Slow Futures #38: Family Matters
'Family' is continually redefined. But the importance of it to us isn't changing much.
It’s the summer, so you may have been on holiday with your family. You may have been on holiday with your extended family, people you don’t normally live with and see every day. You may be on holiday with these people right now, crouched in the corner of an Airbnb, counting down the minutes until checkout.
These can be stressful and trying times. At these times, you may find comfort in a wonderfully dull chart, which describes the self-reported importance of family.
It looks like there’s a long term decline, although we think this is due to survey effects, more on which below. Really, it doesn’t change much at all. Since 2011, every time Trajectory have asked the question, between 78% and 67% have said that family is ‘very’ important to them. There’s been a very gradual decline since about 2012 – interestingly, it was lowest in 2020, when many people spent months locked up with their families – and in the last two years has stabilised at 71%.
Survey effects
Clearly, family is important to us – the vast majority of us. When we add the group who say that family is ‘rather’ important to them it takes the figure for recent years above 90%.
The really big change happens between 2005 and 2011, when the proportion saying that family was very important to them plummeted from a high of 95% (it had been 90% in 1999) to 78%.
What happened? Did the Gordon Brown premiership make us hate our families? Was it something to do with the global financial crisis? Or something else - the arrival of Novak Djokovic as a Grand Slam winning force, perhaps?
Probably none of those things. It’s more likely that the change here is a survey effect. From 2011 onwards, all these data were collected online. Prior to that, the interviews were conducted for the World Values Survey, face to face. If there’s a social expectation that family is important to us then it’s probably easier to depart from that view if answering the question online than when a market researcher is asking you the question in your living room (potentially with your family just outside, ears pressed to the door).
Generational Differences
So, over the last fifteen years or so, the importance of family to us has declined a bit, but not very much, and still remains incredibly important to the majority of people, and is at least a bit important to the vast majority of people.
This is interesting, because in some of our recent analysis exploring the ascent of the Millennial generation to numerical dominance in the UK, my colleague Mari Hamano produced this chart:
In the chart, the values for Millennials (horizontal axis) are plotted against those for Baby Boomers (vertical). If a dot is in the blue area, that means Baby Boomers value it more, if in the pink area it’s more of a Millennial priority. If they’re on the line, both are valued equally.
Millennials are quite different to other generations in some quite interesting ways. This chart shows quite a few of them – income, work and art/culture are all more important to thirtysomethings than to sixty/seventysomethings. But arguably the most interesting thing on this chart are those areas where the two different generations are in almost perfect agreement. Family is one of those areas.
Sometimes, change happens because younger generations do things differently to older generations. One of the things that will always be very different about Baby Boomers and Millennials is that the majority of Baby Boomers were on the housing ladder by 30, while there’s a good chance that the majority of Millennials won’t be on the housing ladder at 40. Sometimes, these changes, or the perceptions of them, are pretty pejorative, as if one generation or another is responsible for pretty much all the problems in the world. The Canadian researcher Paul Farie has a number of excellent threads exploring how these perceptions have manifested throughout time.
But, sometimes, younger generations think and act in pretty much exactly the same way as older generations. The (high) importance of family is one such example. This exposes the (many) limits of generational analysis. But it’s also an indication of the things that don’t change (and the things of most interest to this newsletter).
What does this mean?
In both the UK and US, marriage equality was taken by some to be an attack on the institutions of both marriage and family. The current US election seems to be particularly obsessed with family, and restoring it to some sort of traditionalist ideal. This is manifesting in several highly emotive debates, on the central issue of abortion, the potential threats to Obergefell or the sniping about ‘childless cat ladies’ and JD Vance’s apparent belief that those with children should get more votes. What a family is, today, is different to the past. That’s probably part of the reason it remains important.
Not all differences between generations are evidence of generational change. There are other explanations. When thinking about differences between different age groups its worth thinking about three things: period effects, age effects and cohort effects.
A period effect might be felt by everyone exposed to a particular event – like the cost of living crisis making people spend less on drinking in bars. That might produce differential impacts that look like one group has changed more than another (for example, if the biggest drop in £ spent among younger people who spend more, even if the proportional impact is the same), but really it’s everyone reacting to the same thing.
An age effect might have more to do with lifestage – an example here is the importance of work in the chart below. Younger generations are more likely to be in work, so value it more highly.
Only a cohort effect, points to real generational change. All we know from this evidence is that young people are likely to grow up valuing their family just as much as their older relatives did.
More than this
At Trajectory, we talk about long term, fundamental changes in values, attitudes and behaviours - and what they mean for organisations. The analysis in this article drew on findings from recent work exploring the Changing Meaning of Age and the rise of the Millennials, which have been available to our Now & Next members for months.