Neo-conventional families

• Chester suggested that family diversity has been exaggerated because of the way statistics are interpreted. While the proportion of households that are not conventional families is quite high, the proportion of people not living in conventional families is much lower. This is because conventional families tend to have more members than alternative arrangements.
• Furthermore, statistics are snapshots, based on experiences individuals have at one point in their lives. For example, many experience divorce but remarry soon afterwards or cohabit for a couple of years and then marry. This shows that marriage is more popular than is often suggested. A summary of an individual's life course might show them spending the majority of their life married, thus presenting a more conventional picture than statistics do.
• Chester also argues that, though the majority of wives work now, unlike in the cereal packet stereotype, many give up while their children are young and only return on a part-time basis, resulting in what he describes as the neo conventional family.
• Though Chester's points are well argued, there have been significant changes in society since he made them, including the Civil Partnership Act. Roberts argued that the life course is de-standardised now compared with the past. Previously, the majority of young people stayed in the locality to enter traditional occupations so members of a peer group tended to marry and have children at roughly the same time.
•  Nowadays people's lives are much more divergent. Postmodernists identify the choices people have about their sexuality, whether to live with parents, alone or with others, to marry or not, to have children early or later in life or not at all, and about the order in which they do these things. While those with traditional religious beliefs or conservative views deplore this diversity of choice, others, such as liberals, feminists and the less religious, welcome it as an opportunity to adopt their preferred lifestyle.