is it sufficient to regard declining birth rates as merely the aggregate outcome of private preferences with no collective consequences.

Between those positions lies one of the major political problems of this century.

How can societies make family formation possible without making it compulsory? How can they preserve the economic autonomy of women and men while reducing the professional cost of parenthood? How can housing compatible with family life remain accessible in metropolitan areas where prices have become prohibitive? How can chosen solidarities receive greater recognition without assuming that they can automatically replace every form of intergenerational solidarity? And how can ageing societies be financed when each generation becomes smaller than the one preceding it?

The family may therefore not be disappearing.

It is losing its monopoly.

The state, the market, networks of friends and social institutions are progressively taking over some of its former functions. This redistribution has generated greater freedom, but it has also created new costs, new vulnerabilities and new forms of dependency.

The real challenge is consequently neither to restore an idealised family that never existed in perfectly harmonious form nor to regard its marginalisation as the natural culmination of progress.

It is to understand what a society must continue to transmit if it is to endure.

Because civilisations do not rest solely on the rights they grant to the individuals currently living within them. They also depend on their capacity to care for those who are not yet autonomous, those who are no longer autonomous, and those who have not yet been born.

Main sources

  • INSEE — Births in 2025: the decline in births continues, July 2026.
  • OECD — Society at a Glance 2024.
  • OECD — Fertility trends across the OECD: Underlying drivers and the role for policy, 2024.
  • OECD — data and analysis on fertility, housing, work-family reconciliation and demographic ageing.